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

[Dogempire]

I've brought up statistics that show that healers make a huge difference. I've also given examples of how a Healer NOT DPSing will cause a wipe. See the full pull on Fractal for example. The tank doesn't have enough cooldowns and the Healer doesn't have enough HPS to get through the fight if the Healer doesn't throw in some DPS. You will literally die.

What kind of idiotic tank pulls more mobs than the healer can handle? Obviously the wipe is the tank's fault and maybe the dps' fault to some degree, but this is by no means the healer's fault. If the tank's health was yo-yoing I sure as well wouldn't be trying to set up my DOTS, I would be stalling for time hoping the dps could burn down the mobs before the tank's health hits 0

Further it's not OPTIONAL. A bunch of people think it's optional, but SE specifically decided, after many bad people made it to 60 and were doing healz only, to add text to the game to say that you should DPS when no one needs healing.

The debate isn't over if you SHOULD be dpsing, it's on whether you HAVE to be dpsing, which is a no. Dpsing is the dps' job and if the healer wants to help out, then great. If not, then that's fine too.

Just because it's not optional, doesn't mean people will do it. There are tanks that don't use cooldowns, there are NINs who don't AoE. That makes them terrible at their job, that doesn't make those skills optional.

Exactly, there are bad players for every class, there are dpses that do less than 500 dps on level 60 content, tanks who healers have to babysit because see my signature, and healers who for some reason, are incompetent at their basic job of keeping everyone alive.

The problem with Healing is that it's disportionately bad when you have a bad healer. The thing that started to make me realize was that it was the DPSing healers that were good and the non-DPSing healers were bad, was when I saw people die often in Void Ark/Mhach when the Healers were doing zero DPS and when I regularly saw Healers in Cleric Stance I noticed no one was dying regularly that wasn't standing in stupid. And then I started noticing the same thing in DF. The healers being bad and not using Cleric were the same ones letting people die. Which is when I said "enough is enough, I'm doing to do this myself".

Simple, people who only heal are more likely to be bad healers, and people who dps and heal usually have the skill and confidence to keep the party alive while contributing dps.

When you play as a healer your first thought is "I hope nobody dies when I'm healing," not "I hope I can outdps this black mage." First you learn to keep everyone alive, then you learn to turn on the cleric stance and turn it off when you have to heal people, and even then it takes a leap of faith to do so for most people.