Gauging job performance - how to measure them all?

[MirielleLavandre]

I know people can use parsers and check their dps if they are a dps job, and can therefore see how well they are doing vs. others (and it is kind of sad that not everyone can do this and that is is against the ToS). But how do we measure how well tanks and healers are doing? I know on my PLD I would deem I'm doing well if I hold aggro and put up a bit of dps.

My question is, on my WHM which I've made my new main (from NIN), how do I gauge my performance? I can't really go by healing done, since that may only reflect I had some underperforming dps that couldn't dodge and stood in AoE, thus I had to heal more. I can't use my dps done as a WHM since that may just mean either I was secondary heal and/or had a great group so could dps more. Is the only thing healers have to gauge performance is keeping people alive? I would love a real world way to tell how well I'm doing, much as I can by finding out my dps numbers vs. others -- and therefore work on doing better. Any suggestions or ideas on how to gauge healer job performance?

I guess in general, aside from parses, I'm wondering how people gauge the performance of healers and tanks and even dps. ^_^v Or what methods people use to define if a healer, tank, dps is 'good'.

[Enjuden]

Is the tank alive in coils? Are you following mechanics and doing them successfully? You're doing your job right as a white mage.

Are you doing dps to the best of your ability while healing effectively as a scholar? You're doing your job right.

Unfortunately, you can't really tell if you're doing your job right or wrong in anything but end-game content as a healer. Content for the general populace is neutered so hard by current ilvls and by design decisions that it is a waste of your time trying to tell how effective you are in anything but the Coils. I know in the static I am in, the scholar is meant to dps when they are comfortable with the fight, doing the bulk of single target healing. The white mage is meant for emergency healing on single target, and group healing when the scholar's aoe healing is not enough. It's working so far for turn 13 at least.

Quite frankly, you can press regen and afk through most, if not all fights that are not in the Coils. It's good to be a white mage if you have other stuff to do.

[Yukariko]

just ask the simple questions

healers -
is everybody dead? Y/N
Is everybody on full HP Y/N
Is everybody around the 50% mark Y/N
look at the cast bars in the party list, is stuff actually being cast? Y/N

Tanks
Are they loosing mobs to DPS/healers Y/N

DPS
is a mob/boss repeating attacks during a phase Y/N
did the boss hit it's enrage timer Y/N
Are adds being murdered promptly Y/N

[Elusana_Celah]

Is tank < 100% for longer than 3 seconds? Yeah I was tanking T13 and my HP sat at < 50% for literally close to 10 seconds until Bahamut's auto attack killed me off. Don't be that healer and I'd say you're on the step to great performance :P

[mp-please]

Parse wise, HPS and overheal are useless.
High hps can be achieved by blowing your mp in seconds. High overheal, a certain parse counts every single HoT as overheal so any whm will always have stupid high overheal rates if they're going regen happy.

WHM : MP conservation during battle phases or the so called "how much do you b-... at your party bard".

Let's say you're doing t12 and you blow all your mp during phase 1 and 2 and you have to get your bard to use mage ballad. The bard will be playing it during the whole phase to keep you up through that phase and at the start of phase 4. While not too noticeable, that might make the party get hit by +1 flames of rebirth.
Meanwhile when done properly you should only require ballad at the end of phase 3 while the last bennu is reviving and while party waits for phase 4 to start as preparation and not as actual need for mp.

SCH : How much you're dpsing inbetween mitigations.

While i don't have much experience on sch, your objective is to support the whm on healing (lustrates+embrace), mitigation (adlo+sacred soils) and revives. If your whm is good enough to keep people up, you try and aim to dps the most as possible while supporting the healing.

On a final note, healers stepping on each other toes.
When its sch job to mitigate*, whms shouldn't be using stoneskin and when its whm job to heal schs shouldn't heal**. Both cases cause unnecessary mp waste and overheal.

* To clarify, sometimes adlo + WHM SS are required, what i meant with this is for example on T10 preys where only adlo is required.
** Once again to clarify, this only applies if the whm is keeping everyone topped just fine and sch decides to blow their lustrates on someone when the whm is already mid cast cure II.

[Lyrinn]

If you can keep everyone alive while clearing content, you're good to go. Simple as that.
If you can keep the party together and alive even with people making mistakes and standing in bad things, even better.
If you can DPS in-between heals while doing all that with good MP management, you're ready for the coils.
If you really want to push yourself, try solo healing anything that isn't FCoB without a bard playing ballad.

