post-Dawntrail even story dungeons are harder and more punishing to heal than ever

[Zerovii]

thank you for being somewhat mroe reasonable than the people who have been so mean and judgemental... i've only been focusing on optimizing and stuff because i want to be better prepared for when i finish the msq because i don't want to "miss out" on endgame like i did in endwalker due to struggling making grouping for the harder stuff more difficult...I just.... want to be better prepared for the actual endgame this time... and i feel like if i can't even get good results in xivanalysis in a dungeon... what possible hope do i have to not miss out or not be allowed to take part in endgame again?

What good is it to clear a dungeon if I didn't "really" clear it because my uptime was low and i didn't pull my weight? these are the best ways i can describe my fears, especially given that dungeons are a lot harder than they were in the previous expansion.

maybe i just have a skewed sense of priorities and i'll just keep what you said in mind after I.... step away from thes discussion to cool my head... i deleted the unlisted video because the harassment was getting too bad...

I'm not trying to attack you for this and I'm trying to come off as coaching/advice so I apologize if this reads too critical.

You need to better your positioning and mechanic reading habits before you look at full uptime. You're trying to run before you can walk. Surviving is the first goal before you survive while doing respectable damage.

You should start by making it a goal to just get through the fight while trimming down how many times you get hit until that is at 0. Once you're there then you can start looking at how to fit your casts around the required movement. If your positioning and mechanic reaction times are sloppy then your GCD rolling is going to be sloppy.

As you do this for this dungeon and others, you should begin to pick up on tendencies in the mechanics. IE boss winding up his left arm means he's hitting that side of the arena, things on the ground likely explode in circles, etc.

Remember, you can start moving at 0.3x of the cast time remaining (slidecasting) as well.

It's ok to fail, but you need to be willing to look at past mistakes and ask what you did and adjust for the next attempt rather than just trying the same thing over and over. Be thoughtful of everything you stand in, everything that hits you, etc. Be willing to experiment and acknowledge that the experiment went wrong when it ends with you getting hit or dying.

If you can't tell why you're taking too much damage, or getting hit by a mechanic, then going through content where individual mistake communication and correction is stressed even more with ex trials/savage/ultimate is going to be even harder on you. That's the skill I see a lot of end game raid groups across the games I play struggle with a lot and is the cause of friction during progression.

[Jinglypockets]

After taking a closer look, I'm now convinced you're sincere. I'm sorry, and I want to help.

I hope this comes through with the constructive spirit it's intended with. You say you want to get into more serious content. This is how.

Encounter-specific advice:
1. A lot of people have told you to stand under the boss. This is good advice. Personally, though, I find healing this fight to be a lot more comfortable at range because I prefer the camera angle as comfort thing (not because melee is more dangerous -- it isn't). Do what works for you. The way you've been doing it is not working for you -- it's getting you killed -- so you need to adapt.
2. Don't rely on the yellow circles. Focus on the boss' arms. Whichever arm he raises is the side that's going to explode.
3. After the AOEs go off, reset back to the middle and watch the boss' arms. When his arm goes up, move immediately. Don't finish your cast. Just move.
5. There's never a reason to run through the poison bubbles.

Mentality:
Shift your mindset away from, "This is too hard," and toward, "I need to adapt to overcome this challenge."

The best players are deliberate about improving. They take whatever advantages they can find. Things like analyzing top players, analyzing their own play, taking advice, and deliberate practice. They work, they adapt, and they have a problem-solving mentality. When they're struggling, they don't complain that it too hard. They find things they can control and work on doing them better.

I am not a great player. I have slow reactions, I can't multitask effectively, and I get overwhelmed by visual noise. I'm still able to clear difficult content because I'm comfortable with failure as a teacher, I take and implement advice, I'm realistic about my weaknesses, and I put in effort toward improving and compensating for them.

Your mentality toward these things is your biggest hurdle by far.


Mechanics first:
Your focus on uptime is hurting your uptime. Your uptime is zero while you're dead. High uptime is a worthy goal, but the way you're doing it is counterproductive.

In a hardcore raid I used to run with, we used to do "Zero-DPS pulls" when we were struggling. These were pulls where nobody did their damage rotation. This was never going to kill the boss, but we did it so everyone could focus exclusively on the mechanics to become more familiar with them. When we went back to normal pulls, everyone handled the mechanics better and did more damage.

When people tell you to prioritize mechanics first, they're not saying your uptime doesn't matter. It does. They're saying it's impossible to have high uptime without good mechanics.

