Tanks Pulling Trains (Who's Wrong?)

[Aluja89]

I play a lot of duty finder dungeons alone.

I have had some tanks leaving on their own after I talk with them. I don't really need them to listen, if they don't leave I will leave the dungeon or initiate vote kick if they are way too bad. The point is, I am not spam healing to clear content. I am busy out dpsing my dps party members on mob pulls. Dead mobs deal no damage. Spam healing can happen in some very extreme and odd scenarios where it wasn't the tank's fault that so many mobs were picked and they are using cds.

To be fair, most bad tanks who are using 1/5 of their kit only do single pulls and for there you don't need a lot of healing. In my opinion spam healing tanks when they pull more is enabling bad play in 45+ dungeons. I started regularly queueing up as SCH in leveling roulette because it's the strongest healer for lower lvl dungeons. I get so much free heal while dps-ing it's really nice. I don't have to rely on a stellar tank performance to be killing the mobs.

....You do realize we were talking about pre Lv50 dungeons right?

[Roeshel]

....You do realize we were talking about pre Lv50 dungeons right?

I am talking about 45+ content. You can get anything with leveling roulette.

[Semirhage]

You don't know how to adapt and I'm supposed to take you seriously?

Setting aside the idea of using Presence on Cure 2 spamming, having seen the state of Mentor Roulette lately? I wonder whether adapting past a certain point is actually detrimental. I've dragged more than one sprout group kicking and screaming over the clear line in some ARR extreme primals. Some groups listen. Most don't. They just pull. They don't care to listen to mechanic explanations. They don't care how the mechanics work. The tanks eat the Shiva cleave alone despite being told that sword mode means share. The Red Mages stand in front with the tank and die. The strategy du jour is just make the healer run out of mana with chain raising + LB3 for the last leg of the fight and beat it through sheer Cure spamming.

Nothing about those runs makes any of the sprouts involved better players. Just encourages them to keep bitching at the healers if they die to avoidable AOEs. It's a test on the healer to see how much BS they can enable. I'm absolutely positive some of those sprout groups rolled on a horse whistle without a single clue how the fight actually works.

[Drkdays]

Remember that if the healer stops moving they'll stop moving...or they die. And if they boot you for not allowing them to bully you? /shrug, your queue is faster than theirs.

The burnt hand teaches best.

[Kraniel]

As many have already said, the responsibility is probably to be shared but ... Having done a lot of content as a healer main with many, many random tanks, this is my impression :
1) Most if not all recent dungeons (including Dohn Mheg) are designed so that the tank can do "wall-to-wall" pulls only to a limit. Usually you have 2-3 packs that you can pull before you hit a wall, and only after clearing all the mobs will the next section of the dungeon open. In older dungeons, tanks could do pulls that were impossible to heal through, but now that content has been streamlined, that is not the case anymore ; dungeon layouts are designed so that if the whole team performs normally, big pulls should not be an issue.
2) With that in mind, it is quite weird to me that you had to spam heal with PoM in one of the "new" dungeons. Usually once the tank has pulled the last pack you should be able to => Regen + Divine Benison + Asylum => PoM + Thin Air into Holy spam until your buffs wear off => Assize and maybe heal the tank a little more if needed. By then most of the pack should be dealt with which means less incoming damage and less heals needed. You should be able to Holy spam without interruption, or maybe sometimes you'd have to squeeze in a little Tetragrammatron or something on the tank to keep them at a comfortable amount, but even that happens rarely.
3) So this would be my conclusions (again, based solely on my impressions here, since as others have said without having a video or something it's difficult to tell) :
=> Although iLvl does matter, Dohn Mheg is 375 and you were 385 so it shouldn't be an issue here
=> The fact that you had to repeatedly heal the tank while using PoM makes me think that they were not doing things right (i.e. not using their CDs, standing in AoEs, etc ...), also in the case of the tank iLvl makes a bit more difference when doing big pulls so that could be a factor
=> The fact that this lasted long enough for you to run out of mana also makes me think that DPS were probably not that good (with Assize, Thin Air and Lucid Dreaming, even if you're new and maybe not using them correctly, that should not happen ... unless you had to use raises)


Here's a couple tips i can give you :
1) If you're new to healing, don't listen to the first guy who tells you "Do this instead of doing that". Play the way you feel more comfortable with first, and then try out some new things. Don't start Holy spamming in the middle of a dungeon if you don't know yet how to recover when something goes wrong. There's no shame in going slowly and learning at your pace. Optimizing your healer gameplay will come later on when you're more used to your kit. Also keep in mind that many people think they know better when they have barely touched any of the healer jobs (the fact that your DPS thought Holy, a skill that's been there since the release of ARR, would indefinitely stun mobs if spammed, is a good example of that).
2) And actually as a general advice i'd be careful with Holy spamming anyway, because as a WHM careless Holy spamming in dungeons is the only way to run out of MP (asides from rezzing too much) when you lack experience. Do a couple pulls normally, and if you see that it takes a lot of time to take them down, or if you see that your tank loses HP a bit too quickly, then it's probably better to stick to heals. Holy spamming is good to clear content quicker, but it won't increase the group's DPS "that much", so your base DPS needs to be good from the get-go, or else you'll end up without mana to sustain the party for the rest of the fight.
3) Don't wait too much to use Lucid Dreaming. It's an amazing MP recovery spell with a comparatively short CD. When you're at around 75% MP, don't be afraid to pop it there. That way, you might be able to get another one before you run out of mana.

