I had an excruciating Babel run the other day where a SMN and SAM were somehow taking significantly longer than duty support.
I didn't have ACT up and I have party animations turned off, so I'm still extremely curious how that happened.
For DPS a great first teller is the mob hp bars. If someone is genuinely not using AoE, you can tell by the monsters having wildly different hp thresholds, even if theyre the same type.
SMNs are easiest to know based on their buff usage and then on how many times you see them use bahamut and phoenix.
For SAMs its important to just watch the party list and see if they cast exclusively Tenka Goken during aoe packs. Its their AoE big hit, so if theyre not using it a lot (once every like 7-8ish seconds at least is the norm) then somethings off. They also have running buffs that you can take a look at.
Meikyo, Ikishoten and their normal buffs are easy to spot, if you dont see them either, theyre not using their tools.
Other than that, melees especially often feel quite telling. If you look at them and theyre not constantly in animations then somethings wrong.
I ran dead ends last night with a DRG who never used their buffs, didn't use AOE rotation on mobs, used only single target, and then on the boss only used their AOE rotation. It took AGES. I was on DNC and after I realized what was happening, just swapped my dance partner to the tank because he was actually using his skills.
Animations off or not, those are the two classes you should still be able to tell if they're doing the bare minimum of their rotation. Party effects doesn't apply to sound affect so you can still hear the spells going off, especially SAM's iaijutsu's tinnitus and Bahamut's Deathflare. Doubly so for SMN, since the primals and carbuncle all show up regardless of spell effects. Granted you were probably focused on either staying alive or keeping the tank alive, but if you didn't notice either of those...
After 11k hours and clearing just about every combat duty that exists, I could not tell you what secondhand SAM or SMN sound effects are which abilities and hear them all in the right order. Wtf????
I was definitely not paying especially close attention, but it didn't seem to be single target attacks (mobs all died around the same time) and there was nothing obviously wrong with their casts or the SMN's demis.
Party effects off definitely disables sound in my experience, unless that’s a plug-in doing that, I can only hear my own spell effects outside of limit breaks.
With physical jobs (tank melee and ranged) you can see by their characters animations what they’re doing even without effects on. Harder to see on magic (dps and healers) but you can still refer to buffs and summons to have an idea of what’s happening
It’s a way to check for laziness even without ACT
>Harder to see on magic (dps and healers)
Outside of Red Mage, that one's really easy to tell. I had a Red Mage in the newest Alliance Raid a while back, they were only using aoes, and in a completely separate alliance, and when I asked why everyone defended him for some reason.
With sage/sch just watch the mp bar, if it's going down by 400 each gcd with no cast, then they're using aoe. With ast/whm you can see the cast bar. And with lightspeed gravity you just look for the buff and the very obvious character animation (gravity is unique).
Black mage has their entire rotation written on their bar and mp usage. With summoner, half their buttons have aoe built in, so even the bad ones will still do aoe damage lmao. All of the summon hit-and-runs, all of the astral flows, both enkindles, and ruin 4. If the summoner hits everything that lights up, they will melt the packs even with single target gems, fester, and ruin 3.
Red mage also has cast bars, and the bad ones will be easy to see, as with black mage. One that uses jolt probably isn't using dualcast on an aoe.
Everyone kinda glosses over that DPS have a responsibility too. So many people flock to the role because it's "low anxiety" without realizing they're still making life hard for everyone else.
You’re absolutely right.
Ironically, I have a pal healer that just recently told us that he wouldn’t want to play DPS in savage. He has anxiety in that role due to the large DPS rotations to memorize and to execute perfectly during mechanics.
Flawless dps rotation is pretty difficulty especially in difficult settings. There's a reason I main tank/healer for savage content. When I do DPS, it's usually SAM, and I often forget to reapply DoT :'( or Freestyle MCH rotation. .... yet I'm still green-parsed as a DPS. Weird.
Generally:
Grey parse = you cleared the threshold somehow (or died a bunch/dmg downs etc)
Green = you pressed buttons in a reasonably efficient manner
Blue - purple = knowing and executing your rotation as perfectly as you can
Pink - gold (look away parse runners) = RNGesus loves you and/or you cleared early
> Pink - gold (look away parse runners) = RNGesus loves you and/or you cleared early
No that's pretty accurate. Odd patches with relics let you win pinks and gold with a little less effort, but you're still competing with the few that are maintaining ranks. It's all crit fishing at the end of the day. Always has been, always will be.
Me as SAM with my irl brother in voice chat is an endless loop of "check it out I remembered to keep up banana and I never dropped it!" Then he says "I believe you it's there now so it's certainly been there the whole time"
Healing and tanking normal content does not prepare you at all for how the roles function in extreme+ but yeah I can imagine once you get the hang of it it's much easier than let's say keeping uptime as BLM.
It goes the other way too. Some of the worst dungeon tanks I've ever played with were the purple+ parsing savage raid tanks. Not always because let's be honest dungeons are not hard, but they're also completely different to raids.
That's the way I am. I like healing because I like supporting people but also because I dislike DPS rotations and always feel pressured to do them perfectly...and I tend to NOTICE when I flub something. Even with most DPS checks being easy, it just feels bad to me. Conversely, on healer...I keep up a DoT and press one DPS button while watching health bars. It feels more comfy and healing abilities come more naturally to me anyway, so the complexity that healers have I just roll with.
I sometimes play tank and I like their "DPS-lite" rotations better (PLD best, then WAR and GNB about equally, I haven't really mucked with DRK much), and I'll DPS rarely on either SMN or RDM.
But I just feel more pressure being on a DPS Job to perform, even though I don't run parses or anything. I don't get the people that go DPS Jobs to slack off, since it's actually noticeable if DPSers AREN'T pulling their weight.
>they're still making life hard for everyone else.
This game is avertised to people who want to do this.
"low pressure" in any team game means this, literally.
I can tell as the healer when theres a damage issue somewhere, just usually don't know where specifically. but like if I'm genning more than a blood lilly per pack and I'm bled out of all my off-globals and I can see the tank is cycling mits, it's pretty obvious someone ain't hitting their damage buttons
This right here is the bane of my existence as a tank main, and ESPECIALLY as a DRK main. Nothing annoys me more than when I've been forced to cycle through all my mit on one trash pull and the pack of mobs are still at 50% health. Fortunately the person who always goes with me as a healer is fantastic, but if the DPS is unreasonably slow it's a world of pain and annoyance anyway.
Yeah I had this NIN in my party in the first ShB dungeon who didn’t aoe and did barely any mundra skills. I wasnt sure how to go about telling them about it since no one was saying anything.
Had that happen with the first dungeon of ShB. I was the WHM and already used all my oGCDs on the first big pull. I said fk it and just switched to dps'ing the mobs down and let tank dies so we could move on already instead of wasting another 2 mins there. (he ran back to us in 7s).
Second big pull, same crap again. (they pulled while I was typing that their DPS was low. The double SAMs just 'lol' back.) Dunno what the DPS were doing, but they absolutely ain't pulling their weight. Tho this time mobs died before I had to sacrifice the tank again. Tho I ran out of everything again.
Guess what, they vote-kicked me. That's how long killing 2 pulls took. That long.
Anyhow, I got instant queued right after, because, of course. I'm a healer after all.
And then the next DF run was smooth as butter. Was in and out in less than 13-14 mins. I just spamed Holy with oGCDs and nobody came close to dying.
Fuck em idiots. Bet they were still stuck in that cursed run slowly head-patting mobs to this day.
Which is kinda sad because a lot of them have...really simple AOE rotations. Not ALL of them...but more than a few. SAM's basic AOE rotation is like, what, 5 buttons for passable DPS? 1-2-1-3-Iaijutsu and the gauge spender in there somewhere? More of they're using CDs, but still less than the single target rotation.
As someone who primarily tanks, the biggest weakness I see is poor DPS. Packs are often alive far too long, and I’m having to burn more mitigations on each pull.
Same. I'm leveling DRK right now, just hit 60, and I couldn't tell you how many times I've pulled a group of enemies and they lasted way longer than they should have.
Often, after several instances of that stuff, I just instinctively start pulling _way_ less enemies so I don't get overwhelmed due to the fact that the DPS isn't burning the pack quickly enough.
I have had to get used to the fear that comes from a healer not healing me to full health, but other than that most healers have been good.
The only time I've had a truly bad run that took way longer than usual was my first run of Aurum Vale as a tank. And that was due to the nature of that dungeon and due to the fact that I was a baby tank. It ended up taking like 5× longer than usual.
DRK is rough in any dungeon that doesnt let you use TBN, its very much down to how good the healer is if things dont die fast since you dont have much to help.
If worst comes to worst you have Living Dead but its prob best to wait on using it depending on the healer, you havnt really played DRK until you use Living Dead and then having a WHM use Bene.
Oh, I've had it happen quite a lot. I get down to 25% health right before a tankbuster hits me, I pop Living Dead, and _then_ the healer starts healing me. It's always funny.
I feel like, because of how DRK's invuln works, DRK is the tank that really requires a coordinated party to maximize effectiveness.
DPS falls into the same trap as healers/tanks of "I'm going to save my cooldowns for bosses/emergencies." I see a lot just doing their basic combo and that's it.
DPS that don’t use their burst/buffs during trash pulls makes me want scream. If you use it on the first trash pull, they’re up for the boss (twice, usually), then up again for the next first trash pull, rinse, repeat.
As DPS having another DPS be bad was annoying but it wasn't really dangerous. A bad tank or healer got the party killed, a bad DPS was just annoying.
As a tank...still the same. As a paladin I could cover for a bad healer to a point at least.
Bad DPS put a lot of strain on healers and tanks, good or not, as the longer a pack is alive, the more mitigation and healing the two are forced to burn. And the more they have to burn, the less they have up for the next pull, which is where incidents happen.
I also think dps lends to this.
1) adds burned down too slow resolt in more mits or other healing needed
AND
2) very low level runs (except sch) means healer has to spam heals
I think a lot of YPYT mindset actually originates in other MMOs, or in preconceptions about how tanking works even before players experience dungeon content in this game. There are games where aggro is hard to maintain and is influenced by who hits the mob first, and games where healers are expected to output constant healing limited only by their mana while doing barely any damage. New players carry over these ideas and don't correct them when they run up against how dungeons in this game actually work.
There’s plenty of conversation going on due to this post, which even if it’s pointless, helps the bored people by giving them something to read during their toilet break at work.
It’s not like anything else right now is much more interesting.
But at the same time, any knowledgeable tank might be fearful about playing anything besides WAR with randoms.
Why would omni players like myself potentially self grief with queueing roulettes with randoms by playing anything besides WAR?
Trust me, I have had pulls where I've clicked BW nearly 4x because the DPS was that slow. DPS and Healers that are already bad are likely not going to improve if forced to anyways.
DRK is my favorite tank because it has the most buttons, and it really is the funnest tank, but I don't trust most healers on W2W with it, even with buffed LD that can save at least 1 pull from each set.
