Is the healer working too hard?

Drpsychoball

Hello everyone!
My main is a tank currently CP270, i guess Im okay at thr game, i get my job done in vet dungeons, pledges, able to keep the target in place but sometimes i feel like a healer is working too hard to heal me. I never played healer and have no idea what it feels like so i just wanted to know what are some ways i can tell if the healer is working too hard and how can i make his job easier? No helaer told me that he has hard time healing me before but still want to know.

Pele

Hard to say without personally healing you, but I'm going to guess and say you're fine since no one has complained.

If you're still worried about it, track your incoming damage, and if you're doing all you can to mitigate and avoid as much as possible then you're fine.

jaschacasadiob16_ESO

Hello,
my main is a healer instead. I do enjoy taking care of people.

A tank is not doing his job if there is no CC at all.

If the boss can be taunted but goes all the time after the healer, then the tank is not doing his job. If I have adds on me during a boss fight I move towards the tank, pulling the adds with me. I do expect the tank to get aggro on them.

You can usually tell if a tank does his job if you healer can keep the party up with HoTs.

Of course, if a DD pulls everything and/or does not take care of adds, boss's healing stuff, ...

You can't heal stupid. You can't CC stupid.

Magdalina

Well you could just ask if the healer seems friendly enough

A pretty good gauge is can you survive on your own? Can you tank a boss completely without heals and support - for some time at least? If yes, you're more than fine. If not, you're honestly probably still fine because it's not normal for such a situation and need to come up, but you do have room for improvement

Titansteele

In all honesty you need to get yourself into a guild and ask an established healer or another established tank.

As much as people on the forums can provide educated guesses and vague advise there is no substitute for experience of your performance.

phileunderx2

If the healer is getting all the aggro and everybody else's health is dropping to nothing then yeah. Healer is working too hard. This scenario happens way more than it should.

MarbleQuiche

Tank's job is to keep aggro. Healer's job is to keep everyone alive.

Sometimes it's a hard job to keep all the aggro; sometimes it's a hard job to keep everyone alive. But so long as both those things are happening, it doesn't really matter how hard it is to do it.

Sometimes healing is very easy and the healer could stand about doing nothing most of the time. Some healers just spam healing all the time in these cases, though they'd ideally be adding DPS/DPS support. It doesn't necessarily mean they're having a hard time healing you if you feel like they're spending all their time healing you, they might simply be bored!

I have many healers, but I'll take my two edge cases to illustrate a point and explain what a healer does.

I have a sorcerer healer. Sorcerers don't have class specific healing/support skills, so my go to skill is combat prayer from the restoration staff line. It's a corridor AoE that provides minor spell resistance, minor physical resistance and damage buffs, as well as providing a very decent heal. With a duration of only 8 seconds, I'll be casting this constantly. It might look like I'm frantically healing, but I am in fact providing damage mitigation and damage output buffs. When I'm spamming this, it means the group is doing well and doesn't need healing, even though what people immediately notice is the heal from the skill. When I'm not spamming this, it either means I'm having to do some heavier healing or the group is surviving well enough but I can provide better DPS support by throwing out some DPS myself rather than adding 8% to what is already a low output (in this case, it's the DPSs who are not performing well).

I have a warden healer. Wardens have tons of class specific healing/support skills. In particular, there's a group buff that provides major versions of the physical and spell resistance buffs for 20 seconds and a conal heal that provides minor intellect and minor endurance for 20 seconds (these increase magicka and stamina regeneration). I'll rotate those along with combat prayer in an attempt to make the group near invincible and throw out a warden skill that is an AOE heal that activates after 6 seconds (and has 6 seconds of ticks after that, I believe). A very busy rotation that might look like hard healing work, but is more about mitigation than reacting to emergencies. When I'm rotating these skills, the group is doing well.

So sometimes the healer is busy because they're doing a good job, not because others are doing a poor one. Tank's primary job is to keep aggro. If you're doing that and the healer is keeping you alive, it's all good. If you want to help the healer out, keep an eye on your health and how quickly/far it drops in one go. If you're losing half your health from one attack, you might want to look at why. Sometimes it's because you don't have a big health pool (look at ways to increase it), sometimes it's because you don't have enough armour and/or resistances (armour is essentially resistance - each point in it increases physical/spell resistance by a point). A lot depends on who your healer is. If I'm running a group with you often and I'm playing my warden, we could look at ways to synergise with one another that includes dropping your resistances so you can focus on other stats. As you never know who'll be healing PUGs, for those I'd recommend trying to balance your takning stats - health, armour and both resistances.

