Regarding healers acting as DPS

[Twilite]

What's the point in having true DPS jobs?

[NamoNanamo]

This is an attitude I can not understand. The willingness to not be better at the game. Games exist for you to be good at, that should always be the goal. MMOs are unique in that they reward time spent more often than player skill, but in every other final fantasy game you would be spamming the crap out of Holy and lamenting all the wasted turns your white mage had nothing to do. That's why everyone loved red mage in games that were not FFXI. Because they were a white mage that wasn't fucking useless.

You are a funny guy.

[LegoTechnic]

What's the point in having true DPS jobs?

A true DPS class performing its best will easily do twice the DPS of a healer on a single target who acts as a DPS most of the time and drops out occasionally to spot or mechanic heal. Even as SCH while your DPS is considerable, you simply don't have the tools to catch up to even a BRD or MCH if they're played well, and if there's one thing that Alex Savage has it's massive personal DPS checks. This is especially true for A4S.

Healers are faced with two unique aspects to avoid, one being "overhealing" as that's wasteful, and on the counter side "inactivity". You don't see DPS or Tanks standing around letting auto-attack do its thing while they wait for a vulnerbility buff if they're any good, so there's the thought that healers shouldn't stand around just watching meters either. So what are your options? You could spam heals on the party at intervals, but this is largely wasteful if regen or shields are already taking care of the damage, or if one healer suffices for the current tank damage. Your other option is to switch to cleric stance and drop some DPS, and I think this is the issue that people have trouble with.

Cleric stance imposes a 5-second lock when cast where it can't be immediately turned off, and every healer out there who has switched to cleric has at some point in time wished they could have taken it back as they went DPS and watched the tank suddenly stand in an aoe. Five seconds doesn't feel long, but it can be, and generally I think there's a fear both of switching at the wrong time and then not being able to switch out, or worse yet trying to switch out and then failing to due to wonky command queuing and then healing while still in cleric without realizing it (it happens to us all sometimes). That's a unique kind of stress, and possibly people don't like it. There is also the fear of running out of mana, especially on an AST, and this is also a valid concern, but one you can manage with experience in a fight, as practice will show you how much you can burn and how fast.

But as a healer if your heals aren't required, if your tank can manage for a few seconds without you, if your instant heal is up and ready and if your contribution to overall damage makes a long fight faster, then your additional DPS is making things easier for the raid in general. You are shortening the fight by doing more than expected, giving everyone but yourself an easier time through personal contribution. You are helping to carry the raid.

And isn't that what healers do? We carry the rest of the mooks, so that even when they mook about and kiss the floor we still win?

[Seryl199]

Nobody posts a video of an 89 minute Fractal and says "look how good we are at this game".

(as long as it is not ridiculosly super-slow.)

You seem to have glossed over this line. You can absolutely be a good healer and not DPS. A good healer can save the group from a botched pull or a missed mechanic, they can be on point with mitigative abilities, shields, and pre-casted heal bombs and AoE's. I agree that a better healer does all that and DPS's too, but not DPS'ing doesn't make someone a bad healer.

Healers sit in a weird place, especially considering that the efficacy of a player's skill is measured in damage output. The mindset of a DPS healer is to do as much healing in as little time possible, and an absolute minimum amount of healing any other time. The healer's role, in this case, is to heal as little as possible. In other words, better healers, drawing from our previous conclusion, are the healers who heal the least. It's a strange paradigm at best. DPS healers exist to the extent that they do because their abilities are massively overtuned for a significant portion of content, they have few supporting abilities in their kit outside of DPS skills, and those few supporting abilities (namely CC), are entirely irrelevant in all instanced content.

As long as healers continue to remain under-taxed, with an often redundant amount of healing power when coupled with a proficient tank, and have no meaningful support abilities, healers will always end up with a certain amount of down time, resulting in healers off DPS'ing. I love pushing my classes to their limits, and since DPS is the only means to do it as a healer, I do it, and I enjoy it, to an extent. But it's far from engaging the actual healing role. We end up using our CD's to create borrowed time in which to DPS, rather than using CD's to combat higher amounts of incoming damage, or unique split healing situations, because such a thing hardly exists in most instanced content. Healers are unique in that they have no real rotation, and much of the role comes down to decision making, what tools to use in your kit when, and yet, there's hardly a choice to be made when most of your abilities can sit unused through much of many battles that don't offer raid levels of challenge.

[Risvertasashi]

The healer's role, in this case, is to heal as little as possible. In other words, better healers, drawing from our previous conclusion, are the healers who heal the least.

There are some healers in my raid LSs that absolutely have this attitude. Their attitude towards DPS (or even tanks) who play with less than absolutely perfection--tell them to git gud and kick them. This isn't just dungeons either... Thordan EX can be solo healed so why take 2 healers when you can have 5 DPS? That's the sort of argument they make. And if they ever stand in something, even if it's not (immediately) lethal--kick 'em.

[Blessedbythesun]

-snip-

You don't understand because you are making assumptions and disingenuous assertions. My point of view is an opinion that is meant for people to enjoy playing the game at the end of the day. I am an endgame SCH, I personally DPS plenty, but because I want to. Not out of necessity.

What is killing me is just months ago in 2.0 to the end, everything was so methodical and healing intensive, that healing DPS was kept at the minimal or not required at all to make sure we concentrated on dealing with the mechanics and unavoidable damage every step of the way.

Now that everything is a DPS check lately, it went from healer overall party DPS to DPS now or you suck, even if they are half assing it just so players like you would consider them "good".

[Immut]

You don't understand because you are making assumptions and disingenuous assertions. My point of view is an opinion that is meant for people to enjoy playing the game at the end of the day. I am an endgame SCH, I personally DPS plenty, but because I want to. Not out of necessity.

What is killing me is just months ago in 2.0 to the end, everything was so methodical and healing intensive, that healing DPS was kept at the minimal or not required at all to make sure we concentrated on dealing with the mechanics and unavoidable damage every step of the way.

Now that everything is a DPS check lately, it went from healer overall party DPS to DPS now or you suck, even if they are half assing it just so players like you would consider them "good".

Right that's why the goal was always to single tank and single heal all progression content. You didn't have it on farm until you had 6 dps.


When the difference between a healer dpsing and a healer standing there doing nothing is nearly 10 minutes in a dungeon that only takes half an hour if you're absolute trash, yes I'm going to expect you to DPS.

[SulwynCaliope]

Right that's why the goal was always to single tank and single heal all progression content. You didn't have it on farm until you had 6 dps.


When the difference between a healer dpsing and a healer standing there doing nothing is nearly 10 minutes in a dungeon that only takes half an hour if you're absolute trash, yes I'm going to expect you to DPS.

I seriously think people over estimate how much time healer DPS shaves off dungeon clear time. Maybe if the tank is mass pulling and the WHM is holying + keeping the tank alive like a boss, then sure you can save maybe 10 minutes of your time. But most healers can't even come close to accomplishing a feat like that. Either the tank ends up dying and you waste more time or the healer doesn't have time to cleric stance at all, save the first few seconds of the fight, because he/ she is trying to keep the tank alive.

[MistakeNot]

When the difference between a healer dpsing and a healer standing there doing nothing is nearly 10 minutes in a dungeon that only takes half an hour if you're absolute trash, yes I'm going to expect you to DPS.

Why? I mean, 20 minutes vs 30 minutes for a dungeon run is not enough of a difference to be worth caring about.

[AlphaSonic]

Why? I mean, 20 minutes vs 30 minutes for a dungeon run is not enough of a difference to be worth caring about.

Well reducing 33% of the time needed to do a dungeon is a really big difference.