Your priority list should be:
1. Fight mechanics
2. Heal people who need it
3. Deal damage

Every player who is successful in high-end content understands and embraces this. If you're serious about breaking into endgame content, then embracing this is the only way forward.

[VioletCatastrophe]

Yeah, I literally get the good funny numbers without explicitly optimizing with my cohealer every raid tier that I'm able to play seriously. All of this is 100% true. Was when I played SCH, was when I played AST, is when I currently played SGE, presumably holds for WHM. Honestly, to a lesser extent even when I messed around a bit with being mediocre on EW BLM.

Uptime is secondary to understanding, because you can't understand how to get the uptime if you don't understand the mechanic.

You prog a fight 3 times. The first is to live. The second time is to loosely neaten up. The third time is to polish for enrage. In casual content, the latter two don't matter. And it's the latter two where uptime seriously comes into play. Once the party (myself included) starts consistently making it through a mechanic, that is when I start thinking about how to place my instant casts and how to use pre-moves to minimize downtime. That's when I start thinking about how to better shift tools around from prior mechanics in order to reduce (or even eliminate) GCD healing.

You're trying to polish something before you've even made it. The fundamentals, of which not dying is principle #0, will always matter more than the secondary stuff you keep talking about. You need to drop the ego and listen to the people here. We aren't the ones who can't clear the dungeon.

[Jinglypockets]

Keybinds are really a second or third-tier concern at this point, but I think you should seriously consider addressing them.

I've known a bunch of people who were able to click their abilities and still be very successful. It's still a disadvantage, but it can be done.

For whatever reason, I think the disadvantage is having a bigger effect on you that it does on others. Finding your abilities to click on them is slowing down your rotation and taking up way too much of your attention, which is making it harder for you to pay attention to fight mechanics.

It's not necessary for beating this fight, but my recommendation for your long-term success is that you keybind every ability you use regularly in a fight. 12345 is great, but QERFGZXCV are also right next to your hand at WASD.

If you're serious about getting into endgame content, just having a mindset of being willing to use keybinds would go a long way in proving (to yourself) that you're willing to do what it takes to get better.

[Iveriad]

thank you for being somewhat mroe reasonable than the people who have been so mean and judgemental... i've only been focusing on optimizing and stuff because i want to be better prepared for when i finish the msq because i don't want to "miss out" on endgame like i did in endwalker due to struggling making grouping for the harder stuff more difficult...I just.... want to be better prepared for the actual endgame this time... and i feel like if i can't even get good results in xivanalysis in a dungeon... what possible hope do i have to not miss out or not be allowed to take part in endgame again?

What good is it to clear a dungeon if I didn't "really" clear it because my uptime was low and i didn't pull my weight? these are the best ways i can describe my fears, especially given that dungeons are a lot harder than they were in the previous expansion.

maybe i just have a skewed sense of priorities and i'll just keep what you said in mind after I.... step away from thes discussion to cool my head... i deleted the unlisted video because the harassment was getting too bad...

Unless you're aiming for world first savage raid clear, a clear is a clear, uptime doesn't matter.
As a healer, prioritize staying alive first. If you panicked and got taken down, the DPSes are next on the chopping block unless they play Summoner or Red Mage or the boss is near death. Uptime doesn't matter, and people won't even notice if you did less damage or overheal.
They have better things to do than to check the performance of the other three people in a main scenario dungeon.

And as a healer, don't put too much stock on statistics. A healer's worth isn't measured by the damage they dealt or the amount of healing they did. It will never be constant, since playing a healer will depend a lot on how the party is doing.
If the party is doing well, then your damage will go up since you'll have more chance to deal damage. If the party is not doing so hot, then you will need to forget dealing damage and focus on keeping everyone alive while also making sure you survive.
If a static refused you because you don't have "good result" in xivanalysis as a healer, just leave them, you dodged a toxic bullet.

[Higashikata]

it's fine, just play with the trusts

[victoriate]

This seems to be very much a case of you trying to run before you can walk... or in this case, crawl. You need to learn how mechanics work and how to stay alive before you can even think about optimization.

The biggest DPS loss is being dead.

[Miarchu]

Well, Good. We needed this kind of struggle. Gives us healers a reason to be more then just being glare mages and press a few more buttons then usual.

[Lizvette]

if you want, i'll come to phantom and help you with the dungeons, either as tank or healer

[Khutulun]

Tbh, the dungeons don't feel that much more demanding. We're still outscaling them a week later. Did Alexandria again with IL 696 GNB, properly using mitigations felt completely optional. Even the current two post-story dungeons are getting out scaled rn. I'll probably be sleeping during them in a week. Shame really, the ever rising IL really breaks FF14's content across all expansions.