Finally, sometimes the healer is busy because they don't understand how things work as best as they might. It might be that they're just spamming healing springs everywhere because that's the most obvious thing for a healer to do. Not optimal, but it'll do the trick and they might be learning their role too.

tldr; If nobody is dying, don't fret too much.

jaschacasadiob16_ESO

Spamming Healing Springs and/or Combat Prayer all the time is not necessarily the way to go for a Healer. Mainly in PUGs, people do not coordinate and spread all over the place, sometimes out of range, making those two abilities pretty much useless.

With PUGs I do prefer combining HoTs (Rapid Regen and Aura). Having such a large range Heal over Time usually means the Healer has time to deal damage.

If the healer needs to spam BoL all the time OR is consistently taking damage then something is wrong in terms of CC.

bebynnag

i agree best bet would be to ask for a healer on your platform server to give you some feedback

if you want forum feedback though your going to have to give us more information

class, race, gear (including traits & quality), detailed front bar & back bar skills (including active passives ie are you a vamp, undaunted level etc) and of course CP distribution

chances are you are doing just fine, other wise people would be forcing advice on you in dungeons

AmmonErebos

best measure would be look at your resists and ability to self heal... if your phys/spell resists are near 32k and you can self heal... really should be fine... in dungeons tanks dont *need* a healer to survive... except maybe rom/cos.. but using CC's to control all adds not just taunts on a couple, as well as soft taunts to aggro stuff to you initially help.

SoLooney

as long as youre not a fake tank where i have to spam breath of life. and if i do, i just let you die and kick after we wipe.

depends though, ive seen some squishy tanks who cant mitigate damage well, always QQing for shards, not blocking the appropriate times.
as long as no one is complaining, you should be fine

Junkkis

as long u hold aggro i dont care how hard i need heal u. its still more relax than playing dps imo.

Beardimus

Healing anyone is the healers job, first and foremost I feel.

Tank for me just needs to keep the baddies away from me, and hold the boss in a good position etc. Long as that's going on, i'm there to heal is how I see it!

(well unless they are a 16k health light armour 'tank' that queued with a Frost staff for the daily XP)

redshirt_49

You taking a lot of damage is what's supposed to be happening. As long as the healer can focus on healing you, and no one else, then it's fine.

Here's my guide to tanking.

Step 1) Pop damage shields, armor skills
Step 2) Pop group buffs.
Step 3) Taunt boss, face it away from group. Keep hacking at it.
Step 4) If adds spawn, try pulling as many as possible and grouping them up so DD's AoE can get 'em. (On some dungeons it's impossible for you to pull them all and they'll often default-aggro on heals. DDs have to clean that up.)
Step 4) Reapply buffs and shields as needed
Step 5) ???
Step 6) Profit.

Also, make sure your CPs are spent properly. If you're focused solely on group content, sinking points into damage points is a waste of time and skills (Unless you have max CP and can afford to burn a few). You want things that improve your survivability : that means resistances, recovery rates (to pop more shields and buffs), reduction of block-cost, roll-dodge or whatever your preferred method of tanking heavy damage is (some people like to block n' heal, others prefer dodging and going back into place).

I couldn't really tell anyone if something is wrong with their build without actually taking a look at it, since how effective you are as a tank depends a lot on your group moreso than it does on your build and character class (Not to say that these aren't important though, because they are. Templar tank, warden tank, nb tank, dk tank...they all play quite differently). Though DK is the go-to and plays the most like the classic "damage-sponge" tank.

Rickter

a good tank can stay alive even if your whole team goes down in a dungeon. Im serious. i cant count the come backs ive had. the proper amount of mitigation and self heals should pull you through. healers dont really heal all that much and the less they have to worry about the tank, the more they can worry about buffing the group with lighting staff wall of elements, combat prayer buff, shards, orbs, etc.

In that regard, I personally do feel like a lot ofresponsibility is placed on the healer - moreso than any other role. appreciate them. love them. care for them.

Makato

@Drpsychoball try debuffing the boss as much as possible resistance wise,infused weapons with crusher and pierce armor work well togheter for that ,try getting lots of resists and health to work the squish away ,use echoing vigor if u have it ,its a good HoT and it will help you and your group ,and don't die try to keep in mind if ur heal or tank to help your group as much as possible ,makes the harder bosses a lot easier

Rungar

if your not using burning embers(DK tank) and have no points in blessed or healing received, or are not blocking your healer might be working hard.

otherwise shouldn't need to heal you much at all.