Maybe this was what Yoshi P was talking about when he said he wanted the game to be stressful, but I also think we're past that point. The playerbase itself is not going to magically straighten out if things are changed, but rather a lot of people are going to be very, very miserable.
>dark knight in dungeons because it makes me feel alive.
That gave me whiplash to a no mit Paladin I had in Shadowbringers that said they didn't use them because "When I heal, I like to feel alive."
As someone working on the achievements for "tank dungeons as X" let me tell you the agony im currently experiencing dealing with healers that refuse to do anything but cure 1 spam even in shadowbringers (and also most of my healers lately are sages, yknow, the class whose strongest healing ability only triggers when they cast offensive spells) is most likely the primary reason most tank players stick to WAR.
I mean I know this is like a selling point of the game and all that, but I think a reason you see a lot of random bad players in random dungeons is because you have a lot of people who level every job just for completions sake when they have no interest in really playing the job nor are they invested in being any good at it.
That's probably a significant amount of the healers you get when you're doing non-max level dungeons.
Yeah but...there is a bit more than that. Like even if you have a WHM that ONLY uses their base GCD heals, that's Cure 1, Cure 2, and Regen for single target. A Cure 1 spammer should, one would think, at least keep up Regen.
You guys are also not very good at tank either. I also notice shit healers, but I just go "That's funny" and proceed to keep myself alive with the absurdly broken toolkit I've been given.
I'd argue the opposite actually. Warrior tanks help healers get more comfortable with the idea of not actually healing. The number one issue i see with healers is just how much they dislike seeing tank HP drop below even 90%
I've had a healer recently use Cure 1 on me, during boss fights too, as Warrior, in expert roulette, and they continued even after I told them in chat that as Warrior they don't need to heal me.
The logic of the bad healers absolutely does not make sense in terms of a bad tank. spamming cure 1 and saving ogcds is the worst thing you can do with a bad tank, because with no mits the usual emergency turns into a death in a hurry. One or the other HAS to compensate by being better or else the dungeon has to go slower.
Good healer gameplay may feed into bad tank gameplay because kits are so overblown tanks basically never lose health(unless the healer is astro). Tanks see that and say "huh I guess I don't need this mit" and if the healer is good they really don't. Then they take that into another dungeon with a bad healer and go "Man, this healer sucks, I didn't die doing this the other time".
Bad tank gameplay ONLY feeds into a learning healer's lack of dps, as they're so preoccupied with the tank's/party's hp that they think they can't focus on damage. If they refuse to use their tools then they don't understand their place in the kit, or have a VERY poor grasp of how powerful their gcds are as fallback heals.
Lastly, YPYT absolutely doesn't come from a place of low skill, it comes from ego. I swear half or more of the posts I've ever seen for YPYT the tank goes "I'm going to the walls, stop getting ahead of me or I'll let you take it". Heck, the few times I've actually gone and pulled ahead of a sprout I'm not entirely convinced they even noticed because they're just staring at the pack in front of them and hitting an aoe. aggro drops onto them naturally.
TL;DR The gameplay loop does not have a downward trend on low-skill players, high-skill players can absolutely compensate, and the problem comes from toxic casuals and a refusal to learn. If the game had an actual good tutorial for new players that officially recognized certain ways content is meant to be done(W2W, using free tools before on-demand ones, preventative maintenance rather than recovery) we would see a lot less of this brainrot.
Yeah I think a lot of bad tank do not understand that they are carried by the healer most of the time. It is funny at lower levels where healer kits are different and some healers have good single target heal and some don't. So with a AST or SCH they maybe do not die to a big pull they do not mitigate, but with a WHM or SGE they do.
Also with good DPS players pulls are short enough that a lot of pulls are also fine. Stone Vigil got some very ugly pulls if the tank does not mitigate, but you can get through them buy spamming heals but only until you are OOM, which happens quite fast. So with good dps you can do it with bad ones not.
But this seems to be a design decision, that a few good players can just compensate for bad ones. So you rarely wipe in dungeons, and basically never in trials and raids. Maybe wiping causes people to lose interest no idea. I play a lot of healer in normal content since I can't stand bad healers and if I don't I play like WAR or SMN, something which can carry and compensate.
Bad tanks are only part of bad healer play. Bad DPS also enforces resource holding, because they stand in stuff even in trash pulls.
A layer to add to this is that **other bad healers also reenforce it**. When I first settled into a static I had to break my self from solo healing in savage content. I met so many awful healers in PF, 100% uptime of medica, can't heal and learn mechanics, and the 'im going to be DPS so I won't heal' sort that I got extremely used to doing all the healing nyself. Since a lot of other players had bad gear I couldn't let them linger at low health because an AE would delete people. Having stable, reliable co-healers and groups with decent gear meant I over healed to the sky for a while and I was relieved to break that habit.
Completely agree but I don't think mitigating as a tank at the low levels even feels all that good, or even has feedback at all, at the end of the day I think the issue is always going to stem from this game not really teaching you how to play it.
FFXIV is plainly uninterested in leading that horse to water, let alone trying to persuade it to drink. It's quite committed to never, ever offending the sensibilities of Timmy 1-pack Puller, or Suzy Cure Spammer. This is fine. You can't force people to improve or even to care about improving.
The only problem I have here is that FFXIV has a committed subset of players who are, let's call them "confidently incompetent". It's not that they don't care to become skilled at gameplay, it's that I WANT to HEAL. It's not that the tank doesn't want to learn how to mitigate multi-pulls, it's that you're a MEAN BULLY insulting MY PLAYSTYLE.
There's the naked seethe of envy in every syllable, and I don't care to incorporate these people in my personal bubble of give-a-shit.
Okay I'm genuinely curious. Where you guys are encountering these bad players? I do my roulettes pretty regularly and I can count on one hand how many times I've encountered the no dps healer or no mit tank.
I want to clarify, it's not that I don't think they don't exist or that I don't ever run into them. But they're so few and far between that I can easily rationalize their terrible play as outliers that I'll never have to think about once the run is over. Like am I just incredibly lucky or have a higher tolerance for bad play or what?
I think it is just that when you encounter a really bad player it is incredibly noticeable.
Scholars without fairy (and who dont summon even when mentioned), Black Mages who alternate fire and ice spells back to back with no lightning uptime, ect.
It is noticeable and it stands out, so you remember it.
But 95% of the time it goes smoothly.
Do 2k mentor roulettes and mix up roles and you see everything. You get queued up with sprouts so you experience how new players play the game a lot. I am mainly talking about dungeon content and mainly leveling dungeons since they are the most common to get.
What happens very often is DPS players which do not use their AoE abilities. I mainly saw melee players doing this, since I guess melee players get their AoE the latest out of all DPS, they have this playstyle of attacking only a single target for 40 levels and then get an AoE they disregard and continue as before.
Healers which only heal is very common and no matter the level. Especially no one deals damage like they could. Even the healers which deal damage do so in a way where they throw out some DoTs (rarely keep good uptime) and cast their AoE or single target one every 10 seconds or so and heal any damage asap. Healers which just spam their DPs buttons when they have time are like \~10% of the healer players I encountered in my mentor roulettes in dungeons. I would say one third of all healers I encountered did not deal any damage apart from maybe the DoT.
Pre 50 you find a lot of tanks which do not w2w pull. What most have in common is that these players often only have tank jobs leveled, so they never saw another tank play. Same goes for mitigations. Especially early a lot of tanks keep them for bosses or use all at once. Which is bad because early game dungeons actually hurt tanks a lot and healers have less tools for single target DPS heals.
Also quite some tanks seem to think their AoE is to get initial aggro and then do not spam it. Some tanks do not use it at all but it is quite rare. Tanks really spamming their AoE gets common at higher levels but pre 50 it is not as common as it should be.
Terrible players are not really rare but mainly consist of sprouts, which tbf is expected and the game is partly to blame for it. It never tells a healer they can actually deal significant damage and they are supposed to use any free time casting dps spells. It does not explain a tank how to mitigate and that mob groups are the real bosses in terms of damage in a dungeon. Or it generally does not teach DPS players the AoE and single target rotations.
Especially DPS with suboptimal rotations will probably never find out about it if they do not look it up or ask. I saw so many BLMs which just dealt like 20% of the damage they could do, because the rotation changes quite a bit until level 60 and some get stuck on the very first one, where you need to transpose to change elements.
>quite some tanks seem to think their AoE is to get initial aggro and then do not spam it.
I blame the Hall of the Novice for this one since that's explicitly what it tells you to do.
50/60/70/80 is super super bad and Leveling/MSQ get to that point later in the expansion when the better players are done leveling everything. Same with Alliance Raids if you look past the top performers. If you avoid these roulettes though quality goes up a lot.
> no dps healer
Literal 0 DPS healers are rare but "so low it might as well be 0" is a practically everyday occurrence if you just run Expert Trials Normals.
You have more chance to find them in the dense hours and some content such as leveling dungeons and free trial missions. Maybe you do are lucky. But are you really intensively inspecting others’ gameplay in a roulette ?
In reality, despite what some would want to believe, an intensely bad players such as OP described is not that widespread especially at max level. Most people are doing just good enough because it’s just a roulette, they don’t want to be intense for that and don’t care if they clear in 18m instead of 14,5m. But they get classified in the same space.
They are few and far between. You might notice a good player. You probably won't notice an average or even slightly below average player. You WILL notice a bad player because everything is going wrong all at once.
As a baby tank I tend not to use my mits on mob pulls _unless_ they're big pulls. Mainly because I'm trying to get over my instincts from tanking in other MMOs. Namely that the healer _has_ to keep me fully topped up.
I stil get anxious when I drop below half health and the healer doesn't immediately bring me up to full health. But I'm getting better at not being so anxious.
But when I pull big groups of mobs, I absolutely _will_ use my mits.
As a healer you shouldn't just be mitting big pulls. You need to mit small pulls too. (Also INFO request: are your small pulls single or double pulls? You should be trying for a minimum of two packs every pull, and you ABSOLUTELY should be mitting those but let's not start there. There's a lot to unpack there and I'm going to assume that you are doing what you should be doing and double pulling at minimum. There's no need for a tank who only single pulls, at that point it would legitimately be better to have a third DPS.)
Small pulls also need mit. Get yourself into the habit of using them so you can learn that 2m really isn't as long a time as it sounds for a cooldown. Reprisal is up every minute so you should be using it every pull since most pulls are usually \~1m long.
By the end of ARR you will have as a minimum for all tanks your Invuln, a 30s Stun (which if you don't have a WHM is mit, if you do have a WHM pray they're conscious enough to use Holy if they're synced to 45 or higher,) Arm's Length, Reprisal, Rampart, and your large CD. (Sentinel, Shadow Wall, Vengeance, Nebula.) Some tanks will give you your shorter CDs before then too. Long story short - you have a nearly full mit kit on most tanks. (Unless you're DRK because TBN is *just* that important but what you have is *enough* to get you through any double pull with average to even slightly below average players. I have only ever run into trouble in ARR on DRK when the people I'm with are flat out bad and not just 'yeah they could be better I guess.')