Edit: For tank,
If you're holding hate on everything you're supposed to and not losing it, you have basics #1 down.
If you're using cooldowns appropriately (which means different things depending on content), you have basics #2 down.
If you're positioning mobs/bosses properly (i.e. not facing AoEs at party or blocking flank/rear from melee DPS), you have basics #3 down.
If you can do all 3 of those, you're a good tank.
If you can snap aggro on top of all that, you're ready for the coils.

[synesthetic]

Bare minimum, a healer should be able to keep people alive for an average pull (1-2 mobs), and immediately cleanse debuffs that significantly impact gameplay (e.g. paralysis, slow, heavy on mobility-reliant classes, major poisoning that's difficult to heal through, etc.). And preferably understand how initial aggro works, so they don't do stuff that interferes with tanks' pulling and endanger themselves.
Beyond that, I gauge healer performance by how they use their time, and how much they demonstrate team play.

For example, I've had...
- WHMs who Cure2-only
- Healers who massively overheal by just spamming heals even if the tank is only down by a tenth of their health
- Healers who Stoneskin everyone throughout the fight
- SCHs with Eos on auto (goodbye Whispering Dawn)
I won't hold any of this against them if no one died and they didn't run out of MP. But under most circumstances, it's not going to earn any comms from me.

I've had healers who are obviously not team players.
- run ahead to pull more mobs, especially in a way that causes a lot of chaos
- don't ensure the tank is Stoneskin/Adlo'd before a pull, thereby forcing some tanks to only pull single groups at a time, when everyone is obviously capable and willing to do more
- don't take care of boss mechanics when they're in the best position to
- run off into space or orbit when they have aggro of something that doesn't hurt -that- much, thereby preventing anyone from grabbing the monster[s] off of them
- Fluid Aura anything that's affected by knockback, thereby knocking something out of a mob, away from melee, or out of a caster's line-of-sight and interrupting their spell

As someone who does instances a lot, I really really appreciate it when healers help make the run faster and smoother, where possible. This doesn't necessarily mean DPS'ing.
Most tanks don't require your immediate attention every second, so you have plenty of time standing around. Especially if you make good use of HoTs as a WHM, or keep in mind how much your fairy can handle as a SCH. If you can DPS, great. If you handle boss mechanics so DPS can maintain their better-than-a-healer's DPS, even better.


As for how do I gauge tanks and DPS..

Tanks:
- Are they fast, or do they spend a lot of time walking, standing around, milling about?
- Do they properly hold aggro? (e.g. A tank with an i100 weapon should still be able to hold aggro off of someone with an i115 weapon. A tank with an i90 weapon, or atma weapon, may have trouble with aggro at first, and I can forgive that.)
- When making large pulls, do they tag everything along the way so that all names are in red? And do they pull smoothly instead of starting/stopping along the way?
- Since a lot of tanks could use advice.. how do they respond when given advice?
- Do they have good judgment and know when to not overpull?

DPS is mostly judged on a per-class basis. Like if I see a MNK not bothering with positioning, then I know they're doing it wrong. Or if a BRD never sings, or improperly sings so all they're doing the whole time is nerfing their own damage without helping anyone. That SMN who keeps leaving their egi behind, or who Ruin-spams only? Oh hell no. If I can tell that a DPS is obviously a team player, regardless of how high or low their DPS may be, they'll probably get my comm. Like if I see certain skills getting stunned or silenced and I know it was them.
I think the only thing I can apply to all DPS is.. if the tank has a mob of 6+, are you AoE'ing? And a token ground-DoT does not count if they're single-targeting otherwise. A lot of DPS don't earn my comm on this point alone.

[AlexionSkylark]

- Healers who Stoneskin everyone throughout the fight
I won't hold any of this against them if no one died and they didn't run out of MP. But under most circumstances, it's not going to earn any comms from me.

As for how do I gauge tanks and DPS..

Tanks:
- Are they fast, or do they spend a lot of time walking, standing around, milling about?

2 things about that:

First, I always strive to keep stoneskin uptime close to 100% on everybody exclusing tanks for most of the run, except on bosses. That's called preemptive healing. When you apply stoneskin applied out of battle, the MP is almost INSTANTLY recovered, so it's like you got a FREE heal before the fight even started. Why the HELL would I refrain from using this? I also always precast a SS on the tank when I notice the fight is about to end (meaning, the last mob only has a bit of HP) for the same reason. MP recovery out of battle is good enough as to render Stoneskin almost free. So, before judging healer performance, perhaps you'd like to know a bit more about the job...

