No More Big Pulls in Dungeons

[Omymy]

Ah... People keep eating the baits...

[Zenkii]

Ah... People keep eating the baits...

Baits are good. And while this is bait it also opens discussion..

[Aurelius2625]

It's actually easier to do BIG pulls on the healer than small ones: You end up using the same cooldowns and resources, but for MORE packs, stressing you more than one big pull, boss, one big pull...boss, and so forth.

Don't believe me? Try it out. You can, on Scholar for example, use Seraph on one pull, Fey Union on another and alternate. You can use Recitation Excog on one pull, Sacred Soil with a Deploy on the scholar to spread to the tank for another, and so forth.

For tanks, this is even better, we have fewer big cooldowns, so for one pull we can invuln, then Arm's Length, then Active mitigation like heart of stone. For another pull, we can use 30percent mitigation, reprisal, and active mitagation, saving rampart and our 90s to mix in wherever.

Big pulls are better for this, since you have less pulls overall, and can recover your cooldowns better. If the healer is playing properly, and using lucid every time they are at 8k mana, ,they should never run out. White Mages should use Holy to stun and space out the stuns for max effect.

[Fynlar]

Uhh, people who min/max know Clemency is a gain on DPS because it lets the White Mage deal more damage then you.

The kind of people I'm talking about (note my disdain for them) generally care only about their pDPS, not rDPS.

And there have been healers who get butthurt over tanks healing themselves because they take it as an insult to their ability. I haven't run into much of that in game, but I've seen at least two topics here before from people like that.

[AuraAstra]

So I really don't understand this.

Living Dead is a horrible resource dump, but it's actually really easy to heal through. I don't see how you couldn't possibly heal a DRK in the 10 seconds given for the effect to go off.

With Super, I also fail to understand how you wouldn't be able to heal through it. Once it activates you have an entire 8 seconds to get your GNB tank to a decent amount of HP, and during that 8 seconds they don't take damage.

Part of it is playstyle - When I'm healing through those big pulls the tank is only going to use their "take me to 1HP" ability when I have no instant casts available, my Thin Air and Presence of Mind are down, and the 2.5s cast time and 1k MP cost is not going to be enough to get them back up before they go die and we wipe. I've had this happen often enough that it's basically become habit to keep that one big "oh sh!t" button back and simply maintain the party using my shorter cd abilities. I could get into my on personal philosophy of the best way to heal (for example: I don't like dumping resources when I have other answers available), but that would make this more of an essay.

Part of it is potency effectiveness - Sure, I can spam them with Cure II, but again, personal experience has taught me that sometimes even C2 hits like a wet noodle. I haven't been able to figure out a pattern for when or why this happens, but I have had times where I can literally spam C2 on a tank and their health bar. Will. Not. Move. It's not lag. It's not me disconnecting. It's simply that, for whatever reason, 20k healing = 0 healing.

Part of it is timing - This rolls in with the other two parts. A single cast of Cure II, when I cast it, has a base healing amount of about 20k. If a DRK uses Living Dead and drops to 1HP, I then have 10s to heal them the full amount of their health, let's call that 100k. If C2 takes 2.5s to cast, and does not crit, I will fall 20-40% short on healing, and they'll die from the effect, and burn through 50% of my mana doing so. The *only* way C2 spam works in that situation, is if I manage to precast both Thin Air and Presence of Mind. If I fail to do so (and being honest, that is the more probable scenario), then the tank is dead and I have to use a further 25% of my MP to get them back up, then use whatever I have left to keep the dps alive while the res animation finishes and the tank gets in to grab aggro back. Now, I don't know about other people, but personally? That's not how I like to do things. It's a huge waste of mana, and has a very high probability of wiping the party. On trash.

For Super it has to do with playstyle again. Tank drops below acceptable threshold = panic heal.

[Mixt]

Yeah, using Clemency to self heal results in ranting about "Trusting the healer" and "Wasting GCD's you could use to do damage" and in some cases vote kicks.

