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

[LadyKairi]

snip

This. You get a cookie.

When I started healing, I wanted be great. I tried all I could to better myself, which included dpsing and healing. It took me a little bit to get the hang of it, but I practiced A LOT. Now I get many compliments on my ability as a healer. It's unbelievably satisfying, and I don't understand why others don't strive for this? Even leveling I never understood the hate for AV and the vault. They've always been my favorites and have never been hard for me. If you grasp what your skills do, and if you use them appropriately, you shouldn't have a problem. Healing is so much more than spamming cure/cure II

[Bourne_Endeavor]

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People typically have an aversion to anything outside their preferred comfort level or that radically deviations from what they're accustom to. I find many healers who cling to the belief they should only heal come from WoW or even single player games where you have a specific role to fill and do little else. Honestly, healers are more like a support role in FFXIV, especially with the addition of Astro.

[Feyona]

People typically have an aversion to anything outside their preferred comfort level or that radically deviations from what they're accustom to. I find many healers who cling to the belief they should only heal come from WoW or even single player games where you have a specific role to fill and do little else. Honestly, healers are more like a support role in FFXIV, especially with the addition of Astro.

Just curious do you play healer in Alexander savage? Because you sound like you know alot about what a healer can do and even how they think apprently

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Just curious do you play healer in Alexander savage? Because you sound like you know alot about what a healer can do and even how they think apprently

No, but I know the roles and have played with plenty of very skilled healers. One managed to pull over 1,200 DPS on his opening rotation in A11S. That amount of raid contribution is immense, and while many wouldn't be able to pull it off. Even half as much still contributes substantially to the raid.

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How is my experiences false? I specifically stated "I find," thus insinuating a subjective stance. Likewise, I also said my "assumptions" towards healers only stems to those who willfully gimp themselves by refusing to DPS out of principle. You've seen enough of my posts to know I actually support weakening healing potency or readjusting content in some manner to better emphasize healing. Nonetheless, until that happens, any healer who refuses to adapt to FFXIV's design is lazy.

[loreleidiangelo]

How is my experiences false? I specifically stated "I find," thus insinuating a subjective stance. Likewise, I also said my "assumptions" towards healers only stems to those who willfully gimp themselves by refusing to DPS out of principle. You've seen enough of my posts to know I actually support weakening healing potency or readjusting content in some manner to better emphasize healing. Nonetheless, until that happens, any healer who refuses to adapt to FFXIV's design is lazy.

You said "many", and that just hasn't been my experience, is all. Our raid WHM, as well as my BF (who is indifferent to the whole thing and doesn't really "get" why it bugs me so much) are WoW veterans. Meanwhile, me, who opposes the current meta, had FFXIV as my first ever MMO.

Sorry, I suppose I read too much into it. It just seemed like a subtle dig at people from the language you used, but you're right, I shouldn't have gotten defensive.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

You said "many", and that just hasn't been my experience, is all. Our raid WHM, as well as my BF (who is indifferent to the whole thing and doesn't really "get" why it bugs me so much) are WoW veterans. Meanwhile, me, who opposes the current meta, had FFXIV as my first ever MMO.

Sorry, I suppose I read too much into it. It just seemed like a subtle dig at people from the language you used, but you're right, I shouldn't have gotten defensive.

Fair enough. Perhaps I could have worded it a bit better. In my experience, it has been many WoW players or just people from single player games used to setting up one character as "the healer" who dislike DPSing. Granted, I'm more referring to people who won't DPS on principle, not someone like, well, yourself, who dislikes the game design as a whole because it encourages so much healer DPS. Honestly, I'd love for them to emphasizing healing since whenever I do play healer, I want to actually be healing. It's one reason I'm not a huge fan of Scholar.

No worries though!

[loreleidiangelo]

People typically have an aversion to anything outside their preferred comfort level or that radically deviations from what they're accustom to. I find many healers who cling to the belief they should only heal come from WoW or even single player games where you have a specific role to fill and do little else. Honestly, healers are more like a support role in FFXIV, especially with the addition of Astro.

This is pretty patently false. FFXIV was my first MMO, and I think that for the most part, healing should be the primary aspect of the healer role. I don't deliberately do poorly in content because of that belief, but I also haven't played since 3.3 largely because of that. (Dropping my raid team had a bit to do with it too, because for the most part the non-raid content here bores me - but why did non-raid content bore me? Because I wasn't enjoying healing it.)

As I once said on Reddit re: XIV's healer DPS - in the end, they're ALL just buttons we push, but what those buttons DO actually plays a lot into a person's personal satisfaction with the role and the sort of archetype they like to play. I hate when people assume things about healers that only want to heal, like they want to be lazy or whatever. I don't want to be lazy, I just get way more satisfaction out of pushing those health bars up than I do smashing those mob health bars down. I like green numbers instead of white numbers, and that's not a crime, ffs. Do I support people intentionally balking against the game's design when they're perfectly capable of adapting to the "rules" the XIV community has laid out? Of course not, but when someone says "I just want to heal, not DPS" I can totally empathize with that. We're (supposedly) playing a role-playing game, after all. Being able to identify with the character role that you've chosen is a pretty crucial aspect of staying invested in an MMORPG, IMO, and trying to fit a square peg into a round hole by saying, "but DPSing IS supporting your group, honest!" is really trying to handwave away thoughtful, if not purely objective, criticism over it.

