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

[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.