AcadianPaladin

I play a magplar healer. My friend plays a DK tank. Normally, she holds foes well enough that I can get close enough to include the tank in my Extended Ritual aura. That combined with keeping Rapid Ritual up and nearly a constant stream of healing from Purify normally keeps my tank fluctuating between 90-100% of her 40k health (sometimes even overhealing but that is okay). The thing I love about the tank is that when she does start really taking damage, it is gradual enough that adding a couple Healing Springs is plenty and I don't really have to disrupt keeping all my timed stuff up by panic-bursting with Breath of Life.

So, from a healer's perspective, I'd think that if the tank finds herself semi-routinely burst back up from below 50% health, that may not be good. And, absolutely, ask your healer!

tommalmm

Recently, I'm mostly healing and tanking (though, by all means, I'm not expert in either of these roles). Healers rarely complain about tanks, unless they just loose aggro all the time, totally ignore adds (you can't taunt everything, no one expects you to, but you should at least take care of the hard hitters and ranged).

My experience is that a tank should be able to survive on his own for extended periods of time and that HOTs should be able to keep tank at 100% nearly all the time. It usually works this way when I'm tanking, unless I screw something up (not blocking heavy in time), but then it's just a single emergency rather than a constant. If a tank's health drops all the time and you have to either spam BOL or springs to keep him alive, something is really wrong. I don't mean, that you have to constantly heal yourself, I mean, that your mitigation, placement, blocking, etc. should allow for HOTs to heal you, without constant healer's interventions.

But as long as you're not forcing healer to drain resources on you and neglect the team, it's really fine. Though it's always troubling to see tank's health dropping in a low damage aoe (well, unless cases when the healer's at fault, that means).

To be honest, it works exactly the same with DDs. When I run with good teams on a healer, I only need to apply two HOTs and then just buff them and DPS (HOTs will proc SPC, no need to overdo). In good teams I can keep the buffs and HOTs at nearly 100% uptime and still do 12-15k dps, never struggling with resources. In bad groups I need to emergency heal all the time, I do absymal dps (even though these groups are where healer's DPS matters most) and my uptimes on buffs drop considerably. Good players avoid damage rather than relying on a healer to heal them through (or even chase them to heal them through).

As for vet trials, I can't really say, I've been healing only in normal trials.

bebynnag

Beardimus wrote: »

(well unless they are a 16k health light armour 'tank' that queued with a Frost staff for the daily XP)

quits group finder que on my level 45 argonian warden - stands-in-stupid

Jamini

Rungar wrote: »

if your not using burning embers(DK tank) and have no points in blessed or healing received, or are not blocking your healer might be working hard.

otherwise shouldn't need to heal you much at all.

You mean Igneous Shield and Vigor. Embers is a bit of a waste unless you are a magicka build.

Megabear

It really depends on the other players, mainly the tank. Sometimes healing is cake, sometimes people are constantly on the edge of death.

QuebraRegra

much respect to good tanks, I haven't tried it myself, but it looks like hard work.

As an "off healer" I usually have NO problems keeping a GOOD tank alive. GOOD tanks always seem to keep agro and frankly it's amazing. GOOD tanks usually have some emergency heal themselves as well if I get over busy or drained or resources..

I wish there was a way to control who gets the HEALING WARD shield (prioritize tank, or aim, or something)

RANKK7

Healing is hard per se when done right, there is not a moment to relax (more after the nerf to sustain), other than healing must provide and maintain buffs and debuffs, give group and individual support on sustain.
If you are not blindly ignoring basic mechanics, stubbornly standing in red or have 11k hp not willing to eat, then the healer should be able to manage, in worst case scenario would sacrifice some buffs and support for that (that's not good but can happen).
At any rate is plenty of healers around not even running ele drain, nor giving any kind of support, don't worry for such healers in case they get pissed for something, they are not up to their role anyways.

Ghost-Shot

Healing is a pretty simple role in this game, if a healer is working too hard you are deliberately taking damage.

Megabear

QuebraRegra wrote: »

much respect to good tanks, I haven't tried it myself, but it looks like hard work.

As an "off healer" I usually have NO problems keeping a GOOD tank alive. GOOD tanks always seem to keep agro and frankly it's amazing. GOOD tanks usually have some emergency heal themselves as well if I get over busy or drained or resources..

