Quote Originally Posted by Cirque-it View Post
I appreciate al the help your attempting to provide but in all honesty... I have seen al that information before on xivanalysis.. But I do have an issue with a lot of the info on that site.
First of all. Every single piece of data on that site is directed at one thing only... damage... its all theory crafting around getting the absolute most out of your damage in every single way possible....
For someone whom has always played healers in games, its unpleasent to say the least...
Slide casting, uptime, never using heal GCD's but doing everyone you can to only use oGCD's when you heal
The frowning upon overhealing, or to ever not be casting. (moving is doing something too...)
+ the general rule that applies to EVERY static I have seen when it comes to loot priority.... DPS -> tank -> heals

I remember in other games (i wont name em) where it was the other way around in some raids, other raids had tanks prioritized, etc... but EVERYTHING in this game is about Damage damage damage...
There are a lot of players that dont actually enjoy "meter-whoring" as we used to call it in ((other game))

Your very Helpful post(I do admit it IS helpfull) actually only proves my point... every tip you gave was directed at improving my damage... it makes me sad...

I agree that the damage-first design of this game has caused pervasive harm to gameplay in XIV. I'd prefer that healers have a more robust and interconnected healing toolkit and spend >75% of the time keeping people alive. This tier I was managing upwards of 95% Malefic+Combust uptime during week one prog while still healing more than my cohealer and preventing deaths. It's dull and uninteresting because there's so little healing to do that almost all my time is spent pushing one button over and over again.

That said, I think you might be missing why we look at healer dps. The focus is less on the damage itself than what it represents. Don't get me wrong, high healer dps can make up for deaths and turn an enrage pull into a clear, but that's not the primary focus. I use it primarily as a shorthand for healing efficiency and uptime because those are what determines how early in the tier a healer can overcome a healing check.


Consider a theoretical boss in a traditional MMO that lasts 300 seconds. That's 120 GCDs. Let's say that mechanics and forced downtime reduce that to a maximum of 100 GCDs with perfect play. The fight's healing check requires 60 GCDs' worth of healing to prevent deaths.

A highly optimized healer acts for 95 of those GCDs. Their efficient healing produces only 10% overhealing, leading to 66 GCDs being used for healing and 29 not-healing (usually damage even in other MMOs).

Another healer has connection issues and can only hit 80 GCDs. They're less optimized, but still only have 20% overhealing. Thus, they spend 72 GCDs healing and 8 not-healing.

A third healer has phenomenal uptime and achieves 99 GCDs, but has an atrocious overhealing of 50%. They heal for 90 GCDs and have 9 left over for not-healing.

A fourth is struggling with the mechanics and gets 81 GCDs. They're still learning the fight and overheal 35% just to be safe. All 81 of their GCDs are spent on healing and there are none left for anything else.

All four of these players are able to keep their party alive during the fight. They clear the tier with their respective groups and six months later they all apply to another group that will be tackling the next difficulty in content. This group's leader looks at their logs and sees that all four kept their parties alive. The next thing they notices is that the four applicants have 29/8/9/0 GCDs remaining for not-healing (this is dps in XIV). The leader does not know what to expect in the next set of fights, but suspects that the healing requirements will be higher. Meeting that healing check will require more healing actions, which will come directly out of the non-healing actions. The applicant with 29 not-healing actions has the largest buffer that can be dipped into before being unable to meet the requirements.

Healing in XIV works differently, but the concept is the same. Powerful healing actions, abundant oGCDs, and infrequent damage means that the number of required healing actions is far lower than other games. The difference is that XIV will often include phases with immense damage bursts. Rather than maintaining 60% healing uptime over a five minute fight, XIV healers may be required to maintain 100% healing uptime (including efficient oGCD use) for 30-60 secs. J Waves in TEA, Wyrm's Lament 2 in E8S, and Terminal Relativity in E12S P2 are examples of this. Both healers need to heal continuously and ration oGCDs in order to prevent a wipe. While it doesn't correlate perfectly, a healer with high dps (ie. high downtime after performing the necessary healing) will generally be more capable of healing efficiently and maintaining high uptime during those bursts. This is absolutely vital for a group aiming to clear early in the tier.

If healing is entirely redesigned in 6.0 to resemble other MMOs, then the overall measure of assessment will remain more or less the same. The only difference is that the number of "filler" heals will be counted instead of the number of Glares.



I feel that I should mention that the tips I gave you would apply equally well for a traditional healing paradigm. They maximize actions taken and minimize overhealing. Tweaking "mash your Glare hotkey as your default action" to "mash your Cure hotkey as your default action" would be the only change necessary.