healers need a serious overhaul

[Absurdity]

Yeah, I guess I overgeneralized the OP's situation. As I said I haven't set foot into savage in ShB. I'd kinda like to try it but I feel I can't commit the time to raiding multiple times every week.

If you can't commit to a specific raid schedule then pugging is always an option, although it will most likely take a lot longer to beat a fight than it would in a static since you have to deal with a lack of communication, constantly switching players and heavily fluctuating performance.


Pugging is a bit of a coin toss, you can get an absolutely stellar party where everyone learns quickly and plays their job perfectly... or you can get a giant mess where people die to the most basic mechanics.

[tdb]

Reading these forums has made me really apprehensive of pugging. I expect there will either be some obnoxious individual who doesn't know how to play their class at all but thinks they're the world's top player, or I'll get berated myself for not playing the way the group wants or just not being good enough. This is probably not true, but try telling that to my brain.

Also, from my previous experience in the 4.4 days, pugging for savages involves a lot of waiting. At times I had to wait for more than an hour for the party to fill up. But because I don't know when it will fill up I can't really do much else while waiting, because many of the actually useful things will take multiple minutes. I probably wouldn't be kicked for finishing a craft or taking the node which will spawn in 15 seconds, but again my brain is having none of that.

[ReiMakoto]

It just occurred to me that the situation here is a perfect example of prisoner's dilemma. Applied to healers in FFXIV:

• If one defects (keeps on doing damage) and the other co-operates (heals the raidwide), the defector will get a great parse and the other will get a bad one
• If both co-operate (share the healing), both will get a mediocre parse
• If both defect (ignore the raidwide), the raid will wipe

This illustrates the competition which emerges from the current healing design and the community's fixation on using DPS parses as the only performance metric. In my opinion healers in the same party should not have to compete against each other.


That's an interesting use of Titan-Egi and stacking the phoenix DoT. Unfortunately all of the spell names are in Chinese so I can't tell how much Physick and Clemency they're using. The clear time appears to be about 10:45, which is up there with the best runs from 5.0 - but the run was actually done four months after the release of 5.2, so it's possible (even likely) they had i500 gear instead of i470.


By "a lot of content" do you mean savage or everything? I know I can solo heal any normal content while keeping idiots raised and still do some damage. Would it be reasonable for solo healing to become the norm for savage PFs and statics so the competition between two healers could be eliminated?

So that run by the chinese team was actually done when it was current patch for them, the chinese version of the game is behind in patches so it was still current content for them when they did this. They did not cast a single physik and Im pretty sure the only clemency used was in the req window.

Even ultimates have been solo healed at this point, but becoming the norm, no because of adaptions you need to make mechanic wise around having one healer instead of two. There have been times in the past when easier mechanic fights were more commonly run with solo strats, phantom train solo tank was a common one. My point being 2 healers working together should be able to do respectable damage easily, people getting log checked like that are likely massively overhealing showing a misunderstanding of how healing works/ not using their kit efficiently.

[KageTokage]

People should not be judging a healer for "healing too much" unless most of their healing is overhealing. It's far too common for clueless people to just look at a bad DPS parse and assume someone is bad without actually looking at the finer details for why it was bad, because if you're having pick up the other healer's slack due to them only DPSing or being forced to hard cast rez people because they keep dying to mechanics your DPS is obviously going to suffer for it.

Optimally, the two healers should coordinating their cooldowns so they both can maximize their DPS uptime rather then one of them having to pick up the other's slack.

I think it's less the design of healers that's at fault and more the obsession with maximizing DPS even to the detriment of others that's the problem.

[tdb]

I think it's less the design of healers that's at fault and more the obsession with maximizing DPS even to the detriment of others that's the problem.

Maybe so, but encounter design where most damage is avoidable and healer class design where oGCD heals are often enough for the unavoidable damage certainly doesn't help. The healer role is the most versatile in what it can do (AST especially), yet also the most ambiguous in what it should do. I love playing healers for the versatility, but the ambiguity makes me dread having to prove I'm a good healer, because different people are going to have different ideas about that.

[Thoosa]

A good healer can balance healing and dps, balancing, as in being able to keep the party alive, prioritising OGCD heals over GCD for maximum DPS output. That balancing actually requires the healer to keep the party and tank alive without sacrificing the group to their parse.

