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

[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.)

[Cleftobismal]

Snip

You're offended I get it.

I still won't agree with 100% with what you said. Even if you're using "Empathy" to make a point. All the more reason. So no. I did not miss your point.