Do healer need to help doing dps? Especially cleric stance?

[DarkmoonVael]

In all honestly, your only job as a healer is to heal. If you're new and you aren't comfortable with "Stance Dancing" as a healer, then don't do it. Become comfortable doing your job and make sure everyone stays healed. Eventually you will become more confident and you'll start to notice more times when you can throw out some damage. It comes with time OP, you'll get the hang of it. It's never required but it's always appreciated.

Once you get confident on healer, your job is actually to embarrass DF dps by doing more damage than they are whilst keeping the party alive .

I guess i need to learn to get used with stance dancing. I have slow reflex thus bard get me the easiest time in dungeon (not much running around dodging).

So far my healing in party goes like this (80% of the time)
- tank drop to 50% i heal to full
- dots all the mobs and some dps skill on main target ( usually 2-4 times)
- by this time tank hp already drop to 50% more or less, repeat

I didnt do any dps aside from putting dot in boss fight because most of the time our dps got hit so i got my work doubled (dps being careless and some unavoided attack)

running level 38 AST now and so far it goes pretty well, i can help with dots and dps skill just without cleric stance, nobody in my party complaining so far (then again they chat in japanese so i have no idea what they talk about) but i see it later when i reach say.... Level 50+ dungeon.

And for OP future reference, quoting myself from another thread:

So the best way to deal with pulls as a Diurnal AST in dungeons is as follows:

Synastry on tank > Aspect Benefic > Swiftcast > Aspected Helios > Collective unconscious > Time Dilation > clerics > gravity. You dont have to heal the tank at all in this pull. This pull will also include the use of LA and celestial opposition. Next pull will be A.Ben+A.Helios, the use of essential dignity and lightspeed, but only IF the mobs are not dying fast enough in DF.

The use of swiftcast in the above is also entirely Global Cooldown efficiency. As Collective unconscious regen can take up 2.9 secs to register, its best swiftcasting A.Helios and using collective unconscious during the GCD to hopefully have whell of fate up before the GCD has ended and into clerics we go. .

Have fun not healing the tank in a pull with this and being able to dps as much as you want .

[Nekotee]

Since you're more or less 40ish in AST you begin to learn card combo
Take your time learning it because you might need it later XD
and card management should be done in a blink of an eye at high level you don't have time to think

...

Kudo to you to choose AST as first healer since it's the slowest to grow
Hopefuly it become quite funnier to play starting lv52 ! Gravity everything !

[Alistaire]

Since you're more or less 40ish in AST you begin to learn card combo
Take your time learning it because you might need it later XD
and card management should be done in a blink of an eye at high level you don't have time to think

...

Kudo to you to choose AST as first healer since it's the slowest to grow
Hopefuly it become quite funnier to play starting lv52 ! Gravity everything !

idk man, AST is pretty broken @ low levels, the way Essential Dignity scales it's basically benediction when you start out.

DPS capabilities are low till gravity, yeah. As much as we're supposed to be a whm/sch hybrid I really wish we had a bane equivalent.

Back to OP though there's 2 things to know/judge that will help you dps:

1. The amount your cures do.
2. How fast your particular tank is taking damage.

Clearly in a pull where tank is taking damage slowly you have more leeway to let him get lower % in HP before needing to cure.

Oh, and learn the icons for the tank cooldowns. Then you'll know "oh hey, that 30% damage down is about to wear off, he'll take damage faster soon", or "hey he just popped hallowed, time to dps or at most pop regens and a stoneskin".

[Nekotee]

AST is not broken at low level he is more... heal focused
Since he gain regen first and shield only at 50
He act as whm most of the time

Why would you give AST a bane ? He only got 2 DoTs

Otherwise i agree, you have to quickly learn to judge a tank
Is it a good tank popping CD
Or is it an asshole who doesn't use defensive cooldown gather huge pack and blame you if he die

You will meet both in your healing journey XD

[Alistaire]

Having an ogcd cure for no mp that fills tank's hp no matter what, on a 40 second cooldown, allows a LOT more room to dps. In lower end dungeons you can practically rely solely on ED for tank cures. You could probably /follow the tank, set a macro to pop it on cooldown 15 times in a row and go make a sandwich, and he'd be fine.

[Mattelot]

A healer is not required to ever DPS. Some people can get away with it and nobody will complain but if someone ever tells you that you have to or you're bad if you don't... they're wrong. I rarely ever DPS as a healer. If I want to DPS, i'll switch my stone from Sch to Smn. I play a healer to heal.

Actually, the other day in Antitower, there was a Mch in my party who was doing extremely low DPS and told me once we got to the last boss "this will go very slow if the healer does not DPS, so can you throw some in?" I didn't reply. The boss got down to 30% HP and the Mch said "if you do not DPS, we will wipe." I still didn't DPS and we completed the boss with 0 deaths.

[Normalizer]

I don't really care if the healer (or my co-healer) dps or not, but it irritate me greatly, very very annoying, when i see a healer who jumping up and down all over place pretending to be busy, while only cast cure every 10 or 15 sec, or spamming too much medica/medica 2 while people are at full health and run out of mana, half-heartedly doing it while watching netflix, let the fairies heal while afk following a team member... :/ Those are the worst, and i really hope they will stop play like that...
And to answer your question, at level 60 when you start out-geared most of the content, you will find yourself turn into those irritating healers if you don't dps, because at that level you hardly need to heal if the party is decent.

[Taika]

At level 60 there's no fight (apart from maybe A8S which I haven't personally experienced) where a healer would have to be healing all the time. In fact, some of the level 60 dungeons or primal fights require very little healing during many fights. Since tanks and DDs are constantly doing something during the fights to help the party reach their goal, it's only fair that the healers do the same. And if there's no healing required, that time should be spent by helping the party through DPS. Considering healers are capable of doing some really good DPS numbers (even better than some DDs in expert dungeons, for example), not bringing this benefit to your party can be considered lazy and rude.

However, when you're just starting out as a healer, leveling up or doing new content for the first time, no one should expect you to go all out on DPS. Learn it one step at a time, and it's completely fine to first practice throwing some DoTs out of cleric stance before starting to practice stance dancing.

[Alistaire]

A healer is not required to ever DPS. Some people can get away with it and nobody will complain but if someone ever tells you that you have to or you're bad if you don't... they're wrong. I rarely ever DPS as a healer. If I want to DPS, i'll switch my stone from Sch to Smn. I play a healer to heal.

Actually, the other day in Antitower, there was a Mch in my party who was doing extremely low DPS and told me once we got to the last boss "this will go very slow if the healer does not DPS, so can you throw some in?" I didn't reply. The boss got down to 30% HP and the Mch said "if you do not DPS, we will wipe." I still didn't DPS and we completed the boss with 0 deaths.

While that's exaggerating it dungeon running should never be about "will we make it?" but "will this be a 15 or 30+ minute run". I'd prefer the 15 minute runs considering how often I do them.

As far as not even replying to a request though? I'll take a 30-minute run if it means I get to boot someone acting like that.

[bounddreamer]

When I first started healing, I did very little dps. I focused on healing. The more I leveled and the more confident I got, I slowly began adding dps to my rotation. I talked to other healers about tips and tricks. It wasn't until I'd been level 50+ for a while that I became confident in my ability to both dps and do my proper job as healer. Once you reach a certain point it's even boring not to dps. But, you should do what you're comfortable with. I would say start with conjurer then switch to scholar because you'll have the fairy to help support your healing.