tanks not using cooldowns?

[Shurrikhan]

You can still compensate for many things.

The other day in EX roulette (Antitower) I ran into a WHM who felt the need to alert me in party chat before I'd even loaded into the instance, that he/she was only going to heal.

I did the first little 3-mob pull and watched as my HP sat neatly at 23K or whatever it was at the time, while Cures were slung at my very much topped-off HP pool, repeatedly, until everything was dead.

What'd I do? I dropped Grit for the entire dungeon (I do it all the time on bosses but not usually for trash pulls). I didn't change my game either, I pulled everything I could at every opportunity and only popped one cooldown at a time. I wasn't about to let that Cure spam to waste in the void of overhealing.

This works too. My only issue is when people let the opportunities go to waste, in the short-term as much as long term. And since the STR-nerf, these shorter-term opportunites even more healer-centric.

For instance, I had a near opposite experience with a "I'm only going to DPS" SCH. I kept myself up with Clemency, and tried to CD as best I could to make sure he got all his Banes (and because the raid dps was low, second Banes) off easily. The only issue was that his refusal to Aloquiem or Physic would often lead to him wasting an AF stack on Lustrate as I was literally out of all possible options to keep myself up (had all of HG to heal me), when he needed it to Bane. On the first boss, he thought I was squishy because he had to heal me 5 times when I was in Sword Oath (I was outdpsing the two dps), and said I was reducing his dps (I noted that he could adlo before I hit 25% and actually maintain his DoTs instead). I did the 2nd boss mostly in Shield, and then went back to Sword for the last, where I did more single-target healing and combined HPS/DPS than he did, while still being top dps.

Issue: he was too hung up on using my being able to heal myself to keep track of when and how it might be limited, in the end costing himself dps by being overly aggressive.