Rant on healers acting as a dps role

[Judge_Xero]

I also see my FC teaching SCHs that they are the "off/support" healer in 8+ content should be spending the vast majority of their time in cleric. Seems that's still the general meta in endgame groups as well...

Yeah, that's a point I don't quite agree with as well. I mean, SCH is awesome as a DPS/Sub Healer but there's also points where WHM really shines as well for Burst DPS, where SCH should take over temporarily and on the flip side with SCH's new tool kit they can dish out some solid burst AOE heals.

I'm not too sure on the AST synergy as far as DPS/Healing swaps, but I'm sure it's similar.

Both healers really need to work together with their toolkits to really get the most out of their jobs and the SCH DPS only meta while useable, doesn't really cover all the bases for party synergy.

[Ghishlain]

And yet I do see this attitude creeping into endgame linkshells. Some healers, if they have to step out of cleric, it's basically "wtf".

As in, the other healer might have made a mistake, or a tank might have, or a DPS might have stood in something. Either way, someone screwed up and they need to git gud/be repped.

I also see my FC teaching SCHs that they are the "off/support" healer in 8+ content should be spending the vast majority of their time in cleric. Seems that's still the general meta in endgame groups as well...

Unfortunately, most people give advice without providing proper context to what the advice is actually suppose to entail. Advocating "100% CLERIC STANCE SCH" is akin to tanks advocating "STR TANKS OR BUST" and without properly explaining WHY this is effective will eventually lead to failures. These SCHs or Tanks feel they're doing it right but are actually doing it terribly wrong and getting people / themselves killed because they aren't (in the case of SCH) providing proper party support at correct intervals or (in the tank example) not using their cooldowns properly / not enough HP to survive tank busters and expect their healer to do the bulk of the work in that case.

Encouraging higher levels of play is important as long as the foundation for this higher level of play is created first. Telling a SCH "Cleric's 100% of GTFO" without context doesn't cultivate any adaptability and just prevents the growth of a player. I just wish more people would understand this. *Shakes head* (this isn't a knock against you directly, just my general soapboxing about the playerbase)

[Syzygian]

This really begs the question of what a healer or healers do when no healing is required, or what one healer should do when the other healer has the healing on lockdown. It throws the party out of balance.

For one thing, as a tank, if at least one healer isn't at the very least breaking triple digits on DPS, that takes away my incentive to mitigate damage outside of my own self-preservation (by itself, not an effective motivator for a tank).

If all healers do is heal, then it also becomes an issue of enmity as healing generates approximately 2-3 metric fucktons more hate than just DPSing, which takes away my incentive to DPS as well because then I have to turn on Grit and/or start worrying about hate when I would have otherwise been free to DPS and rotate cooldowns.

So its a conflict of interest with both my mitigation, enmity, and DPS. Healers are designed to DPS they have half of their toolkit and a stance dedicated to it and there is never the kind of outgoing damage in any fight wherein, if a healer(s) only heal, they will not be either A: overhealing or B: sitting there doing nothing for a significant portion of the fight.

Its not about doing your job, its about efficiency. If you are meeting the encounter's requirements for mitigating damage and healing as a tank/healer respectively, any efforts beyond that threshold towards those goals are not a worthwhile use of your toolkit and are excessive. At that point, you need to be DPSing.

Almost every skilled healer in the game that I know lets me and other tanks drop to a given threshold before they start healing and does DPS leading up to that point. I do what I can to mitigate damage to extend that while also maximizing DPS (for a tank these things go hand-in-hand though, I don't have to stop tanking to DPS). If I'm taking 15 seconds of auto attacks to drop below 15K and my max HP is 17K, and I'm getting healed every 5 seconds for 3.5K, that's just wasteful. Its not good. Dunno how else to say it.

Hell, things like Medica and Succor are heals, sure, but by design they're actually intended to buy you time. That time isn't time for you to sit there curing cancer, its time for you to DPS.

[Risvertasashi]

Yeah, that's a point I don't quite agree with as well. I mean, SCH is awesome as a DPS/Sub Healer but there's also points where WHM really shines as well for Burst DPS, where SCH should take over temporarily and on the flip side with SCH's new tool kit they can dish out some solid burst AOE heals.

Agreed. WHM is really the better choice in some circumstances but the ARR attitude is so ingrained...

-snip-

I do not disagree with you at all. What is interesting to me-- Well, suppose you consider a healer's responsibility to be the following:

1. Heal (or mitigate, etc) unavoidable damage.
2. Fix mistakes (heal avoidable damage, res)
3. DPS

I'm seeing more in endgame LS healers that know the theory... and want to cut out #2 completely. So that's the attitude I'm referring to. The "wtf" comes not from a lack of understanding of the theory, but from the expectation of perfection.

[Ghishlain]

I do not disagree with you at all. What is interesting to me-- Well, suppose you consider a healer's responsibility to be the following:

1. Heal (or mitigate, etc) unavoidable damage.
2. Fix mistakes (heal avoidable damage, res)
3. DPS

I'm seeing more in endgame LS healers that know the theory... and want to cut out #2 completely. So that's the attitude I'm referring to. The "wtf" comes not from a lack of understanding of the theory, but from the expectation of perfection.

In some respects, I can't disagree with them. Depending on the content and the party's ilvl, the only way to clear the content is absolute perfection (A3S and A4S say hi).

But... that mentality for say... Void Ark? Well, they're barking up the wrong tree, that's for sure.

[Risvertasashi]

In some respects, I can't disagree with them. Depending on the content and the party's ilvl, the only way to clear the content is absolute perfection (A3S and A4S say hi).

