healers need a serious overhaul

[tdb]

In savage content yes, you should be dps'ing when healing is not needed.

Yeah, but someone has to heal the raidwides. If the environment has become such that performing even required healing reflects negatively on you, that's kinda bad. Or can savages be healed with oGCD heals alone? I don't know since I haven't been in a savage during ShB.

[ReiMakoto]

Yeah, but someone has to heal the raidwides. If the environment has become such that performing even required healing reflects negatively on you, that's kinda bad. Or can savages be healed with oGCD heals alone? I don't know since I haven't been in a savage during ShB.

Some savage fights can be cleared without a healer. Chinese group killed e4s without one. A lot of content can also be solo healed with the healer maintaining high damage uptime.

[tdb]

It just occurred to me that the situation here is a perfect example of prisoner's dilemma. Applied to healers in FFXIV:

• If one defects (keeps on doing damage) and the other co-operates (heals the raidwide), the defector will get a great parse and the other will get a bad one
• If both co-operate (share the healing), both will get a mediocre parse
• If both defect (ignore the raidwide), the raid will wipe

This illustrates the competition which emerges from the current healing design and the community's fixation on using DPS parses as the only performance metric. In my opinion healers in the same party should not have to compete against each other.

Some savage fights can be cleared without a healer. Chinese group killed e4s without one.

That's an interesting use of Titan-Egi and stacking the phoenix DoT. Unfortunately all of the spell names are in Chinese so I can't tell how much Physick and Clemency they're using. The clear time appears to be about 10:45, which is up there with the best runs from 5.0 - but the run was actually done four months after the release of 5.2, so it's possible (even likely) they had i500 gear instead of i470.

A lot of content can also be solo healed with the healer maintaining high damage uptime.

By "a lot of content" do you mean savage or everything? I know I can solo heal any normal content while keeping idiots raised and still do some damage. Would it be reasonable for solo healing to become the norm for savage PFs and statics so the competition between two healers could be eliminated?

[Absurdity]

It just occurred to me that the situation here is a perfect example of prisoner's dilemma. Applied to healers in FFXIV:

• If one defects (keeps on doing damage) and the other co-operates (heals the raidwide), the defector will get a great parse and the other will get a bad one
• If both co-operate (share the healing), both will get a mediocre parse
• If both defect (ignore the raidwide), the raid will wipe

Not really, healing is supposed to be a shared responsibility. If you communicate with your partner you can easily cover gaps where they do not have the required oGCDs for incoming damage and they can cover the gaps for you, resulting in a good parse for both of them.

This only becomes an issue when you don't have any tools available to cover the damage and your partner has but they simply refuse to use them. In those cases however the logs can easily tell you if one of the healers just didn't do their job.


The logs basically tell you every minute detail of the fight, from dps to the exact second at which the party took damage, which healer covered said damage and what abilities they used to do so.
If for example you check the logs and see that the SCH only used Recitation twice in the entire 8-10 minute fight then you know there's something seriously wrong. But if all you do is look at dps and call it a day then you might as well not look at logs at all.

[tdb]

Not really, healing is supposed to be a shared responsibility. If you communicate with your partner you can easily cover gaps where they do not have the required oGCDs for incoming damage and they can cover the gaps for you, resulting in a good parse for both of them.

This only becomes an issue when you don't have any tools available to cover the damage and your partner has but they simply refuse to use them. In those cases however the logs can easily tell you if one of the healers just didn't do their job.

Yeah, I guess I overgeneralized the OP's situation. As I said I haven't set foot into savage in ShB. I'd kinda like to try it but I feel I can't commit the time to raiding multiple times every week.

[Absurdity]

Yeah, I guess I overgeneralized the OP's situation. As I said I haven't set foot into savage in ShB. I'd kinda like to try it but I feel I can't commit the time to raiding multiple times every week.

If you can't commit to a specific raid schedule then pugging is always an option, although it will most likely take a lot longer to beat a fight than it would in a static since you have to deal with a lack of communication, constantly switching players and heavily fluctuating performance.


Pugging is a bit of a coin toss, you can get an absolutely stellar party where everyone learns quickly and plays their job perfectly... or you can get a giant mess where people die to the most basic mechanics.

[Krojack]

I think a lot of people early on in this thread completely overlooked what OPs point is. People replying are saying what you need to do now as a healer class to clear savage content. We all know what healers need to do. What OP is stating is that should change.

Future savage content should be adjusted to lower over all raid DPS to not include healers NEEDING to dps to clear enrage. Then adjust boss damage output so healers need to do more healing.

I've always found it stilly (and stupid) that a healing class needs to pick gear and meld to max their DPS over more healing output. White Mages literally meld Direct HIT as a secondary stat which does nothing to increase healing. ( Crit > DH )

E11s has a few points in the fight where a very heavy DoT is on the raid and needs to be healed though. Add more things like this to fights. Add something where say a DPS will needs to soak a lot of damage and a healer needs to keep healing them while they do so.

So many things could be changed to turn a healers primary job back into being a healer and not a weaker DPS that does large fast burst healing on the side.

I love healing but pressing 1-2 DPS ability buttons for 12 minutes starts to get old. If I wanted to DPS then I would play a DPS job.

[ItMe]

I love healing but pressing 1-2 DPS ability buttons for 12 minutes starts to get old. If I wanted to DPS then I would play a DPS job.

Am I misreading your intent, or is your stance that healers should have zero DPS buttons?

[Cirque-it]

Not really, healing is supposed to be a shared responsibility. If you communicate with your partner you can easily cover gaps where they do not have the required oGCDs for incoming damage and they can cover the gaps for you, resulting in a good parse for both of them.

Yes but you are assuming a condition where the two healers are already in a very wel equiped static group. The road to that point is long, full of roulettes and PF's, not to mention "low time/entry level static groups", where the members really arent going to go that indept into a wall of text. They look at two things (in my experience)
Your DPS, and your overhealing... two extremely unfair measurements since WHM are "supposed" to cast assize the second it comes off CD (resulting in a TON of overhealing) and since its very convenient to use A.Rapture (to heal even 2 members of your party since its an instant cast and charges the blood lily (again, resulting in overhealing a lot)

tdb is actually spot on... healing in PFs and, even some static groups feels a lot like prisoners dilemma to me at the moment.

[Risvertasashi]

The logs basically tell you every minute detail of the fight, from dps to the exact second at which the party took damage, which healer covered said damage and what abilities they used to do so.
If for example you check the logs and see that the SCH only used Recitation twice in the entire 8-10 minute fight then you know there's something seriously wrong. But if all you do is look at dps and call it a day then you might as well not look at logs at all.

Yeah but let's be real here. Most people by far only look at the player's summary page which shows percentile of DPS with no details.

And when people on the savage/ultimate recruiter discord set their requirements, it's a minimum of X percentile. Circumstances aren't really taken into account. But, to be fair, if you've cleared a fight enough times, you should have had at least one good clear...

You can say "oh it's just bad groups that do this", but it's not really, even decent or good ones will do this. Probably with the expectation that you'll have done a parse run at some point.