Toxic WHM Glare spammers

[Packetdancer]

It is beneficial for me if the tank drops below 50%, because then my Excog will be effective, so I never overheal and prefer to deal damage instead.

No offense, but that wasn't well-communicated in your original post. Partly because...

Therefore, your case and mine is not about this, it is about the standard healers dps actions, but I'm talking about cases when a party is in a critical state or is dead like in the Bunker and the healer continues to ignore this situation. This not normal.

...it's not normal, and in my experience, not common either. I grant my dataset may be skewed because like 70% of the time I am the healer, but I really don't see this often. And certainly nowhere near as often as your post gives the impression you think it happens; saying it's so prevalent gives the strong impression that you are under the impression that a healer doing damage at all is giving up the opportunity to heal.

I mean, I would say that it's also not normal for a tank to refuse to enable tank stance and not AoE mobs, just focusing on single-targeting a single mob. I've seen that, though. I've actually seen that more than I've seen DPS-only healers... though admittedly less than I've seen Cure-spam healers who will just do /emotes or stand there when there's no healing to be done.

But I wouldn't say any of those scenarios are common, certainly not enough to post like it's some sort of epidemic of people acting that way in-game. "I've run into a few healers who will DPS to the exclusion of healing, and I'm finding that frustrating" is a statement I think many people can agree with. "80% of mages are toxic glare spammers, and we must stop this epidemic!!!1!!11" comes across a bit differently.

However, if I had to guess, I'd say that people are suddenly feeling sensitive to it because of Bozja. (A theory supported by the various times Bozja or Critical Engagements have been explicitly mentioned in this thread.) It's still early days, people are still trickling in, and many folks have not learned the mechanics for critical engagements yet. This is a recipe for Much Death.

Simultaneously, it's a combat setup we're not used to. Critical engagements feel like organized duties; they have complex mechanics and they're off a separate circle where other people can't come in and join. But in trials, raids, and alliance raids, you have organized parties; if I'm in Puppets' Bunker and the healer in another alliance goes down, I can notice it in their alliance window, select that healer, and rez them. (Assuming I've got Swiftcast, and some other healer doesn't try to rez them at the same moment.)

But in a critical engagement, I can see only whoever I happen to be partied with; I might have ended up solo-queuing and not be in a party at all. And that gets rough. I see someone dead on the ground over there, but everyone's running around to avoid the angry red horsebird and I can't easily click on them to rez them, etc. Someone else is injured, but trying to click onto them to target them for healing can be difficult in the crowd; I can't use function keys or the controller selectors, because we're not in a party or alliance. I do try my best to keep the main tank healed up if I see them hurting (because I can target the boss and hit 'T' to swap to who they're targeting), and if someone does a '/say Rez pls?' or something, I can raise them because I can now target them from the chatbox... but otherwise, people in Bozjan Critical Engagements are probably on their own when it comes to assistance from people outside their party.

And that's unfortunate. If you end up on the ground in a Critical Engagement and sit there, seeing an AST or WHM still attacking the boss while you're on the ground, I guarantee it feels frustrating. (Hey, I've been there; it is frustrating.) And so it probably makes "healers who DPS rather than healing/rezzing" feel like it's suddenly a more common thing, and I suspect it makes people sensitive to the perception of it elsewhere in the game.

Maybe you're in the Bunker and see one healer who legitimately is clearly DPS'ing rather than healing your party, causing them to die; yeah, that sucks, but normally you could just brush it off as one terrible healer. Then you go into Bozja and in two critical engagements you see people on the ground while a healer is still upright and DPS'ing. Then in another Bunker run your party is down, and you see a healer in another party doing damage. But hey, you also had that Ridorana run where a healer did come through in the clutch and rezzed your party's healer, thus saving everyone! And being sensitized from the one experience you might well go, "Four out of five times, healers just left us on the ground! 80% of healers are toxic selfish DPS-only jerks!"

