Healer dps in difficult raids and trials.

Is dpsing mandatory for healers in those instances?

I'm a total noob when it comes to the more difficult endgame content, but so far I get the job healing wise done. It's just that getting to deal damage in a consistent way often gets lost among the chaos.

Now things obviously will get better with experience, but I'm wondering nonetheless if it ever will become a problem if you don't dps well as healer.

I mean I have seen some weird things (at least I think it's weird) being done by my much more experienced cohealers for the sake of dealing damage. For example have I seen it multiple times that they just let people die if they are out of range for heals instead of running towards them (and lose some personal dps in the process). While I know that as a well positioned healer you shouldn't have to chase people, I'd much rather lose the healer dps than risk losing an actual dps, no?

Don't do it until you feel comfortable. Priority is always healing.
When you learn the fights you'll find it quite enjoyable as the general flow of the encounters are very scripted - there is actual downtime you'll want to fill.

The thing is, there is so little damage going on, even in savage raids, that a lot of the time you can just heal the party with an indom (for example) then you have nothing else to do as healer. So instead of staying around doing nothing, use your free time to dps. When you are new, you won't know in which situation you have to use which healing skill, so you propably will have a lot of overheal, but with experience this will decrease, meaning you will get more and more time to dps, because you will use your skills more efficiently. For example, if your party is at about ~80% health and has a regen on them, you don't need to waste more mp to heal them, because the regen effect will do that. Don't be afraid to dps, this is just a question of practice and experience. After a few runs you will know in which situations you will use your cds and in which situations you are free to deal damage.

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Originally Posted by Belgianbeer

For example have I seen it multiple times that they just let people die if they are out of range for heals instead of running towards them (and lose some personal dps in the process). While I know that as a well positioned healer you shouldn't have to chase people, I'd much rather lose the healer dps than risk losing an actual dps, no?

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A well placed healer shouldn't have to chase the tank. Sometimes (mostly I find in Alliance Raids, as in other cases the battlegrounds aren't really large enough for this) DPS will frequently position themselves such that you are either in range to heal your alliances tank or that DPS. So when raid wide damage goes out or they screw up a mechanic, healing them requires abandoning the tank. So that's why if a DPS is way outside of my range I might not run off and heal them- if I can close the distance quickly without going out of range of the tank I will do that. But if that DPS is so far away that I can't get to them easily then I think it's more dangerous to abandon the tank to heal them than it is to let them die. That is, it may be that these healers you're seeing not going after far away DPS aren't protecting their own DPS, they're not gambling with the tanks life.

Healer DPS is entirely mandatory and non-negotiable in all content, unfortunately. Once you get more experience, though, you’ll realise not only that ‘healing’ isn’t really a thing in XIV, but that healers are all specifically designed with the intention of maximising their DPS.


The entirety of your healing can and should come from oGCD healing. You can pretty safely remove Cure / Physick / Benefic from your hotbar if you really wanted. Which means that you have a ton of time where you’re not using your GCD (and thus not doing anything).
And because support spells are too hard to implement or whatever excuse they have, literally the only option you have is DPS or nothing.

You will never be considered a ‘good healer’ unless you do high DPS. Most people would rather have a high DPS low heal healer than one with good healing but low DPS; they’d also agree that healers are better to let DPS die than interrupt their own rotation. The main reason I don’t main a Scholar is because spamming Broil II and DoTs is mind-melting levels of boring.

In my honest opinion it’s an awful system that’s perverts if what healers actually are; you either heal too much and do too little DPS or you aren’t healing enough to satisfy your party members.. But in future, if you really want to do well you pretty much have to accept that you are not a true healer. You’r3 a DPS with healing spells, or a support that deals damage while providing some healing, whatever you want to think. But you’re not a ‘healer’ in the traditional sense of the word. If you tried to play as a true healer and didn’t focus on DPS, there’s a good chance, you’ll be considered a pretty bad healer by many people’s standards.

Personally, I don’t care about a healer’s DPS unless the party has take no/negligible damage for an extended period. Even if they’re just using Cure or whatever to keep the tank topped off, I’d rather have a healer that heals too much than one that just does DPS. Some won’t be as forgiving, however.

