My experience one month into FF14 , some questions.

[vyraline]

Hi all just want to say this is a great game for casual mmo player like me , i am trial version and converted to complete edition just 3 weeks in game due to the 50% off discount end of year sale and the need of retainer bank space & gil uncapping.

First char was PLD and it was a blast tanking from low levels to 55s , then i got to try SAM and RDM , loving RDM so much i leveled it above my PLD , she is now 56. Still confused about samurai though.. Meanwhile leveled my lancer job and conjurer job to at least 30+ to try melee dps and healing.

And as new player i love the Novice Network where many vets helped newbies.. I even have a mentor helped geared me with insane lv 50 cracfted gead full of materia, helped me get into FC and do many incredibly selfless stuff for me.. (thanks Sinstrel)

My questions from my sprout perspective are these :

1. I been told that healer in FF14 are supposed to dps while healing , which is fine for me. but i saw few healers in DF roulette (below 50) do more DPS than healing to the point of allowing tank and dps health below 10%. I noticed they are not sprout player , but they seem to play rather selfishly in group setting (my opinion) .. Lucky i met mostly competent and responsible healer (maybe 90%) and bad apples are few and far between , though it left me with bitter taste a bit.. Is this Normal situation the higher the level ? of just at lower levels

2. When i bring the point #1 into NN , i got piled on by mentors who said i was trolling and other insults. I was shocked as i never thought mentors would do that to sprout in Novice Network. Theres few mentors who explained in civilized way but i remember at least 5 mentors piling up on me.. is this responsible behaviour of mentors ? i dont think brigading and bullying sprout is nice in NN. Note that i was telling my story in Aurum Vale normal where healer either too slow and let tank health dropped precariously , and also letting a dps die.I didnt call out names just stating incompetently played healer is annoying.

Just wish those mentors who lost their mentor spirit stop being mentor and remember what a mentor should behave especiall in NNtoward sprouts..

NOTE : i tested myself by leveling my CNJ to WHM (about lv 35 now) and i found out myself how i can easily ruin a party by acting as semi AFK healer / netflix healer , or how i can concentrate on my job and do both dps and heals effectively.. (if one can say Stone and Aero are good dps at that level).. No issue with Healer doing DPS as long as they remember to heal.

NOTE : I find sprout healers are the best healers and they always try their best in my experience tanking with them , i find the few healers that perform badly have non sprout icons near their name.. i

[Cinno]

It depends on the situation. As for your question of is this a normal occurence during end game, White Mages have a spell called Benediction that heals the target up to 100% of their hp. So a lot of the time, white mages will let the tanks dip very, very low, and benediction them back up. Sometimes its easier to wait and bene them than to cast multiple other spells or use many resources to top them back off. Sometimes it'll even be coordinated, where the tank will use an invuln skill so the whm can keep attacking/spamming holy, and then heal them up before the invuln ends.

Before level 50 however, it's probably just a case of the healers not paying attention. I've noticed that lower level content requires a lot more healing than higher end content, probably because the healers have less to work with. An example is, I did leveling roulette the other day and got thrown into Sastasha, the level 15 dungeon. I was reduced to Cure, Medica and Esuna. At higher end content, I have Regen, a second regen from Medica II, a shield spell, an aoe healing bubble i can place down that heals people inside and reduces damage taken, a broken fairy wing buff that increases defense for the whole party and increases healing potency, and several off global instant healing spells. That being said, in end game content, you dont spend a lot of time hard casting healing spells, at least on a white mage. Your regens and various shields/buffs are usually enough, and when they're not you have instant heals to weave in between your attacks. So.. when you get thrown down to a lower level where you dont have all of these tools, sometimes its hard to adjust. Add in that tanks have less mitigation available at these levels so they require more heals anyway, and you spend a lot more time needing to heal than some players may be used to when they're used to playing end game content.