But... that mentality for say... Void Ark? Well, they're barking up the wrong tree, that's for sure.

I can't disagree with your first point. Some content does require it. But... Well, for example, I got into an argument with an LS person about Thordan. That fight, a lot of mistakes are recoverable, but the person I argued with just thinks recovery should not be part of a healer's job description at all. If someone makes a mistake (of any role), they're on their own.

Obviously I don't agree with that but I have to be careful about where I voice that opinion. And my perception (might not be the same across all servers and colored by the people I associate with, I know) is this is an upwards trend.

[Judge_Xero]

@Risvertasashi

Wow I hope that isn't a largely accepted principle on your server. Really, if anyone is going to recover a fight it is going to be the healers and/or a combination of skilled tanks and SMN Res, but mainly any form of recovery requires healers.

[Sidra]

I can't disagree with your first point. Some content does require it. But... Well, for example, I got into an argument with an LS person about Thordan. That fight, a lot of mistakes are recoverable, but the person I argued with just thinks recovery should not be part of a healer's job description at all. If someone makes a mistake (of any role), they're on their own.

Obviously I don't agree with that but I have to be careful about where I voice that opinion. And my perception (might not be the same across all servers and colored by the people I associate with, I know) is this is an upwards trend.

Obviously you don't want people to make mistakes. But it is asinine to intentionally not heal them let them die to the next mechanic and cause the group to start over or just slow down a win. While there are definitely some boneheads who play this game, I highly doubt that is a widespread opinion anywhere.

[Ashkendor]

Had this with a DF'd SCH in A3, a while back, with a party that stood in everything, I was the main healer and DPS so low we nearly hit enrage with a million cascades that were filled with medica spam with our lives depending on DS/PoM/whichever was up at the time.
At the end, the SCH left a biting remark about having to drop Cleric/stop DPSing somewhere in there (not that it felt like they did, at all).
I wanted to scratch their eyes out. :|

See, that's just not right. I love to DPS as SCH, but if there are things that keep me from doing that it's not the end of the damn world and I'm not going to yell at the other healer for it, especially since it's very likely that it isn't their fault at all. Whether it's an undergeared healing partner, DPS standing in the stupids, low damage, whatever, the fact of the matter is that I queued as a healer and I accepted that as my primary role when I did so. With a partner that's willing and able shoulder the bulk of the healing, I can put out some decent numbers (better than the DPS in some cases but that's a different story entirely...) but the second I see that things are getting out of hand, I drop cleric stance and go back to healing until the situation stabilizes. If things are really going south, I just never go back to CS at all. The way I see it, everyone in the instance queued up with the common goal to clear the content. Me pushing my own personal numbers (as fun as it is) is secondary to that goal.

I can't disagree with your first point. Some content does require it. But... Well, for example, I got into an argument with an LS person about Thordan. That fight, a lot of mistakes are recoverable, but the person I argued with just thinks recovery should not be part of a healer's job description at all. If someone makes a mistake (of any role), they're on their own.

Obviously I don't agree with that but I have to be careful about where I voice that opinion. And my perception (might not be the same across all servers and colored by the people I associate with, I know) is this is an upwards trend.

Thordan is very recoverable at a lot of points in the fight, especially early on. A healer that's not willing to leave cleric stance to help someone recover from a mistake is basically deliberately wiping the group IMO. Repeated mistakes, that's an issue where you may need to look at replacing someone, but everyone screws up once in awhile no matter how long they've been farming the content.

I wonder how that healer would feel if the BRD/MCH told them they were on their own for mana management.

[TatoRazzino]

The issue, as usual, is people putting the cart before the horses. No one should solo heal in their first attempts of any fight, because that hinders progression.

The off-healer is there to help the main healer do his/her job, not to be a pure DPS. Like the OP said, if that was the case a DPS job would be better. The whole point of the off-healer is adding DPS when two healers are not needed. The thing is: you can't possibly know that before you learn the fight. In my opinion, both healers should be on standby waiting in the first pulls or when the group reaches a new phase; when both healers are comfortable, the off-healer can start adding DPS when healing is not needed. That requires several pulls, knowledge of mechanics and a lot of practice. Also: it requires communication and raid awareness; off-healers should be able to react very fast, so they can drop out of cleric when they're needed.

A SCH should, ideally, spend most of his/her time in cleric; that's what the job was made for, that much is clear. However, this ideal situation only comes when the party is on "farm" status (i.e., knows the fight by heart and can one shot it easily). "Learning" status is a completely different scenario: 90% of the time the off-healer will be healing or mitigating damage until both healers know the flow of damage in the fight; then they can both decide when mitigation should or should not be used, when it's ok to be in cleric. "Clear" status is when enrage has been hit multiple times, so the off-healer needs to be pro-active in DPS while paying attention to the flow of damage, expecting mistakes.

This meta is not a problem; it's actually very fun and challenging. The real problem is with bad players that spend most of their time in reddit or on youtube watching professional groups instead of actually learning their job. They see Elysium clears and believe that's how they should approach a fight for the first time. "Fuck you, I'll stay in Cleric like Elysium's off healer". That's completely absurd. Those players simply ignore the learning process of a fight; Elysium learns the fight before they clear it and upload it, and the learning process is not there, but it exists.

The OP should take Ghishlain's advice and communicate with his/her co-healer. Propose a course of action, a learning process and everything will be fine. Pay attention, while learning a fight, to the flow of damage and tell your off-healer when he should or shouldn't help you. Be pro-active and try to solo heal some parts that seem hard, but don't be afraid to tell your co-healer they need to help with healing. That's what they're there for.