But the truth is likely that in Bozja, trying to get up other parties in a sane manner during a critical engagement is often a lost cause; you just have to opportunistically rez where you can and hope you get the right/useful person up. And in that second Bunker run, that healer might've had to use Swiftcast to rez someone else you didn't see go down, or had to use Swiftcast to open up a spot to move themselves out of the bad, or whatever else; slow-rezzing someone in many of those fights is a Bad Time waiting to happen, so they might well be biding time until Swiftcast came back up.

The healer in that first Bunker? Yeah, they were probably just a bad healer; that is a thing that happens.

But even with this ludicrously insufficient hypothetical sample size, that's only 20% of the healers hypothetical-you encountered, not 80%.

Are there some bad healers out there who will focus on DPS rather than healing? I don't run into them often, but yeah, they do exist. And even good healers can have a bad/distracted day where they're off their game and get tunnel vision on "We can burn this boss down quickly, I know it!" I don't think anyone in the thread would argue with that.

But saying that those bad healers are 80% of all healers in the game and it's an epidemic of toxicity? That's a bit of a wild claim, and the sort of thing that people—especially career healer mains—are going to push back against. And with a claim of it being that widespread, you kind of have to expect that people are going to read your complaint as being about healers doing damage at all.

[RajNish]

Snip

You are not 80% of the WHM that I have met. We generally play on different servers. 80% of at least 50 will be 40. Have I met about 40 bad WHM's? Exactly yes. Especially in 70-80 dungeons and raids. So bring your MP/Cast time numbers to these people who do not know how to play, they will be much more useful to them.

[Packetdancer]

...I got wordy. Sorry. Also...

2400 MP is quite a bit to get back for someone in near BiS gear when kit is down. What were they wearing? WHM also has a slow spin up. 30 seconds for a lily. Your piety of 1763 is going to restore MP *much* faster than the 868 some WHM might be wearing.

Heck, I run as WHM with 832 piety. It's actually totally sufficient 99% of the time, especially with Lucid and Thin Air... but that last 1% hurts.

(I've been considering experimenting with dropping even lower, because I've realized that sacrificing roughly 200 piety could get me 200 more Crit and 200 more Det... but that miiiight be pushing my luck.)

[RajNish]

No offense, but that wasn't well-communicated in your original post. Partly because...

You ask me where these numbers come from? I really go through a lot of content, including savage and extreme, I have almost all the tank achievements. More than 300 runs on three tank classes. But mostly I play as a healer. I'm not talking about an epidemic, but I'm talking about a trend that increases in proportion to the player's lvl. Moreover, my friends, who perfectly play as WHM, who mains this class, are amazed at the number of impudent people who shift the work to others or make the tank survive in a regular dungeon, which goes through in no time.

[Ashemmi]

...I got wordy. Sorry. Also...



Heck, I run as WHM with 832 piety. It's actually totally sufficient 99% of the time, especially with Lucid and Thin Air... but that last 1% hurts.

(I've been considering experimenting with dropping even lower, because I've realized that sacrificing roughly 200 piety could get me 200 more Crit and 200 more Det... but that miiiight be pushing my luck.)

I run a little higher piety and agree. 99% of the time, life is good. I don't struggle in the least. That last 1% hurts, and it typically comes following a wipe. Your crit/det idea might work with your static (assuming you're in one). I doubt it would work for PF, call it a hunch.

[Packetdancer]

You are not 80% of the WHM that I have met. We generally play on different servers. 80% of at least 50 will be 40. Have I met about 40 bad WHM's? Exactly yes. Especially in 70-80 dungeons and raids. So bring your MP/Cast time numbers to these people who do not know how to play, they will be much more useful to them.

If you've met 40 demonstrably bad WHMs out of the 50 total you've met... fine, that's 80% of all the WHMs you've met. So I'll accept that your claim is accurate within your own experience. Even with that, I'd still say that 50 healers is not a large enough sample size relative to the size of the overall playerbase on any one server—much less the entire FFXIV playerbase across all servers—to give any sort of meaningful statistics. According to the last XIVCensus, from April, there are 567k active CNJ players (because the census can only gather by class); 50 WHMs out of 567k is... what, something like 0.0089% of all WHM players?