A lot of it really is to do with how you want others to perceive you. Do you want to be seen as a good’ healer by XIV standards? Maybe you’re happy as long as is everyone is healed and aren’t bothered by how high your damage is as a healer. My advice is that I personally don’t think it’s a problem if a healer focuses too much on healing. As long as they aren’t using it as an excuse to go afk

The way fights are designed in this game, there's usually a single raid wide aoe, and a following tankbuster. For the next 20 seconds or so, there's no real damage going out other than boss auto attacks, which can be dealt with by regens.
In most cases you could just use aoe regens and let raid wide damage slowly tick everyone up too, that's how far apart the damage is.

In all that downtime, you can feel free to DPS as you like without too much to worry about. I actually find it best to think of myself as a DPS or tank. They wouldn't just stand around doing nothing, I shouldn't be either.

I don't know who "they" are, but whoever says that letting a dps die so as not to interrupt your own dps is in one of two situations:

The healer is outdpsing the dps, which shouldn't ever happen or

They're crazy because its an rdps loss to let a dps die for a healer's pdps.

This was really depressing to read. I know that since most fights are telegraphed you should know the instances when healing are needed and when not (that is ofc if everybody else know how to avoid things as well), but considering healers as pseudo dps seems like extremely faulty design. Especially since as healer you have to spam ONE spell.

At this point I wouldn't mind if they removed the need for healer dps altogether and replaced it with spammable, but conditional, support spells. Something where you have to keep track of what skills your allies are using and then use a fitting support spell accordingly. I don't know. Maybe change only AST, SCH this way and keep only the WHM as is and thus give it the unique place people are asking for.

I get the complaint about healer DPS being quite simple. It is (for White Mages and Conjurers) simply "apply DOTs, throw rocks", and ranges from being between 2 and 4 buttons. The reason it's this simple though is because it's not really designed to be "the thing you should be concentrating on" like it is for DPS classes. What you should be concentrating on is the party list so you know when someone needs healed and can respond accordingly. Healer DPS is simply something to do when no one needs to be healed- it's an alternative to "standing around looking lost." It's mandatory because standing around doing nothing is pointless, but it is only something you should if no one in the party needs you to do something else.

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Originally Posted by Belgianbeer

At this point I wouldn't mind if they removed the need for healer dps altogether and replaced it with spammable, but conditional, support spells. Something where you have to keep track of what skills your allies are using and then use a fitting support spell accordingly. I don't know. Maybe change only AST, SCH this way and keep only the WHM as is and thus give it the unique place people are asking for.

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I totally agree with the sentiment, but unfortunately the devs and players both seem very happy with the current healer playstyle. I’ve been asking for support spells for healers for ages, the role skill slot is perfect for them. But there just isn’t enough demand

Your damage per second points on those contents have to be equal or higher than your heals per second points. If it is not, change role.

Never!!!!!!!

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Originally Posted by Mirch

Your damage per second points on those contents have to be equal or higher than your heals per second points. If it is not, change role.

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Ideally, yes this is true. But ideally everyone in the party always does all mechanics correctly and never ever get caught out by AOE's and thus you rarely find yourself in a situation where you have to cast heals on them and they never need you to raise them.

Lets not forget that one of the big caps on Healer DPS is how good everyone else in the party is today.

There's enough grey areas and caveats in healing dynamics in FFXIV that there is no black or white answer to the relationships between healers, healer DPS, and healer performance.

Best healing practices are to ABCs (Always Be Casting) while doing mechanics properly. You don't necessarily have to be ABC'ing with only DPS spells though as sometimes a party is so inept you have no choice but to babysit every single party member, thus reducing the number of GCDs you can dedicate to DPS. With that being said, even in high healing situations where it consumes a lot MP, you still have access to Break for MP free damage during healing downtime

To go back answer your opening question - no healer DPS isn't mandatory. It never has been, it never will be. Your primary role in the party is to keep your party alive. Caveat (yes, there will always be a caveat) - Under min ilvl progression is an exception. Also, healer DPS could be the difference between a wipe and clear in an under performing PuG setting. I would consider this a "healer DPS is mandatory" scenario, but these are scenarios that players put themselves in to and not because of designer intent.

In my mind, what separates the healers who perform at a baseline level versus those who perform well are those who understand how to keep the party HP safe while maximizing GCD utilization. Again, this doesn't mean you need to be DPSing like a God of Destruction - it just means you're spending enough GCDs and oGCDs to keep the party alive through the content and mechanical mistakes while filling the gaps with DPS. I appreciate healers who take the time to fix player mistakes more than those who tunnel DPS. No one's perfect and people make mistakes - healers just need to rectify those mistakes.

