As a healer, is it my job to DPS? A new perspective.

[_slowpoke_]

What I think the argument comes from is healers feeling that they are being picked on to be expected to do more then other classes for the mindless daily dungeons.

Except that expecting healers to DPS is not expecting them to do more than the other roles. It's expecting them to perform at the same level as everyone else at the very least, by always casting something, and not standing around doing nothing to contribute to the team effort for up to 100% of a pull.

The crux is that doing damage is (currently) the only meaningful and productive way to reduce downtime as a healer in this game, whether people like it or not. If we had party buffs (like Haste) to maintain in downtime, it's what we would probably do instead, but we don't, so Cleric it is. And, in my personal opinion, DPSing and stance dancing is way more fun and engaging than being a buffbot, but this is were I think different opinions are absolutely valid.

However I completely support healers who do not.

Then you openly support and therefore implicitly encourage objectively bad play. Please stop, you're not helping.

Not because I feel as though they can't do better, but because the average DPS and Tank are not doing anywhere near their best either, from my experience.

But that's not an argument, that's just a cop-out. Also, among DPS and tanks, there's no regular and recurring attempts to justify standing around doing nothing. It's general consensus that step 0 is "Always Be Casting/Attacking". Healers are the only role that has these debates.

And before anyone points out that tanks do have the debates about tank DPS, those are fundamentally different in premise, because they generally revolve around trading survivability for damage, and not around whether or not a tank should be attacking the boss all the time.

With that being said, I do think it's somewhat unfair to expect optimization from a role but not from the others.

But that's exactly what's being done - from the other roles. It's unfair that healers should be the only role that's given a free pass at being lazy when ABC is the absolute lowest level of basic, adequate play for all other roles - we're not even talking about optimizations yet.

There's really only two ways to argue here: either people take the position that ABC is also not required for the other roles, or they make a convincing and sound argument why ABC does not apply to healers. I have seen neither, and anything else is a big double-standard.

I almost never see any threads about lazy DPS or Tanks who are not using their abilities and rotations (I'll leave rotations out, abilities alone lets say) as they should.

There aren't any threads about this because, as I've pointed out above, it's basic and general consensus that DPS and tanks who don't ABC are bad. No one debates about this because no one will try to justify that a DPS player or even tank who stands around for the majority of a fight is anything but bad and lazy. We only have these endless discussions about it among healers.

But again, with of course exceptions, I don't see the DPS or Tanks doing anywhere near their best, so why is there an urge to call out the healers?

Because we're in the healer forums talking about bad healers, not bad DPS or bad tanks - which is a related issue for sure, but not the one at hand. Absolutely every role should be called out for underperforming (intentionally or not), and healers are no exception. Pointing to the other roles is merely shifting the blame and trying to distract from the issue at hand, which is that not doing damage as a healer when there is absolutely nothing else to do that would meaningfully contribute to the group is objectively bad playstyle and we have people continuously trying to defend this.

[Canadane]

And before anyone points out that tanks do have the debates about tank DPS, those are fundamentally different in premise, because they generally revolve around trading survivability for damage, and not around whether or not a tank should be attacking the boss all the time.

Heck no, it's the same argument here as the healers. Unless you will die or lose enmity focus, you should be in your offensive stance as a tank.
Like I could go on a huge tank related tangent here but it really us the same logic applied to the healers. Everyone needs to give 100%!

[Vulcwen]

Heck no, it's the same argument here as the healers. Unless you will die or lose enmity focus, you should be in your offensive stance as a tank.
Like I could go on a huge tank related tangent here but it really us the same logic applied to the healers. Everyone needs to give 100%!

It's not the same argument, tanks being in offensive stance means they take more damage, meaning the healer will need to heal more, to the point it's going to lower healer DPS, therefore the argument about tanks being in offensive stance is more about HOW much more damage they take, and whether the DPS gain outweighs the DPS loss for the healer (in addition to consistency arguments). Of course if the damage is so low, a regen/fairy can still keep you up in offensive stance, that question is easily answered. The argument for tanks is questioning whether it's optimal (and the answer depends on the situation), the argument for healers is cultural.


It's exactly because the argument for healers is cultural, that it's such a big deal. Healers contributing to DPS is optimal, there is no doubt about it. There are a few things here that tend to make people choose for a less than optimal way to play:

- Understanding of job.. You can see healing as a job, or you can see contributing to the team as your job. In the second case, you take on the ROLE of healer, because others can't do it, you have the toolkit to do it, others don't, so you do it.. but when healing is covered, you won't stop contributing. In the first case, when healing is covered, you're basically done.. doing things outside your job can piss people off, so you don't, because, yes there are tanks/DPS that bitch at healers that DPS as well, even if they do nothing wrong. Also in the real world, people can get mad if you try to help them, cause they don't want you to meddle with their problems.
Again, this is a cultural thing, and as long everyone in the group has the same understanding of the job, there is no problem.

- DPSing and healing requires some skill, to learn that skill you have to take risk of being actually detrimental to the group's performance. This risk/reward system does make the DPS healing meta fun, but can scare people off. It's very likely that you will screw up when learning it, so you will be detrimental in some of the runs you do. Whether being detrimental for a few runs at first is worth being able to contribute more later on, is a personal/cultural choice.
I personally don't mind if a new healer causes a wipe when learning how to stance dance, but other people don't want to wipe NOW so that this random healer they'll likely never meet again can speed up future runs, and possibly learn how to deal with clutch situations better.

This skill argument might overlap a little with tanks, but tanks don't experience as much risk as healers, as healers don't just need to deal with their own mistakes, but also with that of others (and failing to cover for that is still your fault).

[_slowpoke_]

Heck no, it's the same argument here as the healers. Unless you will die or lose enmity focus, you should be in your offensive stance as a tank.
Like I could go on a huge tank related tangent here but it really us the same logic applied to the healers. Everyone needs to give 100%!

Uh, no, it's not, because we're not talking about giving 100%. We're talking about basic, adequate play, which revolves around not standing around doing nothing productive for extended amounts of time. I don't expect every healer to be super-aggressively DPSing while barely (but consistently) keeping the party alive to maximize Cleric uptime, minimize overhealing, and optimize play in general (i.e., playing on Savage level). What I do expect from every healer is to minimize downtime as much as possible, just like every other role in the game, including tanks.

This is, as I have said, a fundamentally different premise from the discussions about tank DPS, which is about higher-level optimization, whereas healer DPS discussions are generally about basic, adequate play. No one in the tank forums will argue about whether or not it's okay for a tank to just spam Flash to keep enmity, and no one in the DPS section will seriously debate whether or not only autoattacking is acceptable, but this is exactly what the majority of the healer DPS discussions boil down to - people who defend doing nothing more than the absolute lowest minimum amount of contribution that is required to not fail completely (i.e., not even keeping the group alive).

Believe me, I wish we could have in-depth discussions about actual healer optimizations, both for DPS and healing (because those generally go hand in hand). But we're stuck in this endless hell of not even having a consensus about what constitutes basic adequate play for healers, because people keep on defending what is objectively bad play. Healers are the only role were people regularly and consistently start whining about elitism and being told how to play as soon as someone asks them to not stand around when they have nothing better to do and actually contribute something instead by doing damage.