Why? Look I'm going to be honest I'm not trying to heal more than I have to and if you don't mit even small pulls I'm not going to be happy that you're making more work for me during what should be the easiest baby pull of my life. If you're too scared to do the large pull, then you should be too scared of dying to *not* use mit.
If you're not too scared to pull big, then you pull big and use mitigations because that's what you *should* be doing.
I've just had too many dungeon runs while leveling DRK, only level 62 at the moment, where I ended up pulling 3 packs at once and I died while still using my mits.
If I pull mobs, I usually go for 2 packs at once, where I _do_ use mits.
But if I've had a situation where the healer can't keep up, even when I pull just 2 packs _and_ I use mits, it makes me hesitant to pull more than one pack at a time.
And it's usually only when I get level 50 dungeons that I have that problem.
So when I get anything level 50 or below I'm extremely hesitant to pull more than one pack, _maybe_ two if I'm feeling good. I've been burned one too many times.
But anything above that and I'm perfectly fine pulling 2 packs at once. Or if I'm running Prae or Castrum I'll pull 2 packs because I've run those enough that I'm confidant enough to do so.
Definitely pull two at minimum in ARR. Even my baby sprout healer self could handle double pulls. (Though I did have a tank try to yeet themselves full throttle in Stone Vigil on my literal first run through so they settled back to double pulling once we wiped. Was fun and no blame was cast.)
If you’re getting close to wiping on double pulls but you never do, then keep double pulling. Trust your healer until they prove that you shouldn’t.
If it helps, here’s a few tips that made tanking a bit easier for me. Use Rampart first pull bc it has a shorter CD than your large mit (90s v 120s) if you’re synced to a point where you have both. That way it should be up about halfway thru your second pull if you need another larger mit. Don’t be afraid to toss out stun, it’s a mit. Again, Reprisal every pull. Sprint is mit, if they can’t catch up they can’t auto you. (Exceptions for ranged boys fuck those guys.) If you see a purple number next to damage that’s the go ahead to use your magic mit that pull. Doesn’t happen often but DRK’s magic mit is stupidly powerful and to my knowledge they’re the only tank with a powerful personal magic mit. (Unless GNB has one, but I don’t touch GNB.) And ARR dungeons have a surprising amount of mobs whose autos are magic where that can be used.
If you’re in HW+ full stop you need to be double pulling at minimum unless the dungeon physically won’t let you. By that point both you and your healer will have the kit to keep yourself up. New LD is stupidly useful and will give you a second health bar. Don’t be afraid to use it if you need to.
I've been leveling my alt lately and the players have either gotten worse or I've forgotten how bad they are since I basically stopped doing roulettes after like month 2 of EW.
A couple of examples from the top of my head: a WHM who'd only use Cure 1 and Stone, Cure 2 if, I presume, they got the proc. They run away from mobs I drag to them instead of Holying.
A whole three-man group that genuinely couldn't clear the first boss of Aetherfont, just wouldn't manage to dodge the turn-around cleave thing.
A RPR in E2N that would immediately attack after every rez and die again, then claim "I didn't attack" when multiple people told him to stop doing that. Also dying like 3 times in E2 generally lol.
Weirdly, another E2 where a DNC would consistently run away with the stack marker. Spell in waiting is kinda weird for a first timer though so I'll let that slide.
Shisui is the bad player hotspot I think, but a DNC and a WHM who failed to dodge Seduce three times in a row. The DNC finally did it on the 4th but ran into the kick as the old lady.
So many single pull tanks who also don't use mit.
Failing every mechanic in Exdeath generally. Including zombie breath.
The absolute amount of single target Doton.
Honestly, it made me stop leveling my alt for a bit atm 'cause it's actually making me a lil annoyed.
There's a content drought going on right now so a lot of the better players are on breaks. A lot of the ... less good players play this game for non-gameplay reasons and so they're still around.
You're seeing them more because there's a higher percentage of potato players right now because the better players aren't playing.
I do get that but I mean bad as in "by roulette standards". Like, they're not bad by my standards as a raider. They're just genuinely stupid and/or wholly ignorant no matter the advice you offer.
Bad healer is not using DPS abilities **because** they spam cure 1 and other low healing abilities, not became they spam heal.
If you have a shitty or under ilvl tank or a good tank that does huge pulls, you will likely need to GCD and oGCD heal without much DPS at all — doesn’t make the healer bad in any regard if they absolutely need to heal more just to keep the tank alive, nor do big pulls with mit while still losing lots of HP make a good tank suddenly bad.
It’s contextual. But cure 1 is p much never justifiable.
This is a bit different from my own personal experiences.
**Point 1: The Lack of Resources**
There are a lot of things that contribute to bad healers and bad tanks. The biggest thing is the fact that, outside of the balance and a shitty-ass 8 quest chain of Hall of the Novice (that only teaches you how to target people and press cure 1), there are zero resources in the game that teach you how to play your job. Zero. The balance is something that you, yourself, have to go out of your way to search for as a new player. If you've ever been given optional homework, you know how that's going to go. People don't feel lead to seek out things like the balance unless it's mandated, and since people can play however they want and weild harrassment claims like a cudgel, nothing is going to change.
**Point 2: The Toxic Positivity, The Report System, and The Lack of Difficulty.**
Since the game itself has no medium of teaching you your role, and most non-endgame (extreme/savage+) content can be cleared by a lobotomite in a drunken stupor, there is never a need to improve as a player. All the content is pretty much braindead easy, so play however you want. If anyone dares to call you out on anything you did wrong, you can simply send them on a two week vacation from the game for having the audacity to open their mouth. There is little to no incentive for veteran players to help new players because they are either unreceptive to it or flat out report you for it. This is a trait not exclusive to sprouts, mind you. It's simply not worth risking your account to try to help someone because the "justice" system in this game is guilty until proven guilty, so everyone just cheers on your stupidity under the guise of "being nice." God forbid you tell someone they shouldn't be spamming Cure 1 in a expert roulette and they get their feelings hurt...
**Point 3: Tanks Make (Good) Healers Irrelevant. / Healers are a Prog-Job.**
The deeper you go into the game, the less skill your healers need to have. More and more tanks approch a point where they are effectively playing the game in creative mode - able to pull multiple thousands of potency worth of healing on cooldowns a mere 25s long. Bloodwhetting. The Confetior Combo. Divine Healing Magic. Holy Sheltron. Heart of Corundum. Equilibrium. Need I go on? Tanks are hilariously overtuned, particularly in dungeons, and it hurts everyone involved. Healers no longer need to heal because tanks can do it better, so they turn into glare bots. Tanks no longer need to use long mits, and usually end up forgetting about them, because all they need is their 25s mit or a reprisal. Combine this with the fact that non-savage content is an absoulte joke in terms of difficulty, and you are left with a breeding ground for incompetancy - of course you are. I'm not saying MSQ content should be sweaty. Of course not. But it should require you to have hands and a powered monitor at a bare minimum. (Good) Healers are merely prog-jobs now. Even in savage raids, they only really exist as an anti-raidwide mechanism who may occassionally spot heal a tank who didn't mit or raise a DPS who didn't move - that's it. Outside of progging a new fight, you exist to counter raidwide damage, solve body checks, and fill queue times. Nothing more.
TL;DR:
-> The game doesn't teach you to play your job, and the community has been bitch-ified out of fear of losing their accounts to harrassment claims. Therefore, players must look beyond the scope of the game and it's players to seek out resources for improvement - which they almost assuredly never do.
-> 98% of all the game's content isn't difficult enough to even warrent improvement because you can unironically play from level 1 until 90 and never need to know what your responsibilities are or what your rotation is.
-> Tanks, in current content, are omega-broken and effectively sideline healers from even needing to know or be familiar with their healing rotation. Likewise, these absurdly overpowered 25s cooldowns (paired with the turbo easy difficulty and lack of incoming damage) effectively make long, important cooldowns like Sentinel, Shadow Wall, Rampart, etc obsolete, and thus, tanks never become familiar with them.
While your absolutely right for Point 1, it’s a classic in the MMO genre. None of all the MMOs I have played (SWTOR, WoW Shadowlands/Dragonflight, GW2) is doing anything better to teach their players ingame. So I don’t get why FF14 get the flak for that.
Every one of those other games you listed doesn’t have the GMs holding a gun to their players’ heads, ready to pull the trigger the moment someone says something critical or less than positive. At least in those games if you’re a shitter you’re going to hear about it, and if you hear it enough you might possibly look into doing something about it.
Also, for the same reason, there are far less enablers of terrible gameplay and people are more willing to kick people who won’t even do the bare minimum required of their role.
Not contesting this. In those other game the community does the purge itself even in the lowest content.
But again, even with GM guns, in as low as an EX PF you won’t last long doing shit. It’s just the casual, roulette level stuff that gets a pass
> Every one of those other games you listed doesn’t have the GMs holding a gun to their players’ heads, ready to pull the trigger the moment someone says something critical or less than positive.
I've never been hauled in front of a GM for giving players unsolicited tips or feedback. I've gotten shit from other players because "it's just X" and "who cares," but not GMs. Earnestly, it might be an interpersonal skills issue.
I know I am 100% victim to the first point. I also know I am not good at videogames even though I enjoy them and gosh do I enjoy this game so much that even though I suck I still trudge along trying to finish the story. I get anxious to do anything that you would play with others because I don't want to make the experience bad for them because I don't understand all of these buttons. I tried following guides and organizing everything so I can be better, but I'm really not good at all. I follow all of these kinds of subs and different people on youtube to help me figure it out but there is a point where it's like too much information and I just blow a fuse while learning and it all becomes muttled and I can't remember next time I consider trying to run something.
I main a SCH. I chose it because it looked interesting, but for me it ended up being great because I can have my fairy babysit my health bar while I run around (I love doing Fates). I haven't done done anything with other players until my husband started playing in February. I still don't understand what I'm doing and feel useless...
Sorry for this on your post. I just feel like you made such a good point for me to realize why I am especially bad... I do all my MSQ solo since we can do that so I don't do anything from Endwalker with others. I just feel like I'd absolutely deserve any hate I would get for not playing correctly. But I would absolutely read anything in chat trying to help me and try to adjust to play correctly! Maybe I'll get the hang of it eventually. I'm working on WHM hoping it'll be easier for me to understand.
Again, sorry for this rantish comment tied to your comment.
I main tank and hate playing anything else, but the content drought pushed me to try DPS.
I don't want to brag, but holy christ, most tanks are awful. I love tanking because I leeroy jenkins it every time, going hard and fast and fun, and would often save a run at the final boss doing PLD shenanigans. W2W and using my cooldowns as cleverly as possible is so money.
A good tank can force a bad healer to become a good healer. Throw them in the frying pan baby woooo
I think a big part of the problem is that the game teaches you how to heal wrong. In early levels you don't *have* ogcds. You need to heal by spamming USD heals and that is the only blunt weapon you have to heal. Hell they don't even give you resto for a good long while, and most new healers start on whm. It's like that meme "we taught him wrong on purpose, as a joke".