...yes even those annoying players who don't seem to learn from their mistakes after the tenth time. But that's another topic of discussion! (please don't be one of those players, lol)

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Originally Posted by Ghishlain

...yes even those annoying players who don't seem to learn from their mistakes after the tenth time. But that's another topic of discussion! (please don't be one of those players, lol)

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The funny thing is, I take a party of noobs over a party of overgeared veterans anytime. People messing up is the only unexpected thing that can happen to you as a healer and a bit of chaos and ameliorating player mistakes is what fulfills that healer fantasy the most for me.

Honestly, there's very little excuse to not deal DPS as a healer during content. Pre-Stormblood, I would have said DPS at your own peril because you needed to worry, as a healer, things like Cleric Stance dancing (used to be a toggled oGCD that switched your MND/INT stats, so while in Cleric Stance, your heals were dramatically weaker while your DPS spells were as strong as they are now), Accuracy (you needed a huge amount of this to "hit" with your spells in hard content. Now, they changed the stats for DPS spells to use Mind, and removed the accuracy stat. Now, a healer can DPS without using Cleric Stance or worrying about their spells missing. There's literally no excuse to not DPS. If everyone is >80% HP and has regens on them and there's no AoE attack incoming for a while, why not cast damage spells to help the boss die faster or to end a phase sooner?

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Originally Posted by Belgianbeer

The funny thing is, I take a party of noobs over a party of overgeared veterans anytime. People messing up is the only unexpected thing that can happen to you as a healer and a bit of chaos and ameliorating player mistakes is what fulfills that healer fantasy the most for me.

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I mean, it's the same thing that gets me going - carrying groups that should have wiped 4 minutes ago and pulling through to a clear is one of the biggest things I enjoy about healing in general - despite that in XIV when that happens usually the group thinks you're a terrible healer because people were dying and they have no idea that 6 people all had 4 stacks of vulnerability. I can't do anything more than top you off and maybe Benison you before a tankbuster, tank. The rest is up to you.

But what people say is just generally true. ABC, always be casting. The damage structure vs the strength of our heals and our general MP economy means that once you're in a group with people used to the content - not veterans/raiders, just used to the content - you're going to find yourself with lots of downtime outside of healing and FFXIV has decided against giving us filler utility spells.

Even ASTs have been changed such that their time spent managing cards doesn't interfere as much with their normal GCD so they can just keep churning out those casts - which translates to damage since we've got nothing else to do unless things are going wrong.

It's not my preferred healing system but it's what we got, so if you have any desire to optimize or play 'well' you'll find yourself DPSing more and more. There's a few fights in normal content that have a higher healing requirement so common little screwups mean you are doing more of that triage non-stop healing, but I'd call them the exception and not the norm.

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Originally Posted by Belgianbeer

The funny thing is, I take a party of noobs over a party of overgeared veterans anytime. People messing up is the only unexpected thing that can happen to you as a healer and a bit of chaos and ameliorating player mistakes is what fulfills that healer fantasy the most for me.

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Oh, I agree and I enjoy it too. It's fun to carry had and it's why I play healers - it's the lynch pin for the entire group and I know when push comes to shove, I can carry that group.

It just gets really annoying when you're on the third attempt at O12N and the same 2-3 people die to the opening Program Alpha (not even the stack part, just the resultant AoE after the initial targeted AoE drop).

I mean, in previous FF games when your characters are full on HP and buffed, what do your healers do? You either cast a Holy spell, tried to melee (lol)....skipped their turn. In FFXIV you can either over-cure (waste of MP), throw out damage to end the fight sooner, or stand there and wait for someone's HP to drop below 80%.

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Originally Posted by Connor

Healer DPS is entirely mandatory and non-negotiable in all content, unfortunately. Once you get more experience, though, you’ll realise not only that ‘healing’ isn’t really a thing in XIV, but that healers are all specifically designed with the intention of maximising their DPS.


The entirety of your healing can and should come from oGCD healing. You can pretty safely remove Cure / Physick / Benefic from your hotbar if you really wanted. Which means that you have a ton of time where you’re not using your GCD (and thus not doing anything).
And because support spells are too hard to implement or whatever excuse they have, literally the only option you have is DPS or nothing.