(I'd also say that if you've only played with roughly 50 WHMs, 40 of whom are bad ones, you might want to try expanding the group of folks you run content with; I'm fairly certain there's got to be more than 50 WHMs on your server, much less your datacenter. But that's neither here nor there.)

And if you're saying that we're unable to respond to this accurately because it's 80% of the WHMs on your server, then fine... I cannot argue with that, as I don't play on your server/datacenter to have any personal experience to draw from.

But when you post it here in general discussion with a claim of 80%, that implies you're saying 80% of all healers in the game. And if you're going to shoot down others' personal experiences on the grounds that "we generally play on different servers" as quoted above... then if it's a server-specific complaint, it maybe would've been better-suited put it in one of the server-specific subforums. Because otherwise you are going to have people think your 80% claim applies to healers on their server as well.

So I guess I'll just lay out my position as: if you are claiming that 80% of all WHMs in the community will only DPS and not heal, my own experiences do not back this up. If you are claiming that 80% of all WHMs on your server will only DPS and not heal... I can't argue with that from personal experience, but I don't think this post really belonged in General Discussion as opposed to the server forum, then. If you are claiming that 80% of a sample size of 50 WHMs you personally play with will only DPS and not heal... I can't really argue with that, either—and you have my sympathy on your experiences—but then I really don't think 50 WHMs is a sufficient sample size to claim the behavior is so widespread.

I'm not talking about an epidemic, but I'm talking about a trend

If literally—and I mean genuinely, statistically, not just speaking-in-hyperbole—80% of all WHMs out there refuse to heal and only DPS? Then that is genuinely epidemic behavior, by definition. As adjectives, epidemic/pandemic/endemic just refer to frequency and spread, and as nouns they just mean 'something that is [epidemic/pandemic] to this situation we're describing'. (No, I have no idea why epidemic and pandemic can be nouns, and endemic never is used as such.)

Epidemic means it affects a large number of people within a specific population or region. 80% of WHMs on Spriggan refusing to heal would mean the behavior is epidemic to the Spriggan WHM community, because 80% is 'a large number'.

Pandemic means it affects a large number of people across multiple populations or regions. 80% of WHMs on all servers refusing to heal would mean the behavior is pandemic to the FFXIV community. If you think of FFXIV players as a subset of the larger MMO player community, it would mean that within that community, the behavior is epidemic to FFXIV players.

Endemic means it is natural to or confined to a specific population or region. If all of the WHMs you encounter who refuse to heal come from Spriggan specifically, it would mean the behavior is endemic to Spriggan.

(Sorry, I'm uncaffeinated, and when I'm uncaffeinated I can get pedantic. It's the engineer in me.)

[Packetdancer]

I run a little higher piety and agree. 99% of the time, life is good. I don't struggle in the least. That last 1% hurts, and it typically comes following a wipe. Your crit/det idea might work with your static (assuming you're in one). I doubt it would work for PF, call it a hunch.

Yeah. On the plus side, the difference would require swapping out one piece of gear, so it would be easy to flip back and forth situationally.

[RajNish]

(Sorry, I'm uncaffeinated, and when I'm uncaffeinated I can get pedantic. It's the engineer in me.)

It was not easy to read such a wall of text. I appreciate your time and attention, and thank you for trying to explain your position, but you really need... caffeine.

[BaconBits]

[Spams Glare with malicious intent]

[Veis_Alveare]

The person I spoke about in the posts above had a Swiftcast. He just didn't want to res and heal. It is strange for me to see how others are looking for an excuse for such people, although they perfectly understand what I am talking about. Although, apparently, the fear is so great that some dude from the forum will doubt their professionalism...

How do you know?

If things were as chaotic as you claim you probably weren't sitting there tracking when the swiftcast icon popped up on someone's buff bar for the 1 or so second it sits there. Unless people were all dead for more than a full minute you can't he sure they had swift up at all.

Also, frankly, sometimes I won't prioritize raising some people especially towards the end of an encounter. If I'm beating a dps by anything significant and the boss is nearing its end they can walk back. If they want to skip the walk they can learn their rotation.