Why do so many statics seem to be missing healers? What can be done to solve this?

[Levian]

Double post - deleted

[Levian]

I stated it before but I'll state it again, if you want a learning party, start one. Learning parties don't magically appear from people already working on other content. Learning parties generally appear because someone wants to learn.

Amen to that. When I want to learn something, I don't wait for a learning group to start - I make one. And I kinda like teaching/mentoring so once I know how a thing works I don't mind dropping into a learning group and spreading what I know. But I've also come to realize that by and large people are passive and reactive, not so much proactive.

A lot of people complained about the wait to find an XP party in FFXI. I didn't wait, I grabbed what was available and dragged them off to the leveling zone, usually took less time than the average DPS queue here. One can get a lot more done faster if they'll just step up and lead - even if they don't necessarily know what they're doing at first.

[Okamimaru]

I stated it before but I'll state it again, if you want a learning party, start one. Learning parties don't magically appear from people already working on other content. Learning parties generally appear because someone wants to learn. This mentality about complaining about the lack of them and not creating them is starting to become the PVP naggers that try to harass people to go healer (if they want a healer in PVP, queue as one).

im not saying people cant start a learning party but it seems like half the people dont know what "learning party" means... id say 80% of the time after 2 wipes people just drop without a word... this happens over and over and over... thus nobody ends up learning anything... im not complaining personally since i really only join learning parties to help others get it done... just playing devils advocate here and giving a possible reason why statics are lacking healers...

[QT_Melon]

im not saying people cant start a learning party but it seems like half the people dont know what "learning party" means... id say 80% of the time after 2 wipes people just drop without a word... this happens over and over and over... thus nobody ends up learning anything... im not complaining personally since i really only join learning parties to help others get it done... just playing devils advocate here and giving a possible reason why statics are lacking healers...

People don't know what farm party means, clear party means etc...
As annoying as it is for people to drop with no word it can depend on time commitment. Someone thought they could do 4 runs, but had to leave at a certain time. There is no hard rule to the amount of time someone can dedicate.

[Tridus]

Believe me, I remember. I had a much longer post that touched on a lot more, but the forum is currently limiting me to 1k characters a post and I had to cut it down to 1/6 the content while still trying to grt at the heart of the matter (for me).

You can get around that by posting something below the 1k limit, then immediately editing it. Edits don't have that limit.

[Levian]

snip...

It's normal (these days) for people to jump headlong into content that's beyond their skill level, realize they're in over their head, and back out. Realistically you should have the same percentage of healers passing the learning phase and stepping into statics as you do tanks/DPS. The problem is more like to stem from a pool of healers that isn't large enough to start with.

Tanks and healers are always scarce, most other games I've played have 1 healer to every 4 or 5 DPS, and they're still a bit scarce. FFXIV demands 1 healer for every 2 DPS, and even without looking at census data (if they publish it at all) I can guarantee you %25 of the game's populace isn't regularly playing either WHM, SCH, or AST as a main.

[Tridus]

Tanks and healers are always scarce, most other games I've played have 1 healer to every 4 or 5 DPS, and they're still a bit scarce. FFXIV demands 1 healer for every 2 DPS, and even without looking at census data (if they publish it at all) I can guarantee you %25 of the game's populace isn't regularly playing either WHM, SCH, or AST as a main.

IIRC YoshiP said it was around 22%. Of course, some portion of that likely doesn't want to and is doing it because of the pressure that extremely long DPS queues create.

I tend to think it'd help the health of the game somewhat if they went to a base party of 5, since you can fit 50% more DPS per tank and healer. You'll still have DPS queues and they may not even get a ton shorter, but you'll have fewer people doing the other roles only because they don't have time to wait rather than because they actually want to. (That said, it'd be a huge and no doubt extremely difficult coding change.)

[Levian]

Well, maybe something in the pipe for the next expansion, but I agree that base groups of 5 with 3 DPS to each tank/healer is a better representative of the people that want* to be in a certain role. Obscene queues forcing people into healing slots that don't want to be in them is far less than ideal imo.

[Taika]

im not saying people cant start a learning party but it seems like half the people dont know what "learning party" means... id say 80% of the time after 2 wipes people just drop without a word... this happens over and over and over... thus nobody ends up learning anything...

What I've done is that every time someone joins a party (that I'm leading of course) I ask them how experienced they are with the fight, and then I keep track on that info for everyone, saying for example that "ok we have 3 who have seen enrage, 3 on first mindjack, and 1 at the beginning of last phase". I'll also say "let's set our goal as practicing this phase and aiming to clear this part". Then everyone is on the same page and they'll know what to expect from the party. I've found this to be helpful, but of course you can't control others, and if someone wants to leave they will leave, for whatever reason.

Edit: Another thing that I've found helpful is that when there's a wipe, or something has been messed up more than once, I'll acknowledge it by writing it in chat "we seem to be having trouble with this mechanic, please remember to X when Y happens ". In my experience, people get more easily frustrated when the group just keeps wiping but no one seems to be doing anything to it. But it's important to do this without starting to point fingers in a bad way.

[technole]

It's all initiative like Taika says.

On my main's free company going back to Midas Savage, we had a clique of us raiders, and we were all part of different raid groups. We would get together to pick a night or two each week where we were mutually available and host A5S/A6S learning and weekly page clear parties for "raid-ready" members of the FC or those who didn't have a static but wanted to get weekly pages and didn't want to deal with PF at the time.

For me, growing the free company with more savage players was a fulfilling experience because that increased the pool of players we could make a parties with every week. We spend a lockout or two sometimes but we've taken people from learning to clear. For us raiders, we also get more experience on different roles and jobs. Ultimately I would have loved to taken some through A7S or further into A8S, but this was considerable time taken already. Our intent was to get them to experience savage and want to pursue it further, or get into a permanent raid group.