You will never be considered a ‘good healer’ unless you do high DPS. Most people would rather have a high DPS low heal healer than one with good healing but low DPS; they’d also agree that healers are better to let DPS die than interrupt their own rotation. The main reason I don’t main a Scholar is because spamming Broil II and DoTs is mind-melting levels of boring.

In my honest opinion it’s an awful system that’s perverts if what healers actually are; you either heal too much and do too little DPS or you aren’t healing enough to satisfy your party members.. But in future, if you really want to do well you pretty much have to accept that you are not a true healer. You’r3 a DPS with healing spells, or a support that deals damage while providing some healing, whatever you want to think. But you’re not a ‘healer’ in the traditional sense of the word. If you tried to play as a true healer and didn’t focus on DPS, there’s a good chance, you’ll be considered a pretty bad healer by many people’s standards.

Personally, I don’t care about a healer’s DPS unless the party has take no/negligible damage for an extended period. Even if they’re just using Cure or whatever to keep the tank topped off, I’d rather have a healer that heals too much than one that just does DPS. Some won’t be as forgiving, however.

A lot of it really is to do with how you want others to perceive you. Do you want to be seen as a good’ healer by XIV standards? Maybe you’re happy as long as is everyone is healed and aren’t bothered by how high your damage is as a healer. My advice is that I personally don’t think it’s a problem if a healer focuses too much on healing. As long as they aren’t using it as an excuse to go afk

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I was 99% sure this was a really long, funny joke until I skimmed the rest of this thread.

Don't worry OP, this is like nearly all meme even if it wasn't intended this way. You'll find time to do more dps as you get more comfortable with your abilities and gear up.

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Originally Posted by Mirch

Your damage per second points on those contents have to be equal or higher than your heals per second points. If it is not, change role.

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I assume you've never healed Savage?

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Originally Posted by Belgianbeer

This was really depressing to read..

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Indeed, but it's the way of the world. As most others have mentioned, as you get more comfortable with the content you will (or should) recognize the patterns they present. At least throughout SB, every boss fight is basically 100% scripted. Meaning, once you learn the pattern, you're rotation will hardly ever change. The mantra of "Always Be Casting" is a sure way to align your rotation with the fight patterns. You'll start to figure out how many attacks you can get out between raid damage, tank busters, etc etc and it generally will always be the same (I'm excluding derpy things that happen that will mess up your "flow", but that's always a risk)

But it's not really something you can escape from. Nearly everyone in this game judges damage, not just on damage dealers but on tanks and healers as well. Can't avoid it. So you just have to embrace it and realize at the end of the day you are much more than a healer. Tanks have been debating this for years now - "but I'm a tank my job is to hold aggro". OK, a monkey can hold aggro. What separates you from a monkey? Once you get the basic responsibility of keeping people alive down, from there you grow into contributing more damage, it's the evolution of improving as a player.

How I operate:

Would anyone benefit from healing right now? No.
Are there any upcoming mechanics worth pre-healing, or mechanics in general that require healing soon? No.
>>>
Are my DoTs up? No. Aero's.
Are my DoTs up? Yes. Stone.

Rinse and repeat.

Comfort boils down to fight familiarity vs workload of the trinity - something you will get gradually by default. Until you hit that comfort level where you know a fight and the pattern, enough to know when you NEED to heal (outside of any variables, like Random Joe eating mechanics all day, or failed mechanics in general), then you'll start to know WHEN it is safe to DPS. I'm perfectly fine with people entering content and feeling uncomfortable due to lack of knowledge or experience, but when it comes to people who actually DO know a fight, I'll cringe extra-hard when I see them standing on the side-lines AFK when healthbars are full. What makes me cringe harder is that 90% of AFK healers I see don't even pre-heal... Meanwhile, as a DPS-minded Healer, if I'm in content I'm familiar with, I'll not only maintain relatively decent damage across the fight, but am also far more likely to also pre-heal or react faster despite doing both things. Again, it comes with familiarity vs attitude.

Nobody will expect you to 'compete' with DPS, but people most certainly will expect you to contribute if you have nothing else to do (which is surprisingly often). The faster things die, the less healing you have to do. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not there to keep people at 100%, I'm there to keep them alive.