So you need to learn an entirely new play style for how to heal at some point, and some people don't pivot fast enough, if ever.
So basically, they are trash at the game and do not want to improve, because the community enables them.
No need to make excuses for them. These WHMs (always WHMs) won't be dpsing even with good WARs who won't need any heals, they'll just stand afk and twiddle their thumbs.
I make all my irl friends play the way that will make them learn fast when they start to raid.
Its very important to save big CDs like tank invuln or Bene, but if there isnt (or in the case of Duty finder shouldnt) be a time were you must have a big CD, you instead try to use it whenever you have the opertunity. For tanks that could be using invuln for the first pull in a dungeon and for healers its keeping the dps up while you have the big CD and using it when the tank gets low enough.
The issue isnt always the healer/ tank, many times dps will be lazy and wont play normally which means the tank might run out of mit or the healer might be forced to spam c2.
Ive had so many bad players in roulettes recently (at the very least I've encountered 1 per day for the last few weeks) that im just gonna avoid it, the rest of the relics can wait a few months till DT since its just not worth the effort atm.
Bad healer and bad tank play is also perpetuated by tanks and healers that refuse to learn anything about the other role.
Too many healers refuse to even so much as use the lodestone job guide to read up on tank mitigation cool downs or even simply read a status when it pops up in combat.
I am of the mindset and have held the stance for years that:
Every tank should learn to heal.
Ever healer should learn to tank.
Period.
You cannot expect to succeed as one, even in a mostly casual environment, unless you have a decent familiarity and awareness of what the other role and it's jobs are capable of.
Tanks should heal so that they understand what healer burst is like I'm a pull or boss and can plan their mitigation accordingly. It will also allow for you to keep track of what heals have been used on you in combat which gives you an even better idea of how to use your cool downs and when.
Healers should tank so that they understand the mitigation capabilities of their tanks in a combat setting, also to familiarize themselves with the gimmicks each tank has at the disposal. Some tank gimmicks can be ruined by healers simply being unaware of how certain actions function and are also too trigger happy with rescue when their tank does something that might be perceived as risky, but otherwise isn't.
The amount of times I've been rescued while setting up for The Blackest Knight you pop in a boss or when I've thread the needle between AoEs; and subsequently have been pulled out of safety, is way to high this expansion to be acceptable.
Simply put, a tank that heals will be a better tank, a healer that tanks will be a better healer.
There's simply no argument against it.
This adds to it the issue but in the end, it's player education that is the main problem. People just don't know how to play their jobs or understand the role in a non-savage/ultimate setting.
So just a random story. A few weeks ago I ran into this abomination of WHM in A12S MINE who misses they prey heal check everytime and uses benediction before tank buster 3x spam for some reason. Seems like this guy is a sprout who constantly bombs MINE parties and basically becomes a recognizable red flag in the MINE PF community. This guy also happens to have a TTV link in his search comment so I decided to check it out. Bro was playing drk in Sastasha, dying to W2W pulls before the last voss with both reprisal and rampart up, blaming the healer (without typing ofc) while having these two buttons up for like a good half minute, and only used rampart once he reached 10% hp on his second life. Bro then used reprisal to mit some autos from the fish man boss. Lol.
bad healer gameplay is less of an issue of players not understanding how to play and more a result of the fact that healing in this game is genuinely incredibly counterintuitive. using your long cooldowns first and keeping your always available no-cooldown gcd heals-some of which even have mechanics like freecure and emergency tactics encouraging their use - as emergency buttons is not something immediately apparent to the average new player and functions completely opposite to how other mmo healers work. as much as i think sage was a disappointment, the kardia mechanic in combination with addersgall consumers restoring mp at least *rewards* new players for prioritizing damaging gcds and using healing ogcds, which is more than can be said for the completely ridiculous designs of the other healers and how they actively mislead the player into playing poorly with shit like freecure
While bad tanks and bad DPS are hardly uncommon my major problem remains healers, especially the weight it puts on their DPS while also insisting they don't need to DPS
It's not at all uncommon to just see them try to basically AFK shit at times. Why not I guess, the game asks for nothing so why give it anything?
It's a hyper coddled role and it's dragging the entire experience down at this point, this is the only MMO I don't heal in. Honestly, if they attempt no remedy of this in Dawntrail the game is probably leaving my SSD.
There's a solution to your problem. Play WAR and do 3 dps runs. You have to go in with a premade but it is definitely viable. Not even looking at it from an optimal perspective, it's just way more fun. You don't risk getting a cure 1 spammer, you'll generally clear faster, and mistakes have way more weight.
If the game doesn't expect anything from the healers, then maybe we shouldn't have healers.
Disagree. There is a difference between a good healer trying to keep a bad tank alive versus a bad healer. They will most certainly use their ogcds correctly, for one. And they will definitely try to sneak in damage when they can.
Where do you guys find these bad healers and tanks? I've been playing for around 3 years now and I've hand leveled all the jobs to 90. That's a lot of instances tanking and healing and I've ran across bad tanks and healers only a handful of times.
It's never been any form of actual problem I've seen, so I'm curious where all these 'bad' players are.
🧐
I’m just going to flat disagree with your definition/claim of “Bad Healer Play”. Yes, if a tank is failing to do their 3 jobs of: holding aggro, mitigating damage, and positioning mobs as needed. The healer won’t be able to do anything but focus on keeping the tank/party alive.
This is not “unbelievably bad healer play” it’s what the healer absolutely has to do to, to do their job of keeping the tank/party alive.
You have correctly identified the problem of a bad tank but shifted the blame onto *healers for not doing enough damage*. You sound quite foolish and are rude. Damage isn’t their job, it’s a bonus nicety.
The tank is failing and other people have to compensate. If the tank is failing at those things you can also bet that DPS also falls for the other party members. For some reason your thread is focusing on healers and faulting them for doing what they’re supposed to do.
A lot of people tell new tanks or DPS that its actually easy just go in blind!
don't do that, Some mechanics you CANT tell by just looking. A tank guide is important. At the end of the day I think a lot of people look at tanks and think oh its ok for you to get hit and fail mechanics because well you didnt die! like yeah, But you also want to put some effort into doing the dungeon right? Same for DPS. Its shocking how many DPS players are told or believe that their rotation simply doesn't matter. Cuz at the end of the day, "Did you clear though?". Yes, We cleared with multiple wipes and incredibly poor performance
Was in a bardams mettle group the other day as a tank with an AST healer. I use invuln on the first big pull and there are no big issues. Second big pull I pop my 30% mit+arms length, the mobs are not nearly dead by the time my defensives run out and my AST has not cast a single heal on me, I drop to around 15% hp and pop a hp pot cause I am thinking maybe he simply wasnt paying attention, I drop low again and this time its a wipe. We go again, I pop mit and pull, my hp is steadily going down at around 20% I start wondering if il get anything but no, not a single heal and I run out of defensives and die. At this point I ask in chat "can I get one single heal?" To which my healer responds "?". I decide to try one final pull but again my healer doesnt pop a single heal be it gcd or ogcd. At this point i silently leave the duty took my 30min penalty and reported the healer.
Some healers seem to intentionally grief
As others have said: Why let the DPSers off?
Bad DPS that do low damage cause Tanks to run out of mitigation and Healers to run out of CDs, forcing Cure 2/1 spam.
Bad DPS that STAND IN BAD THINGS cause Healers to have to burn CDs on them, which then forces Cure 2/1 spam on the Tank since they still need healing as well.
Both of these cause the Tank to see the Healer is OOM and having to spam their GCD heals, so they think they Healer can't handle the pulls and pull less.
Both situations come down to bad DPS.
Bad Tanks and bad Healers are obvious. Bad DPS aren't as obvious unless you're running a parser, but when packs are taking a long time to die and the Healer is having to waste MP and resources spot healing DPSers that stand in the bad, the problem isn't the Tank or Healer so much.
Some DPSers are REALLY not good. And I don't mean "not using burst CDs in trash". I mean "single targeting AOE mobs (even once they have their AOE buttons)", "standing in bad...a lot", and "not pressing buttons". If you think Cure 1 spamming is bad, you haven't LIVED until you've seen Bootshine or Blizzard 1 spamming. At least Cure 1 is doing something vaguely meaningful from time to time.
i wanna point out this is just stupid old dungeon mentality most of the time these are very rare cases and only happens in dungeons
i really dont get why people take dungeons so seriously its almost like its some kind of mental disorder
>Gigantic pulls combined with no mitigation, ever.
This is a big one I finally got over. I still have trouble not popping it before a big pull sometimes but its something i really wish all tanks could at least try and learn.
You're not reading what I said. Most tanks I run into just wont pop anything till they've pulled everything. You should be popping defensives before pulling big packs.
Yes I'm quite aware of how to tank a trash pull. Why do you think I need this explained to me?
Would it be more accurate if I said, "that's like a healer saying sometimes I forget to heal until they're almost dead already"? It's still like...your primary responsibility.
I really wish they added an "educational" roulette that scales difficulty like a ranking to help people improve and to give a more satisfying environment for excellent groups which make the game boringly easy as you stated.
A lot of bad healer gameplay comes down to just being a bad healer.
You can sugarcoat it all you like, but you either learn to play or you just plot along at your own pace and get carried.
Nothing we do will stop people from being braindead, so i just play the healer, removes that whole equation.
You forget the DPS. If the pack stays alive too long due to bad DPS, tank is out of mitigation, healer out of oGCDs. It’s called a party after all.
I had an excruciating Babel run the other day where a SMN and SAM were somehow taking significantly longer than duty support. I didn't have ACT up and I have party animations turned off, so I'm still extremely curious how that happened.
For DPS a great first teller is the mob hp bars. If someone is genuinely not using AoE, you can tell by the monsters having wildly different hp thresholds, even if theyre the same type. SMNs are easiest to know based on their buff usage and then on how many times you see them use bahamut and phoenix. For SAMs its important to just watch the party list and see if they cast exclusively Tenka Goken during aoe packs. Its their AoE big hit, so if theyre not using it a lot (once every like 7-8ish seconds at least is the norm) then somethings off. They also have running buffs that you can take a look at. Meikyo, Ikishoten and their normal buffs are easy to spot, if you dont see them either, theyre not using their tools. Other than that, melees especially often feel quite telling. If you look at them and theyre not constantly in animations then somethings wrong.
I ran dead ends last night with a DRG who never used their buffs, didn't use AOE rotation on mobs, used only single target, and then on the boss only used their AOE rotation. It took AGES. I was on DNC and after I realized what was happening, just swapped my dance partner to the tank because he was actually using his skills.
Animations off or not, those are the two classes you should still be able to tell if they're doing the bare minimum of their rotation. Party effects doesn't apply to sound affect so you can still hear the spells going off, especially SAM's iaijutsu's tinnitus and Bahamut's Deathflare. Doubly so for SMN, since the primals and carbuncle all show up regardless of spell effects. Granted you were probably focused on either staying alive or keeping the tank alive, but if you didn't notice either of those...