Sadly there aren’t many good healers out there, so you either get over healers or DPS only healers who will sacrifice their party for a parse. I’m not sure how they expect to beat enrage with all the dps dead and just two tanks alive though.

[Liam_Harper]

No surprise, when I applied to static groups a few months later... everyone said i was a crap healer and needed to work on my damage rotation!?!? (Those other players had uploaded their parses which had me at 90%+ on healing, and only in the 30%~50% window on damage)

Any static worth their weight is not judging you on dps parse alone. Any serious raider knows what "heal chadding" is and will be on the lookout for it, so your e5-8s healers trying to chad good dps parses will never get a good static. However, the statics that denied you might actually have a point and it's much more beneficial for you to see if you can learn from this, rather than deny it outright and type up forum rants that healers should be changed to suit you.
Raiders are not looking for max-dps healers. They're looking for efficient healers.

Heal parses are very complex and depend on a wide range of factors that a decent player will combine and consider.
-Your co-healer. Are they using their full oGCD kit to compliment yours?
-Overheal. A grey heal parse means nothing if one healer has been using all their HoT's and Stars and the other healer immediately heals over them before they apply, thus wasting good heals.
-In the same way, orange heal parses don't mean as much if you have very high overheal or low oGCD usage.
-Deaths. Dying obviously affects you, but messy runs will crash a healers dps because you switch to recovering the run as priority. That's normal.
-Party mitigation. Low raid mitigation and getting hit by avoidable damage bumps the healing requirements significantly, giving you less time to dps.
-Uptime. Always be casting.

Uptime is a very important factor. Many healers who are confident they're doing "fine" are at 60-70% uptime, which means they are pressing buttons only 60-70% of the time and not all of those are necessary (wasted overheal). You'd never take a dps into a serious Savage static, who was only hitting the boss 70% of the time and doing some of their rotation wrong. The same applies to healers.

Many healers fall into a trap of convincing themselves "I'm a healer, I'm meant to keep people alive" as an excuse and once they've fallen into that trap never really develop as a player because they've decided they're fine. We have a toolkit to use. Dps is a downtime filler, the issue is not healers having dps, it's the fact we have so much downtime. Even if we had much less downtime we'd still aim for high uptime and do some damage though.

I'm not going to log stalk but from a glance at recent runs for the sake of trying to help your healing has good potential, you just want to work on Uptime. You're interrupting a lot of casts and could reduce clipping a fair bit. Working on that would easily push you into the purples without affecting your healing and get you into statics no problem. If you run out of movement options, early Dia can be acceptable. Aim for 90% or so.
Also you'll notice your AST was definitely chadding you in e9/10 but their damage wasn't higher either. Poor healing more often is a result of inexperience and far less often a result of dps tunneling, this is a common misconception.

[Cirque-it]

Not really, healing is supposed to be a shared responsibility. If you communicate with your partner you can easily cover gaps where they do not have the required oGCDs for incoming damage and they can cover the gaps for you, resulting in a good parse for both of them.

Yes but you are assuming a condition where the two healers are already in a very wel equiped static group. The road to that point is long, full of roulettes and PF's, not to mention "low time/entry level static groups", where the members really arent going to go that indept into a wall of text. They look at two things (in my experience)
Your DPS, and your overhealing... two extremely unfair measurements since WHM are "supposed" to cast assize the second it comes off CD (resulting in a TON of overhealing) and since its very convenient to use A.Rapture (to heal even 2 members of your party since its an instant cast and charges the blood lily (again, resulting in overhealing a lot)

tdb is actually spot on... healing in PFs and, even some static groups feels a lot like prisoners dilemma to me at the moment.

[Cirque-it]

Also you'll notice your AST was definitely chadding you

Thanks for your elaborate message but I dont know what this scentence means? Chadding?

Edit. nvm, I think I undersstand. never heard that word before haha

[RyuDragnier]

And the fact that you now have an environment where every single savage raider is prioritizing DIRECT HIT over Mana regen is a clear indicator that the healer design in this game needs to change...

It's also a clear indicator that DH should be a DPS only stat, considering tanks and healers normally cannot get it from gear.