Dear Healers that don't DPS in dungeons

[Steeled]

I have been dps'ing as heals since level 30. I know the instances well and know the pulls or tanks that require me to purely heal, but if I can sneak a bane in, I'm helping.

It's been quite good practice.

Honestly, I don't hold back on any tank and the reason for this is that I know what he's going to encounter at 50. The ones "doing it wrong" may cuss at me under their breath, or in party chat, but when they reach 50, they'll owe me a thanks even if they don't realize it. If a tank is having agro problems every pull, i'll shut cleric stance off.

Also, most the tanks that lose hate to my dps agro would lose it to my healing agro too, because hitting overpower or flash more than once is really really hard.

[LiadansWhisper]

The only way to get comfortable is to push yourself. Nobody is magically able to DPS and heal at optimal efficiency; it takes practice. Once a healer is comfortable with the healing part of WHM/SCH, they should start mixing in DPS when healing is not needed at certain parts of the fight. Similarly, once I was comfortable with the easy skill rotation for DRG I moved to the more difficult but optimal one, because that simply makes me more valuable to the group.

Now if we are talking about someone who can't move to the next step of DPS'ing when healing is not needed because they are not yet comfortable doing just healing, then they should indeed stick to just healing. But we're no longer talking about the cream of the crop WHMs and SCHs in this case.

You get "comfortable" by running with a static group. Which most players don't end up doing until they hit 50.

[Kewitt]

I am a war 50 and WHM 50.
I haven't used my WHM to much it's from 1.xx

But I understand how helpful Holy is on low HP mobs that spawn in WP.
I was running as DF WP, I ask the WHM Please holy adds on 2nd boss and they said nope.
Then called me elitist.

I'm not sure how asking someone to do something that will help the party elitist.

I don't care if you Full DPS the dungeon but there are times when it really helps.

[Freakiie]

You get "comfortable" by running with a static group. Which most players don't end up doing until they hit 50.

You do? That's weird, I DFed my entire DL and I sure as hell was "comfortable" with DPSing in WP. I didn't know mobs and bosses didn't follow a set pattern of attacks until after you form a static group, must've missed the memo on that.

[GuardianX]

I'm a whm and rule number 1 in an engagement is to be prepared to heal your team when needed. Rule number 2 is always DOT on every target that's being engaged. Presence of mind is not that great but I make due with it. In the first 30 sec of a boss fight, I regen and stoneskin tank. Then I DOT and hit presence of mind and spam stone 2 while in cleric stance. It ls the best I can make of POM in this situation.

[LiadansWhisper]

You do? That's weird, I DFed my entire DL and I sure as hell was "comfortable" with DPSing in WP. I didn't know mobs and bosses didn't follow a set pattern of attacks until after you form a static group, must've missed the memo on that.

Curious. Is this your first MMO as a healer or have you done this before? Did you have other classes to 50 before you leveled a healer class?

[Ragnaro]

Both healer classes are made to be able to dps as well as heal. If the healer isn't doing much healing, because it's not needed, why not let them dps? SCH is always able to use bio, miasma etc and then heal. When I tank dungeons, I ask the healer to dps (especially on bosses) if they aren't busy healing. Can make some fights so much quicker and easier.

[Freakiie]

Curious. Is this your first MMO as a healer or have you done this before? Did you have other classes to 50 before you leveled a healer class?

While I do have my fair share of experience in MMOs which helps me pick up stuff faster than most people I really don't think it should take people more than a few runs to figure out WP/AK. Those dungeons are so horribly straightforward the only way not to pick up what to do is by paying more attention to your **** than FF. Especially in the DF where you generally aren't speedrunning there's simply a limit to how much damage your tank can receive, unless he makes sure to get hit by every AoE there is, so unless he's severly undergeared there's a massive amount of downtime as a healer.

I'm not expecting a firsttimer to go in there, stancedance around and nuke everything, but even as firsttimer you should realise that if you're standing around scratching your butt because your tank has near full HP that tossing out a few DoTs and perhaps a Stone II might just move things along even that little bit faster. Considering that even as Whm, where mana can be a problem, you already ran multiple instances with Shroud and even improved Shroud by that time you should start realising that, unless you're perma spamming Cure II/Medica (Admittedly some Whms do this *sigh*), mana really shouldn't be the issue it was in the early dungeons anymore.

Basically by the time you hit 50 and start running the dungeons everyone does over and over and you generally want to be done with as soon as possible you should have enough experience as a Healer (assuming it was your first class) that at least healing is already something you do automatic and it doesn't require all your attention just to keep a party alive through something like WP/AK. At that point there are two things you can do. Scratch your butt because there's no healing to be done or start looking for ways to help the party in other ways than healing, which with the tools we got so far leaves you with nothing but DDing. Now you can tell me that you don't like DDing, but last time I checked scratching your butt while staring at a bunch of HP bars that don't move in a dungeon you've already done far too often wasn't all that interesting either.