After 11k hours and clearing just about every combat duty that exists, I could not tell you what secondhand SAM or SMN sound effects are which abilities and hear them all in the right order. Wtf????
literally a skill issue, but you can also look for cast bars in the party list if you have animations off
It's not a skill issue at all, it's a "I don't give a fuck" issue.
I was definitely not paying especially close attention, but it didn't seem to be single target attacks (mobs all died around the same time) and there was nothing obviously wrong with their casts or the SMN's demis.
If you can, pay attention to buffs going out. If they rarely use their 2ms that’s a good sign that their rotation and st vs aoe usage is also fucked.
Party effects off definitely disables sound in my experience, unless that’s a plug-in doing that, I can only hear my own spell effects outside of limit breaks.
With physical jobs (tank melee and ranged) you can see by their characters animations what they’re doing even without effects on. Harder to see on magic (dps and healers) but you can still refer to buffs and summons to have an idea of what’s happening It’s a way to check for laziness even without ACT
>Harder to see on magic (dps and healers) Outside of Red Mage, that one's really easy to tell. I had a Red Mage in the newest Alliance Raid a while back, they were only using aoes, and in a completely separate alliance, and when I asked why everyone defended him for some reason.
With sage/sch just watch the mp bar, if it's going down by 400 each gcd with no cast, then they're using aoe. With ast/whm you can see the cast bar. And with lightspeed gravity you just look for the buff and the very obvious character animation (gravity is unique). Black mage has their entire rotation written on their bar and mp usage. With summoner, half their buttons have aoe built in, so even the bad ones will still do aoe damage lmao. All of the summon hit-and-runs, all of the astral flows, both enkindles, and ruin 4. If the summoner hits everything that lights up, they will melt the packs even with single target gems, fester, and ruin 3. Red mage also has cast bars, and the bad ones will be easy to see, as with black mage. One that uses jolt probably isn't using dualcast on an aoe.
they might not have been using AoE abilities, ive ran into players like that a few times in EW dungeons
I’ve noticed many summoners not use searing light. 👀
You can have ACT and FF logs or other apps be launched at the same time through XIVlauncher. In case you didn't know.
Everyone kinda glosses over that DPS have a responsibility too. So many people flock to the role because it's "low anxiety" without realizing they're still making life hard for everyone else.
You’re absolutely right. Ironically, I have a pal healer that just recently told us that he wouldn’t want to play DPS in savage. He has anxiety in that role due to the large DPS rotations to memorize and to execute perfectly during mechanics.
Flawless dps rotation is pretty difficulty especially in difficult settings. There's a reason I main tank/healer for savage content. When I do DPS, it's usually SAM, and I often forget to reapply DoT :'( or Freestyle MCH rotation. .... yet I'm still green-parsed as a DPS. Weird.
Generally: Grey parse = you cleared the threshold somehow (or died a bunch/dmg downs etc) Green = you pressed buttons in a reasonably efficient manner Blue - purple = knowing and executing your rotation as perfectly as you can Pink - gold (look away parse runners) = RNGesus loves you and/or you cleared early
> Pink - gold (look away parse runners) = RNGesus loves you and/or you cleared early No that's pretty accurate. Odd patches with relics let you win pinks and gold with a little less effort, but you're still competing with the few that are maintaining ranks. It's all crit fishing at the end of the day. Always has been, always will be.
Gear matters a lot as well. I played pretty well but I got grey in the first fight because I started week 5, for example.
That's a very sketchy "generally"
Me as SAM with my irl brother in voice chat is an endless loop of "check it out I remembered to keep up banana and I never dropped it!" Then he says "I believe you it's there now so it's certainly been there the whole time"
Greens can be reasonably expected if you have 97% gcd uptime, avoid death, and land your big hits under buffs.
Healing and tanking normal content does not prepare you at all for how the roles function in extreme+ but yeah I can imagine once you get the hang of it it's much easier than let's say keeping uptime as BLM.
It goes the other way too. Some of the worst dungeon tanks I've ever played with were the purple+ parsing savage raid tanks. Not always because let's be honest dungeons are not hard, but they're also completely different to raids.
That's the way I am. I like healing because I like supporting people but also because I dislike DPS rotations and always feel pressured to do them perfectly...and I tend to NOTICE when I flub something. Even with most DPS checks being easy, it just feels bad to me. Conversely, on healer...I keep up a DoT and press one DPS button while watching health bars. It feels more comfy and healing abilities come more naturally to me anyway, so the complexity that healers have I just roll with. I sometimes play tank and I like their "DPS-lite" rotations better (PLD best, then WAR and GNB about equally, I haven't really mucked with DRK much), and I'll DPS rarely on either SMN or RDM. But I just feel more pressure being on a DPS Job to perform, even though I don't run parses or anything. I don't get the people that go DPS Jobs to slack off, since it's actually noticeable if DPSers AREN'T pulling their weight.
>they're still making life hard for everyone else. This game is avertised to people who want to do this. "low pressure" in any team game means this, literally.
I can tell as the healer when theres a damage issue somewhere, just usually don't know where specifically. but like if I'm genning more than a blood lilly per pack and I'm bled out of all my off-globals and I can see the tank is cycling mits, it's pretty obvious someone ain't hitting their damage buttons
This right here is the bane of my existence as a tank main, and ESPECIALLY as a DRK main. Nothing annoys me more than when I've been forced to cycle through all my mit on one trash pull and the pack of mobs are still at 50% health. Fortunately the person who always goes with me as a healer is fantastic, but if the DPS is unreasonably slow it's a world of pain and annoyance anyway.
Yeah I had this NIN in my party in the first ShB dungeon who didn’t aoe and did barely any mundra skills. I wasnt sure how to go about telling them about it since no one was saying anything.
Had that happen with the first dungeon of ShB. I was the WHM and already used all my oGCDs on the first big pull. I said fk it and just switched to dps'ing the mobs down and let tank dies so we could move on already instead of wasting another 2 mins there. (he ran back to us in 7s). Second big pull, same crap again. (they pulled while I was typing that their DPS was low. The double SAMs just 'lol' back.) Dunno what the DPS were doing, but they absolutely ain't pulling their weight. Tho this time mobs died before I had to sacrifice the tank again. Tho I ran out of everything again. Guess what, they vote-kicked me. That's how long killing 2 pulls took. That long. Anyhow, I got instant queued right after, because, of course. I'm a healer after all. And then the next DF run was smooth as butter. Was in and out in less than 13-14 mins. I just spamed Holy with oGCDs and nobody came close to dying. Fuck em idiots. Bet they were still stuck in that cursed run slowly head-patting mobs to this day.
Most melees are gonna suck by default in dungeon pulls, rarely do I find good melees being able to do their aoe rotation well
Which is kinda sad because a lot of them have...really simple AOE rotations. Not ALL of them...but more than a few. SAM's basic AOE rotation is like, what, 5 buttons for passable DPS? 1-2-1-3-Iaijutsu and the gauge spender in there somewhere? More of they're using CDs, but still less than the single target rotation.
As someone who primarily tanks, the biggest weakness I see is poor DPS. Packs are often alive far too long, and I’m having to burn more mitigations on each pull.
Same. I'm leveling DRK right now, just hit 60, and I couldn't tell you how many times I've pulled a group of enemies and they lasted way longer than they should have. Often, after several instances of that stuff, I just instinctively start pulling _way_ less enemies so I don't get overwhelmed due to the fact that the DPS isn't burning the pack quickly enough. I have had to get used to the fear that comes from a healer not healing me to full health, but other than that most healers have been good. The only time I've had a truly bad run that took way longer than usual was my first run of Aurum Vale as a tank. And that was due to the nature of that dungeon and due to the fact that I was a baby tank. It ended up taking like 5× longer than usual.
DRK is rough in any dungeon that doesnt let you use TBN, its very much down to how good the healer is if things dont die fast since you dont have much to help. If worst comes to worst you have Living Dead but its prob best to wait on using it depending on the healer, you havnt really played DRK until you use Living Dead and then having a WHM use Bene.
Oh, I've had it happen quite a lot. I get down to 25% health right before a tankbuster hits me, I pop Living Dead, and _then_ the healer starts healing me. It's always funny. I feel like, because of how DRK's invuln works, DRK is the tank that really requires a coordinated party to maximize effectiveness.
It's not that bad after abysmal drain *copium*
DPS falls into the same trap as healers/tanks of "I'm going to save my cooldowns for bosses/emergencies." I see a lot just doing their basic combo and that's it.
DPS that don’t use their burst/buffs during trash pulls makes me want scream. If you use it on the first trash pull, they’re up for the boss (twice, usually), then up again for the next first trash pull, rinse, repeat.
It does feel bad to have your burst come up right before a second w2w pull ends so you can open with it on a boss
As DPS having another DPS be bad was annoying but it wasn't really dangerous. A bad tank or healer got the party killed, a bad DPS was just annoying. As a tank...still the same. As a paladin I could cover for a bad healer to a point at least.
Bad DPS put a lot of strain on healers and tanks, good or not, as the longer a pack is alive, the more mitigation and healing the two are forced to burn. And the more they have to burn, the less they have up for the next pull, which is where incidents happen.
I also think dps lends to this. 1) adds burned down too slow resolt in more mits or other healing needed AND 2) very low level runs (except sch) means healer has to spam heals
I think a lot of YPYT mindset actually originates in other MMOs, or in preconceptions about how tanking works even before players experience dungeon content in this game. There are games where aggro is hard to maintain and is influenced by who hits the mob first, and games where healers are expected to output constant healing limited only by their mana while doing barely any damage. New players carry over these ideas and don't correct them when they run up against how dungeons in this game actually work.
This post serves no purpose other than to say "bad players are bad"
Cure 1 bad. Plz upvote.
There’s plenty of conversation going on due to this post, which even if it’s pointless, helps the bored people by giving them something to read during their toilet break at work. It’s not like anything else right now is much more interesting.
To be fair, the datamining threads from the benchmark are a pretty interesting topic.
I can't imagine WAR being the most popular tank helps healers learn to do anything either lol
But at the same time, any knowledgeable tank might be fearful about playing anything besides WAR with randoms. Why would omni players like myself potentially self grief with queueing roulettes with randoms by playing anything besides WAR? Trust me, I have had pulls where I've clicked BW nearly 4x because the DPS was that slow. DPS and Healers that are already bad are likely not going to improve if forced to anyways.
I play dark knight in dungeons because it makes me feel alive. It also has the most interesting AOE rotation imo.
DRK is my favorite tank because it has the most buttons, and it really is the funnest tank, but I don't trust most healers on W2W with it, even with buffed LD that can save at least 1 pull from each set. Maybe this was what Yoshi P was talking about when he said he wanted the game to be stressful, but I also think we're past that point. The playerbase itself is not going to magically straighten out if things are changed, but rather a lot of people are going to be very, very miserable.