Also letting a dps die isn't always that bad of a deal. Healers have to prioritize keeping themselves and the tank alive. If the choice ever comes down to saving the tank or themselves, or saving the dps, the dps will most definitely die and be rezzed later.

As for point 2... Mentor doesnt mean a whole lot in this game unfortunately. It just means that you've played for a long time, and done various kinds of content. Many, many mentors become a mentor solely to get the little crown beside their name, without ever having any intention of actually helping anyone. The mentor system is a little flawed, but it's been this way since it was added to the game and i dont see it being changed any time soon..

[KageTokage]

Healers are rather heavily encouraged to deal damage when no one is in immediate danger of dying...though you lose considerably more group/raid DPS whenever somebody dies from a healer slacking, so keeping everyone's HP at a safe level should always be their top priority. The best healers know precisely when the heavy spikes of damage happen on a fight to fight basis and output just enough healing to keep everyone alive, which is better both for their MP pool and their DPS.

And as previously stated, any random joe can become a mentor as long as they meet a few arbitrary requirements on either DoW/M jobs or DoH/L jobs and the vast majority don't actually care about helping people. The Novice Network culture also varies considerably between servers, and I don't think Gilgamesh is known for being one of the more hospitable ones.

[Xatsh]

With healing your goal is to keep people alive without overhealing so you can focus on DPS output. It takes getting use to and knowledge of the fight, but you do not have to keep everyone topped off as a healer 100% of the time and doing so can cause a dps loss with no benefit.

There are alot of bad healers in FFXIV, more so then any other class type I found. You have those who only heal without dpsing and you have those who are so focused on big parse numbers they let people die and cannot adapt to things going wrong in a fight (These people really slow down endgame progression). A bad healer lets people die due to lack of heals, a subpar healer only heals, a good healer both heals and dps, and top tier healer optimizes the healing and dps, while being able to react to emergencies when others make mistakes in parties.

As for mentors, Unfortunatly most people use mentor to get into an extra roulette and have no desire to actually help newer players. It is a faulty designed system. There are some good ones, but you have the toxic people as well.

[Reinha]

but i saw few healers in DF roulette (below 50) do more DPS than healing to the point of allowing tank and dps health below 10%

Letting people drop lower does not mean they are healing less. It means they are healing later. If no one dies the end result is the same. You still take the same amount of damage from enemies so the healer only has X amount to heal. If they are doing more damage than healing it means X amount takes a very small amount of their time to heal. Healers could pretend to focus more on healing by overhealing or doing less damage, but neither of those options is beneficial to the party.

[SturmChurro]

2. When i bring the point #1 into NN , i got piled on by mentors who said i was trolling and other insults. I was shocked as i never thought mentors would do that to sprout in Novice Network. Theres few mentors who explained in civilized way but i remember at least 5 mentors piling up on me.. is this responsible behaviour of mentors ? i dont think brigading and bullying sprout is nice in NN. Note that i was telling my story in Aurum Vale normal where healer either too slow and let tank health dropped precariously , and also letting a dps die.I didnt call out names just stating incompetently played healer is annoying.

Just wish those mentors who lost their mentor spirit stop being mentor and remember what a mentor should behave especiall in NNtoward sprouts..

No, that is actually pretty normal for mentors. Especially in Novice Network. I'm honestly surprised you weren't kicked, and then given a stern talking to in multiple whispers.

[Rilifane]

1. I been told that healer in FF14 are supposed to dps while healing , which is fine for me. but i saw few healers in DF roulette (below 50) do more DPS than healing to the point of allowing tank and dps health below 10%. I noticed they are not sprout player , but they seem to play rather selfishly in group setting (my opinion) .. Lucky i met mostly competent and responsible healer (maybe 90%) and bad apples are few and far between , though it left me with bitter taste a bit.. Is this Normal situation the higher the level ? of just at lower levels

It is very common at higher levels because all healers have a skill that only triggers or is more effective at lower health. To make the most of it, experienced healers will let you drop.
However at lower levels the damage is generally very spiky so it can easily happen that the tank suddenly drops from 80% to 20% even with mitigation up. Add to that that tanks don't have many tools at low levels to smooth damage over, sudden drops are fairly common.
As long as nobody died, it's fine.
If someone died, the healer hopefully learned to calculate better next time.