On the flip side, trusting the healer and not using Clemency leads to death, spiraling into a wipe, and then screaming and vote kicks.

There are two options, both options lead to being yelled at and kicked from the group for "Being a bad tank!!!"


Then there is the issue of pulling, where you run through a pack of mobs, doing a single AOE while running through them to grab aggro because doing anything more would require stopping for a few seconds, so you only get that one hit in, then while continuing the pull the DPS manage to pull off you mid-run because that's apparantly a thing that can happen when you only land a single AOE hit on the mobs, at which point your options are.

1: Abort the pull and run back the way you came to get aggro back, keeping in mind that both provoke and shield lob are exceedingly likely to end up out of range otherwise (And get yelled at for stopping in the middle of the pull)
2: Let the DPS die (And get yelled at for not managing aggro and letting party members die)

Or you can stop for a few seconds to get another hit in to ensure aggro won't be lost...and then get yelled at for stutter pulling, with all the "I hate it when a tank pulls one pack, stops for a few seconds, and then starts running again to pull the next pack!" ranting that comes with it.

Three options, all of them lead to getting yelled at and potentially kicked.


Or the cooldown issue, where you either use them as often as possible, and get yelled at for "Not managing your cooldowns properly!" or hold them for when they are needed, and get yelled at for "Not using cooldowns at every available opportunity means they are wasted!"
Heck, holding a cooldown for a specific mechanic can get you yelled at over how you should have used it sooner so you can get more uses out of it, even if the cooldown period is longer than the time you have until the mech you need it for comes...and trying to argue over how doing it their way will kill you because it won't be back up in time gets you yelled at.

Use them frequently, get raged at, be conservative, get raged at, try for a middle ground, get raged at...

Do everything right? Get raged at for "Being a tryhard" and making everyone else look bad...

[Kanitezz]

If a tank pulls too much and a wipe happens, that is the tank's fault, and we adjust accordingly, there's nothing wrong with that and it very rarely happens because big pulls are so easy.

Sometimes as a healer it's more like... Tank doesn't use CDs, stands in aoes, doesn't stop tank busters, all that stuff. Then it's stuff like 'WTF are you doing healer'. In my experience you have to be lucky for the tank to accept it as their fault when it actually is their fault.

While it's somewhat of an unspoken code that the tank controls the pace of the run, I don't think its a good mentality for them to rally behind because it can feed certain people's egos too much. And I think this can help nurture the 'If ya cant keep up, you're straight outta luck' mindset.

[Shurrikhan]

Sometimes as a healer it's more like... Tank doesn't use CDs, stands in aoes, doesn't stop tank busters, all that stuff. Then it's stuff like 'WTF are you doing healer'. In my experience you have to be lucky for the tank to accept it as their fault when it actually is their fault.

Most frequent one of late for me is the tank full pulling and then getting the d/c symbol for a few seconds at a time and then getting snarky with for "wasting" a Benediction after my Tetra just did nothing until they left their lag spike, so I had to Bene earlier than I would like rather than just waiting in hope that my earlier heals would eventually go through...
That, or full-pull tanks who refuse to sprint, get pulled off of by dps ramping up for the full gather, going back rather than trusting them to deposit the mobs, and depleting future CDs before we ever even hit the AoE spam...

[Kanitezz]

That, or full-pull tanks who refuse to sprint, get pulled off of by dps ramping up for the full gather, going back rather than trusting them to deposit the mobs, and depleting future CDs before we ever even hit the AoE spam...

Big yes to these too. I've actually started sprinting myself a while back when I tank or heal. I think you were one of the ones that opened my eyes to the effectiveness and helped me to start giving a damn. I could be wrong. But I REALLY have a problem with tanks popping EVERY freakin cooldown before they even start getting hit! My heart almost stops! Like what the hell are we going to do for the rest of the pull????

[Ekimmak]

I feel like healers don't consider you stutter pulling when it's just getting the second hit for the AoE combo in before moving.

But I've yet to manage to interrupt both the Berserk adds in Twinning, because they quite often don't end up both on the party list due to add numbers.