~ Example, back in Ala Mhigo dungeon, the very first boss begins the fight by casting an arena-wide AoE for light damage (about 15% from squishies). This is followed by a long window where only the tank will take damage until the missile-drop phase, so little in fact that a regen will keep the tank at 100%. There is no reason for me to waste time or MP healing the party when I could help shave plenty of health off the boss, though someone going into that fight blind or unaware might not see it that way. Meanwhile, someone familiar with the fight but harbouring the "I'm not here to do damage" mentality would likely cast medica for no gain and then watching the next 15 seconds of downtime go by whilst doing absolutely nothing, waiting for healthbars to drop (which they won't unless people eat a rocket or flame-beam, or the next phase of AoE damage). Considering I've done that fight 20 bazillion times, 90% of my spells = Stone IV.

Again, you're not there to compete, but if you find yourself with nothing to do, consider at least throwing DoT's on the target. Something is better than nothing, even while you're learning.

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Originally Posted by MoroMurasaki

I assume you've never healed Savage?

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I assume he never healed anything.

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Originally Posted by Belgianbeer;

considering healers as pseudo dps seems like extremely faulty design. Especially since as healer you have to spam ONE

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Well there are over a quadrillion post on this topic so welcome :p

But as people said, it is kinda mandatory.
For instance, me and my coheal usually do around 3k dps when learning (so virtually 0 cd coordination and loads of overhead and "waiting" in case something would happen) and then we slowly raise as we learn the fight to something like 5k.

Which could be considered a fifth bad dps.

There is no way we would ever have downed any boss without that extra juice. We don't have top parser be beside ou fresh NIN, everyone is around 40~50 perf. And we're still somewhat borderline on the dps check.

Any content before savage doesn't require it tho.
Like, if we wipe for the enrage on suzaku, even if a healer had 0 dps I wouldn't blame them. The dps check is so lenient,any group with remotely competent dps should be able to down her in time.

But if you intend to enter the savage scene (which I would encourage you) you're gonna have to learn to dps.
A good start is to keep your dots up on the boss.
Then as you learn the fight try to place more broil2 in between mechanic.

Obviously, healing is always your priority.

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Originally Posted by MoroMurasaki

I assume you've never healed Savage?

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I assume you've never healed Feast?

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Originally Posted by Mirch

I assume you've never healed Feast?

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Isn't the topic "Healer dps in difficult raids and trials."?

If you want to run Ex/Savage, you may need to learn to Heal and DPS if your group constantly hits enrage. Otherwise, I could care less as long as the healer stays alive and dodge mechanics if they're only healing.

In savage raids yes healers should be contributing to the dps as much as they can without compromising the primary role.

In expert/dungeons/trails and such. Not so much.

The key thing in mind is you should always be casting. Be it healing up the tank, apply regen to the party, shielding up for damage or throwing out dots and your basic dps move if party health allows it. You should never just be standing there waiting to heal.

A it a sign of a bad healer/lazy player and b its just bad manners to the party.

If your new to content your other healer may be willing to shoulder most of the role so you can learn the fight but you should do the minimal you can to help. Be it keeping up party regen/shields and applying dots. Once you know the fight try weaving in some dps between the difficult mechanics and your normal role requirements until your more confident. Best thing you can do is communicate with your other healer and tank to gauge there abilities.

Im quite lucky I run most content with my co healer...this tend to turn into 'you do all the healing ~I'm dpsing lol.'

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Originally Posted by Belgianbeer

This was really depressing to read. I know that since most fights are telegraphed you should know the instances when healing are needed and when not (that is ofc if everybody else know how to avoid things as well), but considering healers as pseudo dps seems like extremely faulty design. Especially since as healer you have to spam ONE spell.

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I admit sometimes content can be boring if there isn't much to heal because most of what I do is reduced to broil spam while the dps and tanks actually get to continue to engage in interesting class mechanics. Broil spam bores the hell out of me.

If you aren't big on dpsing (aka itt's not that fun for you). Then just solo heal raids, simple as that. Any healer class can do it, it's rewarding, nobody will complain if you don't dps like crazy.

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Originally Posted by Mirch

I assume you've never healed Feast?

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I don't see how Feast is relevant to the discussion given the topic at hand. The title quite literally said Trials and Raids not to mention your kit in PvP and the style of gameplay in general are completely different.

Maybe read more?