2. When i bring the point #1 into NN , i got piled on by mentors who said i was trolling and other insults. I was shocked as i never thought mentors would do that to sprout in Novice Network. Theres few mentors who explained in civilized way but i remember at least 5 mentors piling up on me.. is this responsible behaviour of mentors ? i dont think brigading and bullying sprout is nice in NN. Note that i was telling my story in Aurum Vale normal where healer either too slow and let tank health dropped precariously , and also letting a dps die.I didnt call out names just stating incompetently played healer is annoying.

You said yourself you are new, so I'd honestly be a bit more careful with calling others incompetent, wether by name or not because compared to veteran players, you still lack a lot of experience.
We don't know exactly how you or the mentors worded something, so I'll not even try to judge wether they or you were right.
Just know that in many NNs, people don't look kindly on fairly new players already starting with the incompetence talk because it breeds a sense of superiority early on when it's clear they're still inexperienced themselves and most don't even notice they may have contributed to the problem they were complaining about.
You have bad mentors, obviously, because being a mentor isn't a quality label nor is it a job. If they insulted you, you have reason to report them.

[SannaR]

It depends on the healer. A scholar has their fairy to basically do most of the healing for them at the very low levels. Also really good healers know exactly how much of a bar their spells will heal. So, yes it's very common to see an experienced healer dps more in the lower dungeons due to things not hitting for much.

It also depends on how/why the dps died. Did they stand in the bad when they could have moved out of it? This could be easy to dodge aoes or the rare times the floor gets an effect that gives some kind of damage, or they just got raised and still didn't see they had resimunity and did something to have it wear off early. Or did they res at a bad time where it wore off just in time for a raid wide aoe to go off while the healer(s) didn't have a chance to top them off yet.

As others have said many a mentor only became one so they can get the crown next to their head and treat it as a thing to show off. It's why a lot of mentors don't wear the crown. So, they can't be associated with the bad ones or get treated like crap by sprouts and other mentors. Who troll them (mostly from other mentors), call them elitist pricks, that they are not their parent, don't pay their sub, or are expected to know everything about the game and be 100% correct at all times while also being a walking carpet because this is just supposed to be a game lulz stop trying to get me to just do the min basic crap for this run.

[StriderShinryu]

Most people have already covered the healing question but one extra thing worth nothing about that is fights, particularly boss fights, in FF14 are very scripted. If a healer knows the rotation/flow of a fight and what/when the incoming damage is they can often cheat on healing quite a bit. For instance, if they know it's going to be 30 seconds before the next attack that hits something other than the tank, they may choose to not heal the DPS until they have to (or until their heal spell of choice is off cooldown, which they can also plan around the rotation of the fight). Same thing for the tank. If they know that there won't be major tank damage until the next tank buster in 45 seconds, they may opt to not heal them yet and just trust the tank to mitigate with cooldowns (as any good tank should).

Of course, that's not saying there aren't healers who prioritize DPSing over healing who have a very selfish approach to playing the job, but not always keeping everyone topped up in FF14 can actually be the sign of a good, knowledgeable, trusting healer rather than a DPS hog.

[Vahlnir]

Of course, that's not saying there aren't healers who prioritize DPSing over healing over who have a very selfish approach to playing the job, but not always keeping everyone topped up in FF14 can actually be the sign of a good, knowledgeable, trusting healer rather than a DPS hog.

Playing "how low can you go?" with my HP makes me nervous as a tank, but I usually give my healer(s) the benefit of the doubt. I've seen my fair share of sub par healers lately...more than my fair share, but the ones that shine really know their stuff. If that comes with being slightly nervous every so often I'm okay with that.