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

[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.