Healer opinion RDM rez

[Gemina]

I tend to treat raising as a RDM the same way I do as a healer... mostly.

Do we need a specific person up for a certain mechanic? Okay, time to raise. Do we not? Cool, they can wait for a convenient time for me then.

A KO'd player does zero DPS. Even if they are rubbing their face across the keyboard it is still more DPS than if they are down. As an RDM you definitely don't have to prioritize rezzes over your own DPS, as a healer though, leaving KO'd players down is directly neglecting your primary duty. It's understandable if you need to dodge and swift is on CD, but learning a fight so you know how to hard cast a rezz is one thing that separates the good healers from the rest. A BLM main taking on the healing role will have a distinct advantage here.

I'd say the only big difference I find with raising as a RDM versus raising as a healer that I see would be my raise priority. As a healer in anything below Savage I'll raise dps first, tanks second and a cohealer last. This is because that should be the most damage efficient order. As a RDM/SMN I'll raise healers quicker since I'm less confident in random healers being able to solo heal anything for any length of time.

Outside high-end content, there is no priority. The priority is dictated by the situation. This is one of those things that is taught in healing 101 for RDMs, and tested with a situational question:

"One tank is down, and the other is near critical. One of the healers is also down. A DPS player just messed up mechanic; leaving a vuln stack + crit condition on both him and the other healer. Unavoidable raid AoE is coming that they will not survive. Raid AoE goes off, and the second healer and DPS player also drop. You can only raise one of them as your current resources are limited."

Who do you raise?

A. The tank B. The healer that was down C. The healer that just died D. The DPS player E. ball up in corner

Since both healers are down, it is pretty clear you have to raise one of them. However, if you raised the healer that just died, it would have literally been better to choose any other option; even E. The reason is because the healer that just died very likely does not have the same resources available to them as the healer who has been down; and in this clusterfork of a situation happening here, there isn't a whole lot healer C can do since they can't even heal themselves out of critical condition, and has to hope the winds of fortune blow while they replenish their resources.

tl;dr? Evaluate the situation before firing off a rezz as any job capable of doing so. That is part of the fun with rezz duty, and why I recommend to leave it to the healers unless absolutely necessary.

[Absurdity]

A KO'd player does zero DPS. Even if they are rubbing their face across the keyboard it is still more DPS than if they are down. As an RDM you definitely don't have to prioritize rezzes over your own DPS, as a healer though, leaving KO'd players down is directly neglecting your primary duty.

I'd have to disagree with that at a certain point. Yes, in most cases a living dps does more than the dps you lose by rezzing them but if that dps is rubbing their face across the keyboard there comes a point where the mp and time you have to invest in them outweighs their usefulness. As a healer your job is to keep the party alive and as a RDM your primary job is still to be a dps, if someone is dying so often that they are a detriment to that objective I'm gonna have them take a nap for the rest of the fight.

[Liam_Harper]

Oh. And if the healer is too occupied with his/her own DPS to rez an actual DPS, I'll step in. (And may or may not mention it after the fight, that in almost every situation, a live DPS class would contribute more damage than a healer. Ahem.)

That really depends. Let's say Swift has 12 sec on cd, no healing is needed from me (otherwise hardcast Rez is a bad idea anyway). I push out 5 Glares, swift Rez and continue. My other option is hardcast for 8 sec (both I and the dps are doing 0 for the duration) then both I and the weakness debuffed dps have 4 sec dealing damage. That 8 sec of combined damage is equal or worse than my 12 sec (esp with the dps weakened). From 15 sec cd left onwards, there's a good case for eating the Hardcast (healing required dependent), unless the dps is terrible or has a high weakness debuff, which is a decision you make in the moment.

Also to mention something on heal lb3 here, because I've been told off by inexperienced players too many times for using it. If the fight isn't going to end soon, lb3 for 3 reasonably decent dps is almost always a net gain over melee lb3, because you save 24 sec of healer hardcast (not only does this significantly hurt the healers damage and healing, but it means the dps aren't up immediately and wait for 8-24 sec) and gain 3 weakness debuffs (if hard raised they'd be at 75% power, this is sort of like giving them a +33% main stat buff for 100 sec on that). Heal lb3 is an amazing tool.

[Thmas]

Just want to thank all the contributors to this thread. Has been very insightful on how main healers view rez. I particularly like the situational hells breaking loose whi do you rez example. Thank you!

[Veis_Alveare]

snip.

Rather than some sort of itemized response I'll just be brief.

First - if you have no way to know what sort of damage people are putting out I could see the logic behind always trying to raise dead people. If you aren't in that situation and you can literally see when someone isn't worth your time then you should be using your judgment. I won't presume to know which side of that you fall on.

Second - the proposed situation is a giant mess not of my own doing. I choose to let the wipe occur, people need to learn. On a serious note you're trying to big brain this but haven't even talked about the prospect of healer LB or whether one of the healers is legitimately better than the other. Raising someone with a brain and understanding of their tools but who doesn't have access to everything is preferable to raising a cure1 spammer who has all their CDs up fOr eMeRgEnCiEs because only one of those people is likely to avert a wipe. Competence matters.

Basically - you should raise as a caster if you can. In casual content buff alignment basically doesn't matter so the offset to mana generation on RDM is moot, plus if you're already raising its not as if things are going splendidly. RDM and SMN basically have no other use for their essentially limitless MP pools where as healers may need theirs. That all gets turned on it's head in Savage but that isn't the focus of the discussion.

[Side-Eye]

God, I wish that were the case.

That's where parsing would tell you how much damage the DPS was actually doing... you know, if one were using a parser... which of course none of us do.