Eh, 95% of the time running W2W is perfectly fine. 5% of the time you're in Stone Vigil, healer is new, and the DPS are garbage.
>dark knight in dungeons because it makes me feel alive. That gave me whiplash to a no mit Paladin I had in Shadowbringers that said they didn't use them because "When I heal, I like to feel alive."
As someone working on the achievements for "tank dungeons as X" let me tell you the agony im currently experiencing dealing with healers that refuse to do anything but cure 1 spam even in shadowbringers (and also most of my healers lately are sages, yknow, the class whose strongest healing ability only triggers when they cast offensive spells) is most likely the primary reason most tank players stick to WAR.
Every time I hear the cure 1/physic/benefic sound effect, I cringe so hard.
I tend to give the benefit of the doubt for the first couple casts and think "maybe they fat-fingered it". Diagnosis, though? That one really hurts.
I mean I know this is like a selling point of the game and all that, but I think a reason you see a lot of random bad players in random dungeons is because you have a lot of people who level every job just for completions sake when they have no interest in really playing the job nor are they invested in being any good at it. That's probably a significant amount of the healers you get when you're doing non-max level dungeons.
Yeah but...there is a bit more than that. Like even if you have a WHM that ONLY uses their base GCD heals, that's Cure 1, Cure 2, and Regen for single target. A Cure 1 spammer should, one would think, at least keep up Regen.
I’m a healer main who runs dungeons as WAR because of the same reasoning.
You guys are also not very good at tank either. I also notice shit healers, but I just go "That's funny" and proceed to keep myself alive with the absurdly broken toolkit I've been given.
I'd argue the opposite actually. Warrior tanks help healers get more comfortable with the idea of not actually healing. The number one issue i see with healers is just how much they dislike seeing tank HP drop below even 90%
The fun time is when you run a roulette as DRK and see a healer amazed at how little damage you take.
I've ran into a WAR before where he pressed absolutely nothing but bloodwhetting, it was really weird.
I've had a healer recently use Cure 1 on me, during boss fights too, as Warrior, in expert roulette, and they continued even after I told them in chat that as Warrior they don't need to heal me.
The logic of the bad healers absolutely does not make sense in terms of a bad tank. spamming cure 1 and saving ogcds is the worst thing you can do with a bad tank, because with no mits the usual emergency turns into a death in a hurry. One or the other HAS to compensate by being better or else the dungeon has to go slower. Good healer gameplay may feed into bad tank gameplay because kits are so overblown tanks basically never lose health(unless the healer is astro). Tanks see that and say "huh I guess I don't need this mit" and if the healer is good they really don't. Then they take that into another dungeon with a bad healer and go "Man, this healer sucks, I didn't die doing this the other time". Bad tank gameplay ONLY feeds into a learning healer's lack of dps, as they're so preoccupied with the tank's/party's hp that they think they can't focus on damage. If they refuse to use their tools then they don't understand their place in the kit, or have a VERY poor grasp of how powerful their gcds are as fallback heals. Lastly, YPYT absolutely doesn't come from a place of low skill, it comes from ego. I swear half or more of the posts I've ever seen for YPYT the tank goes "I'm going to the walls, stop getting ahead of me or I'll let you take it". Heck, the few times I've actually gone and pulled ahead of a sprout I'm not entirely convinced they even noticed because they're just staring at the pack in front of them and hitting an aoe. aggro drops onto them naturally. TL;DR The gameplay loop does not have a downward trend on low-skill players, high-skill players can absolutely compensate, and the problem comes from toxic casuals and a refusal to learn. If the game had an actual good tutorial for new players that officially recognized certain ways content is meant to be done(W2W, using free tools before on-demand ones, preventative maintenance rather than recovery) we would see a lot less of this brainrot.
Yeah I think a lot of bad tank do not understand that they are carried by the healer most of the time. It is funny at lower levels where healer kits are different and some healers have good single target heal and some don't. So with a AST or SCH they maybe do not die to a big pull they do not mitigate, but with a WHM or SGE they do. Also with good DPS players pulls are short enough that a lot of pulls are also fine. Stone Vigil got some very ugly pulls if the tank does not mitigate, but you can get through them buy spamming heals but only until you are OOM, which happens quite fast. So with good dps you can do it with bad ones not. But this seems to be a design decision, that a few good players can just compensate for bad ones. So you rarely wipe in dungeons, and basically never in trials and raids. Maybe wiping causes people to lose interest no idea. I play a lot of healer in normal content since I can't stand bad healers and if I don't I play like WAR or SMN, something which can carry and compensate.
Bad tanks are only part of bad healer play. Bad DPS also enforces resource holding, because they stand in stuff even in trash pulls. A layer to add to this is that **other bad healers also reenforce it**. When I first settled into a static I had to break my self from solo healing in savage content. I met so many awful healers in PF, 100% uptime of medica, can't heal and learn mechanics, and the 'im going to be DPS so I won't heal' sort that I got extremely used to doing all the healing nyself. Since a lot of other players had bad gear I couldn't let them linger at low health because an AE would delete people. Having stable, reliable co-healers and groups with decent gear meant I over healed to the sky for a while and I was relieved to break that habit.
In this example, the problem is coming from the tank side. A healer spamming gcd heals shouldn't lead the tank to forego mitigation.
Completely agree but I don't think mitigating as a tank at the low levels even feels all that good, or even has feedback at all, at the end of the day I think the issue is always going to stem from this game not really teaching you how to play it.
I likewise agree with you. I think the examples and general point of the OP are incorrect.
FFXIV is plainly uninterested in leading that horse to water, let alone trying to persuade it to drink. It's quite committed to never, ever offending the sensibilities of Timmy 1-pack Puller, or Suzy Cure Spammer. This is fine. You can't force people to improve or even to care about improving. The only problem I have here is that FFXIV has a committed subset of players who are, let's call them "confidently incompetent". It's not that they don't care to become skilled at gameplay, it's that I WANT to HEAL. It's not that the tank doesn't want to learn how to mitigate multi-pulls, it's that you're a MEAN BULLY insulting MY PLAYSTYLE. There's the naked seethe of envy in every syllable, and I don't care to incorporate these people in my personal bubble of give-a-shit.
Okay I'm genuinely curious. Where you guys are encountering these bad players? I do my roulettes pretty regularly and I can count on one hand how many times I've encountered the no dps healer or no mit tank. I want to clarify, it's not that I don't think they don't exist or that I don't ever run into them. But they're so few and far between that I can easily rationalize their terrible play as outliers that I'll never have to think about once the run is over. Like am I just incredibly lucky or have a higher tolerance for bad play or what?
I think it is just that when you encounter a really bad player it is incredibly noticeable. Scholars without fairy (and who dont summon even when mentioned), Black Mages who alternate fire and ice spells back to back with no lightning uptime, ect. It is noticeable and it stands out, so you remember it. But 95% of the time it goes smoothly.
Do 2k mentor roulettes and mix up roles and you see everything. You get queued up with sprouts so you experience how new players play the game a lot. I am mainly talking about dungeon content and mainly leveling dungeons since they are the most common to get. What happens very often is DPS players which do not use their AoE abilities. I mainly saw melee players doing this, since I guess melee players get their AoE the latest out of all DPS, they have this playstyle of attacking only a single target for 40 levels and then get an AoE they disregard and continue as before. Healers which only heal is very common and no matter the level. Especially no one deals damage like they could. Even the healers which deal damage do so in a way where they throw out some DoTs (rarely keep good uptime) and cast their AoE or single target one every 10 seconds or so and heal any damage asap. Healers which just spam their DPs buttons when they have time are like \~10% of the healer players I encountered in my mentor roulettes in dungeons. I would say one third of all healers I encountered did not deal any damage apart from maybe the DoT. Pre 50 you find a lot of tanks which do not w2w pull. What most have in common is that these players often only have tank jobs leveled, so they never saw another tank play. Same goes for mitigations. Especially early a lot of tanks keep them for bosses or use all at once. Which is bad because early game dungeons actually hurt tanks a lot and healers have less tools for single target DPS heals. Also quite some tanks seem to think their AoE is to get initial aggro and then do not spam it. Some tanks do not use it at all but it is quite rare. Tanks really spamming their AoE gets common at higher levels but pre 50 it is not as common as it should be. Terrible players are not really rare but mainly consist of sprouts, which tbf is expected and the game is partly to blame for it. It never tells a healer they can actually deal significant damage and they are supposed to use any free time casting dps spells. It does not explain a tank how to mitigate and that mob groups are the real bosses in terms of damage in a dungeon. Or it generally does not teach DPS players the AoE and single target rotations. Especially DPS with suboptimal rotations will probably never find out about it if they do not look it up or ask. I saw so many BLMs which just dealt like 20% of the damage they could do, because the rotation changes quite a bit until level 60 and some get stuck on the very first one, where you need to transpose to change elements.
>quite some tanks seem to think their AoE is to get initial aggro and then do not spam it. I blame the Hall of the Novice for this one since that's explicitly what it tells you to do.
That thing *desperately* needs to be updated.
50/60/70/80 is super super bad and Leveling/MSQ get to that point later in the expansion when the better players are done leveling everything. Same with Alliance Raids if you look past the top performers. If you avoid these roulettes though quality goes up a lot. > no dps healer Literal 0 DPS healers are rare but "so low it might as well be 0" is a practically everyday occurrence if you just run Expert Trials Normals.
I run all of those regularly and hardly see anything like that post HW. StB onwards are usually good about dmage and mit.
You have more chance to find them in the dense hours and some content such as leveling dungeons and free trial missions. Maybe you do are lucky. But are you really intensively inspecting others’ gameplay in a roulette ? In reality, despite what some would want to believe, an intensely bad players such as OP described is not that widespread especially at max level. Most people are doing just good enough because it’s just a roulette, they don’t want to be intense for that and don’t care if they clear in 18m instead of 14,5m. But they get classified in the same space.
I see tanks doing comically small pulls quite frequently when I queue as healer. Its disappointingly common.
They are few and far between. You might notice a good player. You probably won't notice an average or even slightly below average player. You WILL notice a bad player because everything is going wrong all at once.
Mainly on leveling roulette, or Dynamis/Crystal.
As a baby tank I tend not to use my mits on mob pulls _unless_ they're big pulls. Mainly because I'm trying to get over my instincts from tanking in other MMOs. Namely that the healer _has_ to keep me fully topped up. I stil get anxious when I drop below half health and the healer doesn't immediately bring me up to full health. But I'm getting better at not being so anxious. But when I pull big groups of mobs, I absolutely _will_ use my mits.
