T/H/D/D vs T/3DPS - By the numbers

[Renathras]

You could take all the self heals away and it wouldn't do much aside from make tanks upset.

Plenty of dungeons I've ran there has been an AOE that I don't need to heal because they don't even do half damage. By the time the next unavoidable damage occurs I can press a button, they're up to full and nothing has changed. Tanks are worse. Unless they stand in bad I only need to pop CI or Exal on a tank buster (some times not even that) and they're fine. The "worst" I ever have to do is pop a regen on them. Bosses are a joke to heal in this game.

Again, this is so odd to me since I have to actively heal players in DF groups I run all the time, and people sometimes still die. I'm not sure what makes the difference, but a lot of raidwides knock off over half of DPS health values, and automatic healing isn't sufficient to restore them fully before additional attacks in some cases. Again, final boss of Lapis add phase has 3 individual players targeted, then a party stack, a second 3 individual target if the adds aren't dead yet, then the raidwide phase transition, then another stack on the other side of it.

I'm sure that can all be healed with oGCDs, but not healing any of it AT ALL? And the boss is untargetable during this phase, do Reprise/Addle/Feint are only effective on the stack post-transition.

This is also assuming no players are taking avoidable damage, and in most of my runs, at least one person gets clipped fairly frequently, and sometimes two (or all three). So maybe I just have bad DF luck, but I'm not at all sure that damage is so negligible you could actually just NOT heal at all and your party be fine...

IMO you're actually rather incorrect on this one, but the reason why is a little complex.

I'm not quite sure how this actually changes what I said, though.

ARR was a crazy time (people would 3 Healer things like Titan Hard early on because "What Enrage?"). I don't claim to know the motivations of all players, but having a Healer along decreases risk. I'm not sure how well that can be argued against. If you have, say, a WAR/NIN/BLM/BLM party and someone DOES die (one of the deaths from the mono-role parties I did was our all Tank party doing the second boss. Someone got clipped by the X attack, which apparently applies Doom. No Esuna means KO. No Raise means stay KO.), you have no way to bring them back. On the off chance there is a cascade of deaths, this can lead to wipes. While wipes aren't exactly punishing, they do add to the dungeon complete time, and they are something that people like to avoid. Besides which, if a party already has a Tank, they don't need to bring a Healer for the DF time-to-enter bonus.

"Once my teams had Coil/savage on farm". That last word is pretty important there. Not to mention you're talking about statics, not average player runs of simple content for tomes.

.

I think my issue with the design thing is that it's yet another case of hyperbole.

Say you have a flawless Rolex, worth more than a lot of people's cars or bank accounts. Master craftsmanship, high quality materials. But you play to go deep water diving. The watch isn't useful to you THERE, but that doesn't mean the watch is BADLY DESIGNED. It just means the design is for something else.

My contention is that the Healers are not BADLY DESIGNED - they are designed fine - the problem is the encounter designs of the game have shifted over time to be (relatively) incompatible with them.

the hardest content in the game, current ultimate AND the more difficult one

I'm kind of curious, can any Ultimtes be solo Tanked?

I've solo Healed Extremes without issue, but I've also solo Tanked extremes. And I think there was an all Tank run of something Savage (P1S?)

SE already tried that once: the second boss of Bardam's Mettle (Lv.65 dungeon).

I wouldn't say I mind fights like that every once in a while, but honestly, I don't think they're all that fun in most cases. That one was okay I suppose...but I wouldn't want to see a lot more of them. Though some bosses use things like that as mini-phases.