FFXIV: Tales from the Duty Finder – The Micro-Managing Healer

In a sequel to the story of the “Don’t Care” Healer… today, we have the flip side of the story where the healer cares a bit too much about what everyone else is doing… except for his own healing.

I’ve been slacking on earning tomes lately. I have all the drops needed from Deltascape to get my weapon, but was lacking 300 Creation. So, Syn, Amoon and I decided to do some roulettes last night. The Expert went just fine, and I even got the cool mount drop.

But, then we get the Leveling Roulette. Now, we usually do this with a full FC group, and it’s been a while since I’ve run stuff with randoms. We had to pick up the healer last night… and boy, what a catch!

Because we joked about always getting Sastasha, the game decided to pitch up Gubal Library instead. I haven’t done this dungeon in probably over a year or more, and only a handful of times. But whatever.

So we get started – Me on Bard (which I’m still trying to re-learn), Syn on Ninja (leveling) and Amoon on Dark Knight (leveling). I’m not sure that any of us are at “pro” status on these jobs – we’re mostly there to get some experience, practice and level. I know that I still haven’t figured out all the changes to Bard yet. This is the first above level 50 dungeon I’ve tried on this job since Stormblood, and I felt a bit lost.

Apparently, our Astro healer was a true pro, though! So much of pro that he didn’t want to wait for the tank to get a feel for things. He was racing past the group to the next pull the moment the dungeon started, and started complaining when he didn’t get a wall to wall. I didn’t get a screenshot of it, but it was something along the lines of “Why you not pull more??”

Then, when he got the big pull he demanded, the healer started to try to “coach” Amoon to use his cooldowns (wish I had a screenshot of this). Which… Amoon already knew how to use. When Amoon demonstrated this fact, the healer did at least acknowledge this, but the way he said everything came off  like how you praise a pet for doing something you wanted them to do.

If the healer had taken a moment to inspect any of us, he would have realized he was playing with folks who were familiar with the game, but just a little rusty on the dungeon, or re-learning the changes to old alt-jobs. Instead, he decided to “help”… but it came off in a condescending tone. Whether he meant it to sound that way or not, I don’t know, but I suspect he didn’t realize how he sounded.

For all his coaching, he wasn’t that great at healing. He was more focused on speed and DPSing than he was on keeping his teammates alive — he mostly ignored DPS when they needed heals, and let the tank (and even himself) get pretty low before actually doing something about it.

Still, he hadn’t really done anything wrong aside from constantly sprinting ahead of the tank, so we kept rolling.

Then we get to the second boss, where you have to kill the adds and drag the tether through the boss to make him vulnerable again. Syn accidentally pulled the tether too near to the gas clouds, which destroys it, and so we had to do it again (remember, we haven’t run this dungeon in a while).

No big deal.

Except it apparently was enough for the healer to “coach” our team on mechanics yet again. After we downed that boss, he went sprinting off ahead, but Amoon had enough of his “helping,” and decided to let him know. This was when the fireworks began.

This heated discussion took place in the middle of several pulls – one of which the healer forced himself. I think he intended to run in and suicide himself, but Amoon was not having it, and pulled the mobs off him.

Sometimes during this exchange, he let Amoon get pretty low on life, and I was worried he was going to let the party wipe. We discussed if this warranted a vote-kick, but since we were so close to finishing the dungeon, and he hadn’t actually let anyone die on purpose, we decided just to finish up.

He did try to argue some more…

But it wasn’t worth our time, so the rest of the dungeon went in silence. He probably thought he “won” the argument. But the fact we didn’t have to hear him “coach” the team further was more a win to us. 😉

The moral of the story? Apparently those micro-managing players see themselves as “helping” and get pretty defensive when you tell them that you’re okay without their help.

What has the world come to????