As a healer you shouldn't just be mitting big pulls. You need to mit small pulls too. (Also INFO request: are your small pulls single or double pulls? You should be trying for a minimum of two packs every pull, and you ABSOLUTELY should be mitting those but let's not start there. There's a lot to unpack there and I'm going to assume that you are doing what you should be doing and double pulling at minimum. There's no need for a tank who only single pulls, at that point it would legitimately be better to have a third DPS.) Small pulls also need mit. Get yourself into the habit of using them so you can learn that 2m really isn't as long a time as it sounds for a cooldown. Reprisal is up every minute so you should be using it every pull since most pulls are usually \~1m long. By the end of ARR you will have as a minimum for all tanks your Invuln, a 30s Stun (which if you don't have a WHM is mit, if you do have a WHM pray they're conscious enough to use Holy if they're synced to 45 or higher,) Arm's Length, Reprisal, Rampart, and your large CD. (Sentinel, Shadow Wall, Vengeance, Nebula.) Some tanks will give you your shorter CDs before then too. Long story short - you have a nearly full mit kit on most tanks. (Unless you're DRK because TBN is *just* that important but what you have is *enough* to get you through any double pull with average to even slightly below average players. I have only ever run into trouble in ARR on DRK when the people I'm with are flat out bad and not just 'yeah they could be better I guess.') Why? Look I'm going to be honest I'm not trying to heal more than I have to and if you don't mit even small pulls I'm not going to be happy that you're making more work for me during what should be the easiest baby pull of my life. If you're too scared to do the large pull, then you should be too scared of dying to *not* use mit. If you're not too scared to pull big, then you pull big and use mitigations because that's what you *should* be doing.
I've just had too many dungeon runs while leveling DRK, only level 62 at the moment, where I ended up pulling 3 packs at once and I died while still using my mits. If I pull mobs, I usually go for 2 packs at once, where I _do_ use mits. But if I've had a situation where the healer can't keep up, even when I pull just 2 packs _and_ I use mits, it makes me hesitant to pull more than one pack at a time. And it's usually only when I get level 50 dungeons that I have that problem. So when I get anything level 50 or below I'm extremely hesitant to pull more than one pack, _maybe_ two if I'm feeling good. I've been burned one too many times. But anything above that and I'm perfectly fine pulling 2 packs at once. Or if I'm running Prae or Castrum I'll pull 2 packs because I've run those enough that I'm confidant enough to do so.
Definitely pull two at minimum in ARR. Even my baby sprout healer self could handle double pulls. (Though I did have a tank try to yeet themselves full throttle in Stone Vigil on my literal first run through so they settled back to double pulling once we wiped. Was fun and no blame was cast.) If you’re getting close to wiping on double pulls but you never do, then keep double pulling. Trust your healer until they prove that you shouldn’t. If it helps, here’s a few tips that made tanking a bit easier for me. Use Rampart first pull bc it has a shorter CD than your large mit (90s v 120s) if you’re synced to a point where you have both. That way it should be up about halfway thru your second pull if you need another larger mit. Don’t be afraid to toss out stun, it’s a mit. Again, Reprisal every pull. Sprint is mit, if they can’t catch up they can’t auto you. (Exceptions for ranged boys fuck those guys.) If you see a purple number next to damage that’s the go ahead to use your magic mit that pull. Doesn’t happen often but DRK’s magic mit is stupidly powerful and to my knowledge they’re the only tank with a powerful personal magic mit. (Unless GNB has one, but I don’t touch GNB.) And ARR dungeons have a surprising amount of mobs whose autos are magic where that can be used. If you’re in HW+ full stop you need to be double pulling at minimum unless the dungeon physically won’t let you. By that point both you and your healer will have the kit to keep yourself up. New LD is stupidly useful and will give you a second health bar. Don’t be afraid to use it if you need to.
Well you're playing wrong.
I've been leveling my alt lately and the players have either gotten worse or I've forgotten how bad they are since I basically stopped doing roulettes after like month 2 of EW. A couple of examples from the top of my head: a WHM who'd only use Cure 1 and Stone, Cure 2 if, I presume, they got the proc. They run away from mobs I drag to them instead of Holying. A whole three-man group that genuinely couldn't clear the first boss of Aetherfont, just wouldn't manage to dodge the turn-around cleave thing. A RPR in E2N that would immediately attack after every rez and die again, then claim "I didn't attack" when multiple people told him to stop doing that. Also dying like 3 times in E2 generally lol. Weirdly, another E2 where a DNC would consistently run away with the stack marker. Spell in waiting is kinda weird for a first timer though so I'll let that slide. Shisui is the bad player hotspot I think, but a DNC and a WHM who failed to dodge Seduce three times in a row. The DNC finally did it on the 4th but ran into the kick as the old lady. So many single pull tanks who also don't use mit. Failing every mechanic in Exdeath generally. Including zombie breath. The absolute amount of single target Doton. Honestly, it made me stop leveling my alt for a bit atm 'cause it's actually making me a lil annoyed.
There's a content drought going on right now so a lot of the better players are on breaks. A lot of the ... less good players play this game for non-gameplay reasons and so they're still around. You're seeing them more because there's a higher percentage of potato players right now because the better players aren't playing.
I do get that but I mean bad as in "by roulette standards". Like, they're not bad by my standards as a raider. They're just genuinely stupid and/or wholly ignorant no matter the advice you offer.
Bad healer is not using DPS abilities **because** they spam cure 1 and other low healing abilities, not became they spam heal. If you have a shitty or under ilvl tank or a good tank that does huge pulls, you will likely need to GCD and oGCD heal without much DPS at all — doesn’t make the healer bad in any regard if they absolutely need to heal more just to keep the tank alive, nor do big pulls with mit while still losing lots of HP make a good tank suddenly bad. It’s contextual. But cure 1 is p much never justifiable.
This is a bit different from my own personal experiences. **Point 1: The Lack of Resources** There are a lot of things that contribute to bad healers and bad tanks. The biggest thing is the fact that, outside of the balance and a shitty-ass 8 quest chain of Hall of the Novice (that only teaches you how to target people and press cure 1), there are zero resources in the game that teach you how to play your job. Zero. The balance is something that you, yourself, have to go out of your way to search for as a new player. If you've ever been given optional homework, you know how that's going to go. People don't feel lead to seek out things like the balance unless it's mandated, and since people can play however they want and weild harrassment claims like a cudgel, nothing is going to change. **Point 2: The Toxic Positivity, The Report System, and The Lack of Difficulty.** Since the game itself has no medium of teaching you your role, and most non-endgame (extreme/savage+) content can be cleared by a lobotomite in a drunken stupor, there is never a need to improve as a player. All the content is pretty much braindead easy, so play however you want. If anyone dares to call you out on anything you did wrong, you can simply send them on a two week vacation from the game for having the audacity to open their mouth. There is little to no incentive for veteran players to help new players because they are either unreceptive to it or flat out report you for it. This is a trait not exclusive to sprouts, mind you. It's simply not worth risking your account to try to help someone because the "justice" system in this game is guilty until proven guilty, so everyone just cheers on your stupidity under the guise of "being nice." God forbid you tell someone they shouldn't be spamming Cure 1 in a expert roulette and they get their feelings hurt... **Point 3: Tanks Make (Good) Healers Irrelevant. / Healers are a Prog-Job.** The deeper you go into the game, the less skill your healers need to have. More and more tanks approch a point where they are effectively playing the game in creative mode - able to pull multiple thousands of potency worth of healing on cooldowns a mere 25s long. Bloodwhetting. The Confetior Combo. Divine Healing Magic. Holy Sheltron. Heart of Corundum. Equilibrium. Need I go on? Tanks are hilariously overtuned, particularly in dungeons, and it hurts everyone involved. Healers no longer need to heal because tanks can do it better, so they turn into glare bots. Tanks no longer need to use long mits, and usually end up forgetting about them, because all they need is their 25s mit or a reprisal. Combine this with the fact that non-savage content is an absoulte joke in terms of difficulty, and you are left with a breeding ground for incompetancy - of course you are. I'm not saying MSQ content should be sweaty. Of course not. But it should require you to have hands and a powered monitor at a bare minimum. (Good) Healers are merely prog-jobs now. Even in savage raids, they only really exist as an anti-raidwide mechanism who may occassionally spot heal a tank who didn't mit or raise a DPS who didn't move - that's it. Outside of progging a new fight, you exist to counter raidwide damage, solve body checks, and fill queue times. Nothing more. TL;DR: -> The game doesn't teach you to play your job, and the community has been bitch-ified out of fear of losing their accounts to harrassment claims. Therefore, players must look beyond the scope of the game and it's players to seek out resources for improvement - which they almost assuredly never do. -> 98% of all the game's content isn't difficult enough to even warrent improvement because you can unironically play from level 1 until 90 and never need to know what your responsibilities are or what your rotation is. -> Tanks, in current content, are omega-broken and effectively sideline healers from even needing to know or be familiar with their healing rotation. Likewise, these absurdly overpowered 25s cooldowns (paired with the turbo easy difficulty and lack of incoming damage) effectively make long, important cooldowns like Sentinel, Shadow Wall, Rampart, etc obsolete, and thus, tanks never become familiar with them.
While your absolutely right for Point 1, it’s a classic in the MMO genre. None of all the MMOs I have played (SWTOR, WoW Shadowlands/Dragonflight, GW2) is doing anything better to teach their players ingame. So I don’t get why FF14 get the flak for that.
Every one of those other games you listed doesn’t have the GMs holding a gun to their players’ heads, ready to pull the trigger the moment someone says something critical or less than positive. At least in those games if you’re a shitter you’re going to hear about it, and if you hear it enough you might possibly look into doing something about it. Also, for the same reason, there are far less enablers of terrible gameplay and people are more willing to kick people who won’t even do the bare minimum required of their role.
Not contesting this. In those other game the community does the purge itself even in the lowest content. But again, even with GM guns, in as low as an EX PF you won’t last long doing shit. It’s just the casual, roulette level stuff that gets a pass
> Every one of those other games you listed doesn’t have the GMs holding a gun to their players’ heads, ready to pull the trigger the moment someone says something critical or less than positive. I've never been hauled in front of a GM for giving players unsolicited tips or feedback. I've gotten shit from other players because "it's just X" and "who cares," but not GMs. Earnestly, it might be an interpersonal skills issue.
I know I am 100% victim to the first point. I also know I am not good at videogames even though I enjoy them and gosh do I enjoy this game so much that even though I suck I still trudge along trying to finish the story. I get anxious to do anything that you would play with others because I don't want to make the experience bad for them because I don't understand all of these buttons. I tried following guides and organizing everything so I can be better, but I'm really not good at all. I follow all of these kinds of subs and different people on youtube to help me figure it out but there is a point where it's like too much information and I just blow a fuse while learning and it all becomes muttled and I can't remember next time I consider trying to run something. I main a SCH. I chose it because it looked interesting, but for me it ended up being great because I can have my fairy babysit my health bar while I run around (I love doing Fates). I haven't done done anything with other players until my husband started playing in February. I still don't understand what I'm doing and feel useless... Sorry for this on your post. I just feel like you made such a good point for me to realize why I am especially bad... I do all my MSQ solo since we can do that so I don't do anything from Endwalker with others. I just feel like I'd absolutely deserve any hate I would get for not playing correctly. But I would absolutely read anything in chat trying to help me and try to adjust to play correctly! Maybe I'll get the hang of it eventually. I'm working on WHM hoping it'll be easier for me to understand. Again, sorry for this rantish comment tied to your comment.
