Healers please

[GarretStrongstaf]

but in no way do I ever consider my primary focus dps.. why? because I lack any kind of toolkit for that assumption. no matter how you spin it.

I agree. A healer's primary focus is keeping the party alive. However I disagree that a healer lacks any kind of toolkit to make dps a primary focus. In the right hands, our tool kits have the potential to do solid DPS. While you may not consider DPS a a primary focus, just be aware that for some healers, DPS is, at the very least, a close second. Etherea you absolutely should play however makes you happy but if you want to be successful in party finder or duty roulette you are going to have to figure out a way to get along with co-healers with play-styles that differ from yours. <3

[GarretStrongstaf]

Maybe it would be good to take a look at the job actions list if you don't play other healers because their respective "big heal coming up" tells are generally easy to spot. Nothing improves gameplay and performance like knowing what the co-role is capable of, be it healers, tanks or even dps.

I agree. If a player really loves to heal in Final Fantasy XIV, they will benifit from playing end game content as all four healers. This will familiarize them with the other's toolkits and ease new healers into being the flex masters the role is designed to be.

[Sylve]

To play a little devil's advocate here.

I just wanna point out that when complaints such as the OPs are being made, it's not commonly EX Trial or Savage that they're seeing this behaviour.
The place I see bad healers most often is Normal Raids.

Bad healer play is wildly variable based on who is observing the play in question.
It can be as little as as using GCDs where an oGCD would have worked and as big as intentionally slacking on heals because "meh the other healer will fix it" mentality.

I've been called a bad healer because I dont believe in leaving the team half dead after a mechanic.
I'd rather just pop the team back to full ASAP and then go back to DPS focus.
I do that because if I have to heal damage because a mechanic is coming in 10 seconds, why wait until the last moment to fix it?
It saves the team deaths from accidental mistakes on mechanics

In Savage/EX, you have time work out a plan with your co healer and team in general before starting.
In Normal raids, you barely even get a hello before the tank is sprinting into the boss.

Unfortunately, a LOT of healers will either do the bare minimum (refusing to do anything at all beyond an occasional oGCD) or ignore the co healer and overwrite everything they do, which ive experienced a lot already in Panda. Including a SCH recently who insisted on overwriting my E-Prog with Succor every time i cast it, not even as an accident as it was always several seconds after I applied it.

These kinds of incidents are less common in EX and Savage because the offending player is just removed before they can cause party stress.

[Packetdancer]

I wish there were more "floor is lava" mechanics where the raid takes periodic damage for either the entire fight or several minutes straight just to give healers something to do besides DPS and weave their big oGCD heal for everything.

I've definitely been pleased to notice more and more comparatively spicy DoTs since late ShB. E11S, Delubrum Reginae's savage variant, the water-is-lava variant in P2N, the raidwide-with-bleed in the first EW extreme...

I mean, none of those bleeds are that difficult to manage, but they're a lot chonkier than the sort of DoTs/bleeds we generally saw before, and you do need to manage them with something.

[Packetdancer]

That's letting the one person, who already missed a couple mechanics and has some vuln stacks, die. That tbh, may not survive anyway even at 100% hp.
It's a cost benefit analysis and sometimes its easier to just raise them afterwards.

I refer to this as the "nuclear Esuna"; it costs me 2400 MP and converts any number of debuffs -- cleanseable with normal Esuna or not -- into a single Weakness or Brink of Death debuff.

I do not often employ the nuclear Esuna deliberately... but if you have 5 vuln stacks or more, I'm gonna seriously consider it.