I wish there was a way to control who gets the HEALING WARD shield (prioritize tank, or aim, or something)

You got it very right. It's hard to notice good tanks, unless you have a tank yourself. Basically if your team isn't getting hit very often especially from trash mobs, then you got yourself a good tank. If the tank is busy doing other things on top of making sure everything is taunted (debuff, interrupt, buff, heals, etc), then you got yourself and excellent tank. Tank's role is and should be very busy work.

idk

jaschacasadiob16_ESO wrote: »

Hello,
my main is a healer instead. I do enjoy taking care of people.

A tank is not doing his job if there is no CC at all.

If the boss can be taunted but goes all the time after the healer, then the tank is not doing his job. If I have adds on me during a boss fight I move towards the tank, pulling the adds with me. I do expect the tank to get aggro on them.

You can usually tell if a tank does his job if you healer can keep the party up with HoTs.

Of course, if a DD pulls everything and/or does not take care of adds, boss's healing stuff, ...

You can't heal stupid. You can't CC stupid.

There are classes without CCs. Only the Sorc and DK have useful AoE roots and all other CCs are not worthy in a dungeon.

Further, the healer should have some sort of damage skill avaialabe. If the healer is keeping the group up with hots what else is the healer doing.

IronCrystal

Giles.floydub17_ESO wrote: »

jaschacasadiob16_ESO wrote: »

Hello,
my main is a healer instead. I do enjoy taking care of people.

A tank is not doing his job if there is no CC at all.

If the boss can be taunted but goes all the time after the healer, then the tank is not doing his job. If I have adds on me during a boss fight I move towards the tank, pulling the adds with me. I do expect the tank to get aggro on them.

You can usually tell if a tank does his job if you healer can keep the party up with HoTs.

Of course, if a DD pulls everything and/or does not take care of adds, boss's healing stuff, ...

You can't heal stupid. You can't CC stupid.

There are classes without CCs. Only the Sorc and DK have useful AoE roots and all other CCs are not worthy in a dungeon.

Further, the healer should have some sort of damage skill avaialabe. If the healer is keeping the group up with hots what else is the healer doing.

Buffing/resource management?

Soriana

@Drpsychoball - main tank chiming in here. To echo what everyone else is saying, if no one is dying, you're probably good. That being said, tanks have way more HP than everyone else in the group...sometimes more than everyone else in the group combined! If your health gets too far down, it can take quite a bit of the healers magicka to heal you back up. If that happens on a consistent basis, there could be cause for concern with either your gear, your cp's, your skills and rotation, or any and all of the above.

I would find a healer you can trust and ask them how you are doing. That would give you the best feedback I think.

jaschacasadiob16_ESO

Giles.floydub17_ESO wrote: »

Further, the healer should have some sort of damage skill avaialabe. If the healer is keeping the group up with hots what else is the healer doing.

Searching the crates for mushoorms. Clapping to DDs as they fight the boss and trash. Using mementos. Standing still being cute with the brassy assassin personality,I mean, really, the healer is always busy.

I do always spend my spare time buffing and dealing damage. Often with PUGs that spare time is very little or non existant at all. On the other hand, everyone should always be ready to self heal when needed. You can't expect the healer to be there all the time. ESO is a group effort where roles kinda blend.

yolanee

Giles.floydub17_ESO wrote: »

jaschacasadiob16_ESO wrote: »

Hello,
my main is a healer instead. I do enjoy taking care of people.

A tank is not doing his job if there is no CC at all.

If the boss can be taunted but goes all the time after the healer, then the tank is not doing his job. If I have adds on me during a boss fight I move towards the tank, pulling the adds with me. I do expect the tank to get aggro on them.

You can usually tell if a tank does his job if you healer can keep the party up with HoTs.

Of course, if a DD pulls everything and/or does not take care of adds, boss's healing stuff, ...

You can't heal stupid. You can't CC stupid.

There are classes without CCs. Only the Sorc and DK have useful AoE roots and all other CCs are not worthy in a dungeon.

Further, the healer should have some sort of damage skill avaialabe. If the healer is keeping the group up with hots what else is the healer doing.

Are you doing only normal dungeons that you say that?

In vet dungs you need to also heal not just through HoTs. Then you need to debuff the boss, buff your teammates. Then you need to keep at least the tank up with resources. All the while you have to manage your own resources through heavy attacks and the occassional potion.

There's really not time for healer's negligible damage.