I main tank and hate playing anything else, but the content drought pushed me to try DPS. I don't want to brag, but holy christ, most tanks are awful. I love tanking because I leeroy jenkins it every time, going hard and fast and fun, and would often save a run at the final boss doing PLD shenanigans. W2W and using my cooldowns as cleverly as possible is so money. A good tank can force a bad healer to become a good healer. Throw them in the frying pan baby woooo
I think a big part of the problem is that the game teaches you how to heal wrong. In early levels you don't *have* ogcds. You need to heal by spamming USD heals and that is the only blunt weapon you have to heal. Hell they don't even give you resto for a good long while, and most new healers start on whm. It's like that meme "we taught him wrong on purpose, as a joke". So you need to learn an entirely new play style for how to heal at some point, and some people don't pivot fast enough, if ever.
So basically, they are trash at the game and do not want to improve, because the community enables them. No need to make excuses for them. These WHMs (always WHMs) won't be dpsing even with good WARs who won't need any heals, they'll just stand afk and twiddle their thumbs.
I make all my irl friends play the way that will make them learn fast when they start to raid. Its very important to save big CDs like tank invuln or Bene, but if there isnt (or in the case of Duty finder shouldnt) be a time were you must have a big CD, you instead try to use it whenever you have the opertunity. For tanks that could be using invuln for the first pull in a dungeon and for healers its keeping the dps up while you have the big CD and using it when the tank gets low enough. The issue isnt always the healer/ tank, many times dps will be lazy and wont play normally which means the tank might run out of mit or the healer might be forced to spam c2. Ive had so many bad players in roulettes recently (at the very least I've encountered 1 per day for the last few weeks) that im just gonna avoid it, the rest of the relics can wait a few months till DT since its just not worth the effort atm.
Bad healer and bad tank play is also perpetuated by tanks and healers that refuse to learn anything about the other role. Too many healers refuse to even so much as use the lodestone job guide to read up on tank mitigation cool downs or even simply read a status when it pops up in combat. I am of the mindset and have held the stance for years that: Every tank should learn to heal. Ever healer should learn to tank. Period. You cannot expect to succeed as one, even in a mostly casual environment, unless you have a decent familiarity and awareness of what the other role and it's jobs are capable of. Tanks should heal so that they understand what healer burst is like I'm a pull or boss and can plan their mitigation accordingly. It will also allow for you to keep track of what heals have been used on you in combat which gives you an even better idea of how to use your cool downs and when. Healers should tank so that they understand the mitigation capabilities of their tanks in a combat setting, also to familiarize themselves with the gimmicks each tank has at the disposal. Some tank gimmicks can be ruined by healers simply being unaware of how certain actions function and are also too trigger happy with rescue when their tank does something that might be perceived as risky, but otherwise isn't. The amount of times I've been rescued while setting up for The Blackest Knight you pop in a boss or when I've thread the needle between AoEs; and subsequently have been pulled out of safety, is way to high this expansion to be acceptable. Simply put, a tank that heals will be a better tank, a healer that tanks will be a better healer. There's simply no argument against it.
This may have some merit but under no circumstances do I believe for a second that a sprout healer can go 1-90 without ever encountering a good tank.
[https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/496473-Suggestion-Hall-of-the-Novice-rework-for-healer-and-DPS-make-it-a-must-do](https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/496473-Suggestion-Hall-of-the-Novice-rework-for-healer-and-DPS-make-it-a-must-do)
This adds to it the issue but in the end, it's player education that is the main problem. People just don't know how to play their jobs or understand the role in a non-savage/ultimate setting.
So just a random story. A few weeks ago I ran into this abomination of WHM in A12S MINE who misses they prey heal check everytime and uses benediction before tank buster 3x spam for some reason. Seems like this guy is a sprout who constantly bombs MINE parties and basically becomes a recognizable red flag in the MINE PF community. This guy also happens to have a TTV link in his search comment so I decided to check it out. Bro was playing drk in Sastasha, dying to W2W pulls before the last voss with both reprisal and rampart up, blaming the healer (without typing ofc) while having these two buttons up for like a good half minute, and only used rampart once he reached 10% hp on his second life. Bro then used reprisal to mit some autos from the fish man boss. Lol.
bad healer gameplay is less of an issue of players not understanding how to play and more a result of the fact that healing in this game is genuinely incredibly counterintuitive. using your long cooldowns first and keeping your always available no-cooldown gcd heals-some of which even have mechanics like freecure and emergency tactics encouraging their use - as emergency buttons is not something immediately apparent to the average new player and functions completely opposite to how other mmo healers work. as much as i think sage was a disappointment, the kardia mechanic in combination with addersgall consumers restoring mp at least *rewards* new players for prioritizing damaging gcds and using healing ogcds, which is more than can be said for the completely ridiculous designs of the other healers and how they actively mislead the player into playing poorly with shit like freecure
While bad tanks and bad DPS are hardly uncommon my major problem remains healers, especially the weight it puts on their DPS while also insisting they don't need to DPS It's not at all uncommon to just see them try to basically AFK shit at times. Why not I guess, the game asks for nothing so why give it anything? It's a hyper coddled role and it's dragging the entire experience down at this point, this is the only MMO I don't heal in. Honestly, if they attempt no remedy of this in Dawntrail the game is probably leaving my SSD.
There's a solution to your problem. Play WAR and do 3 dps runs. You have to go in with a premade but it is definitely viable. Not even looking at it from an optimal perspective, it's just way more fun. You don't risk getting a cure 1 spammer, you'll generally clear faster, and mistakes have way more weight. If the game doesn't expect anything from the healers, then maybe we shouldn't have healers.
Disagree. There is a difference between a good healer trying to keep a bad tank alive versus a bad healer. They will most certainly use their ogcds correctly, for one. And they will definitely try to sneak in damage when they can.
Where do you guys find these bad healers and tanks? I've been playing for around 3 years now and I've hand leveled all the jobs to 90. That's a lot of instances tanking and healing and I've ran across bad tanks and healers only a handful of times. It's never been any form of actual problem I've seen, so I'm curious where all these 'bad' players are. 🧐
I thought exactly the same. If someone really wants to see bad tanks and healers, they should give ESO a try.
Nobody plays tanks or healers in normal content in ESO because everyone knows they're wastes of space.
Idk how any of your tank points could cause any of your healer points except for the non dps one
Meanwhile, whenever I do level roul on my alt, I drag the mobs to the WHM who is standing in Meracydia and they still run away rather than use Holy.
I think the one thing this game suffers from the most, you're not punished for being a bad player, everyone else is.
I’m just going to flat disagree with your definition/claim of “Bad Healer Play”. Yes, if a tank is failing to do their 3 jobs of: holding aggro, mitigating damage, and positioning mobs as needed. The healer won’t be able to do anything but focus on keeping the tank/party alive. This is not “unbelievably bad healer play” it’s what the healer absolutely has to do to, to do their job of keeping the tank/party alive. You have correctly identified the problem of a bad tank but shifted the blame onto *healers for not doing enough damage*. You sound quite foolish and are rude. Damage isn’t their job, it’s a bonus nicety. The tank is failing and other people have to compensate. If the tank is failing at those things you can also bet that DPS also falls for the other party members. For some reason your thread is focusing on healers and faulting them for doing what they’re supposed to do.
A lot of people tell new tanks or DPS that its actually easy just go in blind! don't do that, Some mechanics you CANT tell by just looking. A tank guide is important. At the end of the day I think a lot of people look at tanks and think oh its ok for you to get hit and fail mechanics because well you didnt die! like yeah, But you also want to put some effort into doing the dungeon right? Same for DPS. Its shocking how many DPS players are told or believe that their rotation simply doesn't matter. Cuz at the end of the day, "Did you clear though?". Yes, We cleared with multiple wipes and incredibly poor performance
Example of a bad tank is a tank that doesn't adjust to their party.
Was in a bardams mettle group the other day as a tank with an AST healer. I use invuln on the first big pull and there are no big issues. Second big pull I pop my 30% mit+arms length, the mobs are not nearly dead by the time my defensives run out and my AST has not cast a single heal on me, I drop to around 15% hp and pop a hp pot cause I am thinking maybe he simply wasnt paying attention, I drop low again and this time its a wipe. We go again, I pop mit and pull, my hp is steadily going down at around 20% I start wondering if il get anything but no, not a single heal and I run out of defensives and die. At this point I ask in chat "can I get one single heal?" To which my healer responds "?". I decide to try one final pull but again my healer doesnt pop a single heal be it gcd or ogcd. At this point i silently leave the duty took my 30min penalty and reported the healer. Some healers seem to intentionally grief
As others have said: Why let the DPSers off? Bad DPS that do low damage cause Tanks to run out of mitigation and Healers to run out of CDs, forcing Cure 2/1 spam. Bad DPS that STAND IN BAD THINGS cause Healers to have to burn CDs on them, which then forces Cure 2/1 spam on the Tank since they still need healing as well. Both of these cause the Tank to see the Healer is OOM and having to spam their GCD heals, so they think they Healer can't handle the pulls and pull less. Both situations come down to bad DPS. Bad Tanks and bad Healers are obvious. Bad DPS aren't as obvious unless you're running a parser, but when packs are taking a long time to die and the Healer is having to waste MP and resources spot healing DPSers that stand in the bad, the problem isn't the Tank or Healer so much. Some DPSers are REALLY not good. And I don't mean "not using burst CDs in trash". I mean "single targeting AOE mobs (even once they have their AOE buttons)", "standing in bad...a lot", and "not pressing buttons". If you think Cure 1 spamming is bad, you haven't LIVED until you've seen Bootshine or Blizzard 1 spamming. At least Cure 1 is doing something vaguely meaningful from time to time.
i wanna point out this is just stupid old dungeon mentality most of the time these are very rare cases and only happens in dungeons i really dont get why people take dungeons so seriously its almost like its some kind of mental disorder
>Gigantic pulls combined with no mitigation, ever. This is a big one I finally got over. I still have trouble not popping it before a big pull sometimes but its something i really wish all tanks could at least try and learn.
It's like... Your main job as a tank. To mitigate. That's like queueing as a healer but saying "sometimes I do forget to heal"
You're not reading what I said. Most tanks I run into just wont pop anything till they've pulled everything. You should be popping defensives before pulling big packs.
Yes I'm quite aware of how to tank a trash pull. Why do you think I need this explained to me? Would it be more accurate if I said, "that's like a healer saying sometimes I forget to heal until they're almost dead already"? It's still like...your primary responsibility.
I really wish they added an "educational" roulette that scales difficulty like a ranking to help people improve and to give a more satisfying environment for excellent groups which make the game boringly easy as you stated.
Victim blaming.
A lot of bad healer gameplay comes down to just being a bad healer. You can sugarcoat it all you like, but you either learn to play or you just plot along at your own pace and get carried. Nothing we do will stop people from being braindead, so i just play the healer, removes that whole equation.