[LiadansWhisper]

While I do have my fair share of experience in MMOs which helps me pick up stuff faster than most people I really don't think it should take people more than a few runs to figure out WP/AK. Those dungeons are so horribly straightforward the only way not to pick up what to do is by paying more attention to your **** than FF. Especially in the DF where you generally aren't speedrunning there's simply a limit to how much damage your tank can receive, unless he makes sure to get hit by every AoE there is, so unless he's severly undergeared there's a massive amount of downtime as a healer.

I'm not expecting a firsttimer to go in there, stancedance around and nuke everything, but even as firsttimer you should realise that if you're standing around scratching your butt because your tank has near full HP that tossing out a few DoTs and perhaps a Stone II might just move things along even that little bit faster. Considering that even as Whm, where mana can be a problem, you already ran multiple instances with Shroud and even improved Shroud by that time you should start realising that, unless you're perma spamming Cure II/Medica (Admittedly some Whms do this *sigh*), mana really shouldn't be the issue it was in the early dungeons anymore.

Basically by the time you hit 50 and start running the dungeons everyone does over and over and you generally want to be done with as soon as possible you should have enough experience as a Healer (assuming it was your first class) that at least healing is already something you do automatic and it doesn't require all your attention just to keep a party alive through something like WP/AK. At that point there are two things you can do. Scratch your butt because there's no healing to be done or start looking for ways to help the party in other ways than healing, which with the tools we got so far leaves you with nothing but DDing. Now you can tell me that you don't like DDing, but last time I checked scratching your butt while staring at a bunch of HP bars that don't move in a dungeon you've already done far too often wasn't all that interesting either.

That's great.

I've encountered healers at 50 who don't know what Esuna does. I've encountered healers at 50 who don't know how to target switch at all (literally, they can only heal one person, and if you ask them to do more than that, they don't know what to do). Healers who think that any little bit of damage calls for Medica. Healers who don't know what their CDs do (despite the fact that the tooltips tell you what they do), who don't understand the purpose of Shroud of Saints, who don't know what stats they should be looking for, much less what each stat does. At 50.

I'll also remind you that if you're using the random Duty Finder to run AK or WP, every single run is going to be different. You'll have your clockwork runs where everyone knows what they're doing. Your runs where no one knows what they're doing. You'll run with the tanks in full Coil gear (assuming they even queue >.>), and then you'll run with the tanks who refuse to wear their AF gear because it's "ugly" and insist on using level 40 armor because it's "prettier." You're going to run into the DPS with broken gear who dies every other second from standing in things (that wouldn't one-shot him if his gear wasn't broken, but...). You'll get the people who know what an interrupt is, and those who do not. Those who can follow marked orders, and those who just DPS whatever the hell they feel like. Those who understand what CC is and how to use it, and those who just stand around with their thumbs up their butts while the tank is getting pounded into dust. The random Duty Finder is just that - random. And I hear enough bitching and moaning from other players every single day to know that it's incredibly hit or miss as to what kind of group you'll get.

And into this incredibly chaotic, confusing environment, you expect someone who has never played a healer before in any game, or for whom this may be their very first MMO, to just "get it" in one or two runs.

Okay. Sure.

And therefore, because you have not encountered any of these difficulties, and because "getting it" was easy for you, it should be easy for everyone.

Seriously, I would rather have a healer not DPS at all if they are unsure. I would rather have them do nothing but heal, if that is what they are comfortable with. Because I can live without the DPS - that's what DPS are there for. But I really, really, really need the healer to be healing when the shit hits the fan.

[Freakiie]

Sure, I'm not the norm. But neither are any of those cases you mention. Like I said, I DFed my entire DL. I DFed quite a bit of Myth tomes after that as well. I've had like 2 complete fails in that time? One run with an Arcanist and another with a tank that was just completely undergeared. Who knows, perhaps it helps that I do WP a lot more than AK, but I'm not gonna write off the DF just because I had 2 bad WP runs out off the nearly 100 I've done by now.

So just because you found a bad healer it doesn't mean every healer is bad. Just because you can mention a few extremes it doesn't change that on your average DF run there's plenty off downtime for a healer and generally there are no firsttimers simple because the pool off experienced players is that much bigger. If you manage to get into 3 WP runs in a row where everyone is undergeared, has no clue and it's absolute panic then I think you won the lottery. It's so much more likely that you'd get 3 parties in a row where the other 3 people got relics and then aside from those people there's another massive pool off people that know what to do, got some DL pieces (thus already outgearing WP) and are simply farming their remaining DL before facing Titan.