All in all i wouldn't worry too much about my performance if i were you. Sometimes dungeons don't go as expected, and that's about it ... Nonetheless, i think it's good that you come here to ask for advice ! I wish you a lot of fun in your future healer ventures

[Avenger]

I think one of the biggest issues is that leveling dungeons are often more difficult than endgame dungeons and players often forget that. Especially at the start of new expansions.

Dusk Vigil, Siresong Sea, Bardam's Mettle, Doma, Castrum Abania, Holmister Switch are all going to chunk tanks who aren't prepared and actually using their defensive CD's.

Holminster with paper GNB at the beginning of Shb kind of put me off of healing in general...

DPS pulling hate also seemed to be a thing.

[Mortex]

Holminster with paper GNB at the beginning of Shb kind of put me off of healing in general...

DPS pulling hate also seemed to be a thing.

Even with down synched gear in general the lvl dungeons really do hit hard as hell In comparison too the “expert” stuff. Then having tanks not using cd and big pull are normally not possible to heal in anyway.

[Mortex]

Even with down synched gear in general the lvl dungeons really do hit hard as hell In comparison too the “expert” stuff. Then having tanks not using cd and big pull are normally not possible to heal in anyway.

With lvl dungeons I mean the shadowbringer ones and some from stormblood. Not the 50/60 ones (except tank poopy gear)

[RopeDrink]

There are only a few dungeons that fit those criteria. In most cases, content feels harder purely because you lack certain buttons. Stone Vigil as WHM springs to mind given you haven't got your ream of oGCD's or Holy, thus reliant on HoT's and hard-casts, with your only damage being DoTs or Stones, all while the tank lacks CD's as well. It's not necessarily 'difficult', just restricted, and you'll feel it if either person is taking half-measures during multi-pulls.

One of the better examples is Bardem's Mettle, which remains a nasty-hitting dungeon after all these years regardless of scaling. It's not uncommon for me to enter Bardem and see a tank keel over on their first attempted double-pull even to this day. You can still do it - and comfortably - with a tank/healer who knows what's up, but given it's a mid-range leveling dungeon, you will always get a run there with someone who might not be prepared for it, especially if they've been neglecting gear.

-----

Speaking of which, I've been grinding out my DRK and have reached Bardem territory as of this morning. After a few smooth runs with first-timers, I eventually got a group with a Scholar in level 60 gear screaming "PULL MORE MOBS". With the above points in mind, I went for the opening double - not a triple - and they try to rescue me towards the third pack, which may have been suicide unless the DPS was high enough to wreck the double en route to the third, which would have peppered everyone with fast-cast and obnoxiously large AoE telegraphs to make things awkward for everyone, healer most of all.

With no Holy, I wasn't feelin' it. At a time like that, I've had no chance to gauge the healer or overall DPS (in a dungeon I know will slap me around even when popping all mitigation CDs). Ignoring the attempted Rescue, I head back to the pulled mobs -- oh, and thanks for pulling me away from Salted Earth btw, as if that wasn't indication enough that I had no intention of going further -- which revealed to me that the DPS and Healer also like running ahead and pulling things themselves to force the issue.

I pride myself on being one of those people who will stick through things until the bitter end in 99% of cases, but this just soured my mood after a nice session earlier, so I left after a few select words. I wouldn't be surprised if I was reported or flamed as the "bad guy" in that situation. Will queue again once the remaining 10mins of my time-out have passed. Gives me time to have a cup of tea. No regrets.

On the flip-side, I made the uncommon mistake of toggling off my tank stance at the start (due to checking something at Quarrymill before the queue and assuming I had changed class to do so, which means you have to reapply it when swapping back, but I resolved this during the first double), so it's not like I was without fault myself.

[Karthunk]

Today is the first time I've been yelled at for not keeping a tank alive in his massive trains (Dohn Mheg).

The DPS lectured me that I should be spamming Holy instead of heals, and the tank accordingly blamed me for his deaths because of it. I know that wasn't it because the tank died in 2 globals and the packs lived far beyond 3 casts (diminishing returns).

So we either wiped because:
a) Cure II spam wasn't enough to keep the tank alive (and I mean literally button smashing)
b) I ran OOM before the packs died because (a)

Am I at fault here, or is this guy just not using cooldowns / pulling too much?

You need to do more than just spam holy on the first 3 casts. You have a 4 second, 2 second and then a 1 second stun for the first 3 Holy cast. Be sure to weave in OCGDs and GCD while the entire pack is stunned. After the first 3 you should have things in order that can freely cast Holy.

Asylum is your red light for any good tank. If they see you put down Asylum in front of them they should stop there. You need to be right up the tanks butt when they are doing large pulls as well. If you are 2-4 seconds behind the tank then you are at least 1 GCDs + 2 OFCDs behind on the pull.