Second... I have an issue with your stance on both healers and tanks being "bad" and "not worthy of comms" if they don't speedrun. Speedrun never was, nor should be the default. Not everybody in this game have iLvl 120+, not everybody in this game want to rush dungeons. Some of us are even doing them for the first time. Some of us LIKE to do dungeons and don't see them as a chore they wanna get over with ASAP. pushing people into speedrunning should NEVER be seen as positive behaviour, and much less NOT wanting to speedrun be deemed negative behaviour. Please review your concepts.

[synesthetic]

2 things about that:

First, I always strive to keep stoneskin uptime close to 100% on everybody exclusing tanks for most of the run, except on bosses. That's called preemptive healing. When you apply stoneskin applied out of battle, the MP is almost INSTANTLY recovered, so it's like you got a FREE heal before the fight even started. Why the HELL would I refrain from using this? I also always precast a SS on the tank when I notice the fight is about to end (meaning, the last mob only has a bit of HP) for the same reason. MP recovery out of battle is good enough as to render Stoneskin almost free. So, before judging healer performance, perhaps you'd like to know a bit more about the job...

Second... I have an issue with your stance on both healers and tanks being "bad" and "not worthy of comms" if they don't speedrun. Speedrun never was, nor should be the default. Not everybody in this game have iLvl 120+, not everybody in this game want to rush dungeons. Some of us are even doing them for the first time. Some of us LIKE to do dungeons and don't see them as a chore they wanna get over with ASAP. pushing people into speedrunning should NEVER be seen as positive behaviour, and much less NOT wanting to speedrun be deemed negative behaviour. Please review your concepts.

Don't misunderstand me by adding in things I did not say.

For stoneskin, I've seen healers not using it for preemptive "healing". I've seen it used as a substitute for healing, and I've seen it used as an excuse to have something to do in all of the time they stand around when they don't need to heal (especially in boss fights). In the latter case, that's fine, as long as they're not running out of MP because of it and then let someone die.
Is there ever a case where you need to maintain stoneskin on everyone in order to keep everyone alive? Almost never, and especially not outside of a raid. Time and MP can be safely spent on other endeavors.

If you keep everyone alive, you've done a passable job as a healer. Regardless of how efficient or not you are with your time and MP.
But I am not going to comm someone for doing a passable job. The commendation system is there to give kudos to people who impressed you. Passable does not impress me. Sorry.
Does that mean I think they're not "worthy of comms"? No, because that's stupid to think that your own subjective form of judgment should be unanimously shared by everyone. They're just not getting my comm.

I don't believe I said anywhere that anyone has to speedrun in order to be "worthy of comms", or that they're "bad" if they don't.
Did I say a tank has to make a large pull? No. If they do though, then they'd better do a good job of it.

Note that one of the first things I said in my post was "I gauge healer performance by how they use their time, and how much they demonstrate team play." This applies to more than just healers, and all of my points are related to it.
Like in WoD, am I going to comm the BLM who went out of their way to get into a meteor point, or am I going to comm the healer who stood right next to it and is just occasionally curing the tank?
Or the dungeon I was just in. Am I going to comm the healer who was spamming Succor when only the tank was getting hurt, or am I going to comm the Ifrit-lance DRG who's at least trying to AoE like his life depends on it (and it does) when most melee DPS I see will still single-target in the face of 8 monsters? He didn't do much damage owing to the i60 weapon, but he got my comm. We didn't die, so the healer (or the fairy) did a passable job. Am I going to gripe if they get a comm when I didn't think they were anything special? No.

[mp-please]

- don't ensure the tank is Stoneskin/Adlo'd before a pull, thereby forcing some tanks to only pull single groups at a time, when everyone is obviously capable and willing to do more

Aside from raid content and before a boss, there is no need at all to SS before a large pull. Precasts really don't really make that much of a difference on a large pull.
The only pull i can think of that actually needs precast ss/adlo is the full pull of the crowd after the 2nd boss of WPHM due the amount of casters spread throughout the 3 buff tomes. And yet most tanks fail due running out of cooldowns before most mobs die and healer not being able to keep up.

So yea, if tanks aren't pulling more is because they're thinking on party composition or are playing safe, no aoes = no large pulls. I sub main pld and i'm not pulling what i mentioned above if i see my party dps lacking aoe or having undergeared aoes (same for healer).