dungeon helpers

[Cynfael]

When I say this, people are taking it way too literately. To refresh:

a) There are three "roles", Tank, Healer and DPS. If you step outside that role, you are taking ownership of the party failure. This is not suggesting that Healers should not DPS and DPS should not heal themselves, but rather if you step outside the role, you are still responsible for your role.With healers this is far more critical.

False. Using your full kit does not constitute "stepping outside your role." If you don't want to be taken so literally, then consider not making everything you say sound so black-and-white. The roles are there to ensure that parties have the bases covered, so to speak; they aren't intended to be straitjackets.

b) A healer that is DPS'ing when there are no healable targets is adding to the total DPS. A healer that is DPS'ing while other players (DPS/Tank) are healing themselves are subtracting from the total DPS. Hence again, you do NOT DPS while there are healable targets. If players were playing the dungeon instances with the minimum gear requirements instead of maximum, they would have no opportunity to DPS period, and instead need to conserve MP.

What constitutes a "healable target"? The majority of DPS who heal are doing it because they don't know any better or are just plain bad. When I play BLM I have rarely used my heals while the healer is alive, and generally only after I've observed that they are A) extremely bad and can't be trusted or B) dead. If it's actually the healer who is so bad that they are scaring the DPS into attempting to heal, that's purely about player incompetence and beyond the reasonable expectation of intelligent healer DPS.

Also, the last bit about minimum gear requirements and not being able to DPS/needing to conserve MP is not true in all cases. Overgearing certainly gives more breathing room for a few important reasons, but healing requirements vary depending on the situation, even at lower gear levels, and MP is not this precious, rare resource that needs to be hoarded at all costs; running dry should be a rare thing except if multiple rezzes are needed, especially in dungeons since you regenerate tons of MP between pulls even if making larger pulls.

c) There is a certain threshold at which a healable target "needs" to be healed, and the goal posts move the farther away from the minimum gear requirement is. If the entire party is minimum gear, then overpulling would not even be an option, as MP would be exhausted between pulls. People keep forgetting this because parties are often comprised of over-geared tanks and over-geared healers with minimum geared DPS in the low-level dungeons. When it's reversed (minimum geared tank) the healer has spend a lot more time healing the tank, and thus has less opportunity to DPS. A minimum geared tank may have as much as a 50% difference in HP compared to a maximum one. That changes the healing requirements significantly when the amount of damage they take goes from 5-10% per hit to 40% per hit.

Not sure when this became a speedrun discussion, but I don't see anything to disagree with here. It goes without saying that healers will spend more time healing when incoming damage significantly exceeds any mitigation or passive healing in place.

d) The dungeons are not designed to be speedpulled.

The devs might not want players to be able to pull an entire dungeon in one fell swoop, but if they truly wanted to thwart larger pulls, they would simply place more doors and more pits. Clearly the design allows for players to bite off a bit more if they can handle it.

e) Please play with randoms in the Duty Finder if you think healing is too easy. I assure you that the only reason healers might be bored is when the party is actually good enough to not require as much healing as a band of newbies. Take that opportunity to DPS rather than stand still. You're never required to, and anyone who throws a fit about you DPS'ing or not DPS'ing is a poor player to begin with.

Here's the thing: most of us who are giving people advice on how to play healer properly use the DF and play with actual random people on a regular basis. This information is not coming to you from the FFXIV Military Healer Academy; these are skills that we use every day in random settings.

A lot of misconceptions about FFXIV come from players who apparently played WoW or GW or some other MMO where basically everyone is a DPS and few people pick healer roles because the healer role is too squishy, and other healing mechanics (eg pots) are cheaper and lack penalties. The Tank who chainpulls is an example of bringing bad habits from one MMORPG to FFXIV.

If you are going to play a game, you first play it like the developers intended it, and then when you see opportunity for emergent gameplay, that doesn't break the intent of the game mechanics, you take advantage of that. Trying to go straight to minmaxing every GCD just because it's there, is not not smart or efficient gameplay, and certainly isn't fun to play with party members who expect a pro every time.

I'm pretty sure that the misconceptions about the healer role in this game are largely on your end. If players followed your admittedly literal-sounding advice, they would utilize only half of their toolkit for the most part and not become skilled with stance dancing at all. It's not just "pro" parties that allow a healer to assist; healing requirements are relatively minimal for most content, and even in the most healing-intensive content like T13 you can utilize your mitigation and healing tools to carve out windows for safe DPS contribution. Applying that to something like a 4-man dungeon isn't difficult.

Besides, if contributing DPS as a healer is a "pro" skill, it needs to be cultivated with practice. I certainly didn't start out realizing that I could provide a lot of DPS to my parties when I was a new healer; I was terrified even to click Cleric Stance on! With practice and by knowing my fights I became able to choose my moments with confidence and significantly boost party DPS while ensuring that I met healing requirements. That's all there is to it.