That said, if the devs stick with their current intended design, then there's nothing wrong with that, either. I can acknowledge that there are a decent amount of people (at least on the healer subforum) that like this style of play, and far be it from me to remove it from them. Only SE probably really has any sort of empirical evidence on this (who knows), and I generally assume that they make their design decisions with all the feedback, tools, and knowledge that they possibly can. I won't play this game anymore if Stormblood doesn't at least ATTEMPT to make encounters more healing-focused, but it's not like I expect them to do so simply because I feel so strongly about it.

[Cleftobismal]

Do I support people intentionally balking against the game's design when they're perfectly capable of adapting to the "rules" the XIV community has laid out? Of course not, but when someone says "I just want to heal, not DPS" I can totally empathize with that.

I wouldn't. I've seen bards who refused to play Peon and Mana songs in the name of keeping their DPS top. I wouldn't see any healer tolerating this when they get low from healing so much.


How about we switch it up a bit? What if said healer was a SCH and he said the same thing, but you see his fairy is doing all the work while he is just walking. Would you still emphasize to this "Role playing behavior"?

[tjw]

I wouldn't. I've seen bards who refused to play Peon and Mana songs in the name of keeping their DPS top. I wouldn't see any healer tolerating this when they get low from healing so much.


How about we switch it up a bit? What if said healer was a SCH and he said the same thing, but you see his fairy is doing all the work while he is just walking. Would you still emphasize to this "Role playing behavior"?

See, this is my main issue with comments such as this. Lorelei is attempting to take a view that accepts both viewpoints, by commenting that they wish to be invested more in the 'healer' role rather than the 'dps' role, but acknowledging that a DPSing healer is optimal in the current meta of the game. You change it to alike their post as advocating for lazy playstyle by comparing it to a lazy SCH by just focusing on a couple sentences. What? How does one wishing for the game to have a more healing-centric gameplay meta for healers the same as wishing for laziness? Like, I'm in total agreement that healers should DPS wherever possible to the best of their ability; heck, I find it invigorating to do so as I enjoy it, but please, please stop trying to bring out the worst possible applications of either side as an attempt to debunk someone else's statements.

[loreleidiangelo]

I wouldn't. I've seen bards who refused to play Peon and Mana songs in the name of keeping their DPS top. I wouldn't see any healer tolerating this when they get low from healing so much.


How about we switch it up a bit? What if said healer was a SCH and he said the same thing, but you see his fairy is doing all the work while he is just walking. Would you still emphasize to this "Role playing behavior"?

You completely and utterly missed the point of my statement to a degree that I am honestly surprised you even read enough of my post to try to formulate a counter-argument. It's like you literally just saw the words "empathize" and "role-play" together and assumed that I was saying it's okay to play an ice-only BLM so long as it's in an RP context, which is not even remotely close to what I was saying at all. Please actually read it, not just skim. I know it's long, but brevity is the dearth of discourse, in my humble opinion.

A better analogy using the same setup you gave would be a BRD wishing for a pure physical ranged DPS class with none of the DPS-lowering support nonsense attached to it. Is there a problem with wanting something like that? Is there a problem with that BRD currently playing their role using their songs correctly, but wishing that they had a DPS option where that wasn't required? That's basically how I feel about healer DPS. I do it, but wish that the developers would start nudging the role more towards what people are traditionally expecting it to be when they sign up to play a healer in an MMORPG.

Now, as I ALSO admitted, the devs don't actually have to change squat. If the devs change BRD to remove their support songs and make them purely DPS-oriented, that might make the BRD in my example happy, but it would make the BRDs who actually enjoy that aspect of the job patently UNHAPPY, and I acknowledge that's the real issue with the devs trying to adjust the meta at this point. I'm just one sub, and I have no way of knowing if there are more of "me" than there are of "you". But I'm trying to debunk the endless mudslinging I see on here (your post being a primary case in point) about healers who want the role to be more traditional, and less DPS-oriented. We're not "lazy". Many of us are currently playing the role optimally in the current design schematic. That doesn't mean we're not allowed to want it to change.

To elaborate further, when I say "change", I don't just mean something as banal as "remove Cleric Stance so that way it's a non-issue!". The way healing is set up in this game, it's DESIGNED to be boring to be friendly to newer players. It's the reason the global is set up the way it is too, with it being super-long at the beginning while people are getting used to playing an MMO, with more stuff added to keep you "busy" as your levels advance. The only problem is, healers have to default to a function that isn't their PRIMARY function in order to keep "busy", because strictly healing at endgame isn't engaging enough to require full throughput from two experienced, global cooldown-efficient healers. So if healing is going to be changed to the point where healers aren't DPSing unless they seriously overgear the content (like how it is in TERA, WoW, SWTOR, Revelation Online, Wildstar, basically any other MMO that has healers at this point except like The Secret World etc.), major design aspects of the game are going to have to change.

It's okay to not want change. It's not okay to make blanket statements about the types of people who might, though. I don't want to twiddle my thumbs in between globals, or casually stroll taking in the scenery while mashing my Embrace macro. I just want my globals to be occupied with using my healing spells, for the most part, not my DPSing ones. (I get that DPSing in content I seriously overgear will always be a thing - it is in those other games I listed, too. But I don't think I've played an MMO yet where you mass pull all the mobs up to a boss in a dungeon with the tank dropping their mitigative stance partway through and the healer primarily DPSing rather than healing...when that content is still relevant.)