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

[LucyDaernos]

I believe everyone should do the best they can to be an asset to their team. Imo a healer's main priority is obviously to keep anyone from dying. But once it's clear enough to you that it's not happening I don't see a reason why you wouldn't want to help your team a bit more. Ofc if you're not sure in your skills and are still too scared someone's gonna die cause you don't know the dungeon/raid/job well enough I don't think anyone's really going to blame you if you want to play it safe till you get used to it some more. But I think everyone should at least try to practise and contribute to the best of their abilities and experience. There are other people in your team when you're in a party. Be considerate. I understand if people just wanna play the way they want to but if there's others in your group trying their best to make it a better run for you as well, it would be nice if you found a compromise and tried your best to make it a better run for them as well. Give and take etc.

[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

[LadyKairi]

snip .

But I was one of those healers who came from wow. I was one of those wow healers whom did nothing but heal. I kept an open mind coming to this game, not expecting it to be like wow. I had a goal to be the best I could, since I stayed in my "comfort bubble" on wow. Every single day I see sooooooo many healers with so much potential, but can not blossom because they refuse to come out of their own bubbles. Wow healing and XIV healing is different. Coming from WoW is not a good excuse, because I was there. It's not impossible, you just have to try. Practice makes perfect, as they say.

[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"?

[Feyona]

Ive heard rumours about a red mage coming is this an actual dps healer? Do hope so. Scholar ast and wmg healer classes, red mage support. Will suit many people that like to dps heal. No role confusion. Healers may be allowed to heal again, hopefully as id rather play an actual, dps/healer or a healer. Healers playing with stances feels awkward to me. There is no flow to it. As sch you have a full dps rotation that you got to cut off abruptly if someone suddenly needs a heal, you cant just heal them u have to come out stance before u heal. I dont think im bad at it but sometimes only just catch the tank before he dies. Its rare anyone dies in dungeons with me tho, unless its their fault. I can do this fine its just not enjoyale to me. Used to love dicipline priest in wow ( support class) dps/heal. No problems, and enjoyable flowing playstyle. I just hate cleric it makes dps healig more difficult than is necessary. Please no unproductive comments that im lazy or want an esay life etc.

[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.

[LucyDaernos]

I also love more healing intensive fights. The ones where the tank pulls several packs or the boss hits really hard or there's tons of heavy aoe dmg and all you can think about is "PLSDONTDIE, PLSDONTDIE, PLSDONTDIE" or "Omg I wont make it, need another cd, omg all of them are still on cd!!! FFFF". I LOVE those kind of fights! I haven't seen any endgame yet (started about 2 weeks ago and just hit lvl 50 on my main 2 days ago yay lol) but coming from games where healers couldn't do any useful dps even if their life depended on it I'm actually enjoying the option to be able to dish out decent dps as a healer too. I'm still far from good at this "stance dance" thing and either let the tank die cause I try dpsing too much in the wrong situation or waste good opportunities for dpsing cause I'm too scared to let the tank die (both happening more often than I'd like to lol) But I know I'm gonna enjoy it in the long run.