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

[Sylvain]

Because it helps the team.
[/QUOTE]
I might have been not clear enough. The problem isn't that it helps or not. I know it helps and it's actually great that it does.
The problem is that healer are so grossly overpowered in this game (3aoe heal and raid is stopped) that reaching the point where you can spend a significant portion of the fight nuking the boss is too easy. Hence the whole "healer should dps whenever they can" issue so many have.

Thanks to cleric stance having a nearly non existent cooldown. You can swap stance so effectively that, unless the fight is extremly healing intensive to the point both healer need to spam, you can at the very least always squeeze some dot every 20-30sec.


The problem (to me) is that you're not required to overgear the content nor to have a group that dodges absolutely everything perfectly to do dmg.
Even if people do mess up, even if you do lack gear, you'll have the time to put dots. After all, failing a dodge in a savage raid usually result in a OS or weakening debuff which will OS you next time so... you can't even heal that.

So right now, instead of having healer-dps as a reward, it becomes something canon that you have to do whenever possible.



I know these are different games, but I'll still compare.

When I was raiding as a healer in WoW, the default raid dmg was high enough to keep healer busy. Assuming one was assigned to tank dmg and one to raid dmg, as long as people would dodge properly, you could effecitvely have 1.5heal if not 2 on the tank most of the time.
People not dodging properly on the otherhand would force heal on them which would increase the amount of heal, the assigned healer on the tank, has to dish to keep him alive, effectively making him run low on mana much faster. Also, since tanks take far greater dmg in WoW than FF, you can't reasliticaly have one healer dropping the tank for more than a few seconds without the threat of a dead tank.

In that scenario, when you reached the point where every one dance perfectly, tank have more gear and we psuh through mechanic faster, yes you could have one healer shoot some dmg time to time.

But in FF with
tank health dropping slowly
aoe heal being too potent
song making healers a botomless pool of mana
And finally, every aoe applying a weakening debuff making the next one OS you (or nearly)

Healer can't be overwhelmed by the dmg the group takes as it will extremly quickly range from
Everyone dodges --> nothing to do
People don't dodge --> they stack debuff and it's simply a matter of time before they get OS by the next aoe.

I've gone over why either decreasing healing output or increasing damage input without significantly changing the current system would not accomplish the intended goal.

While more would probably be needed to change the current system. I do believe it would change a lot. One being probly less healthy for the game though.

If SE were to substiantally increase the boss dmg outpout, currentely as most aoe tend to do already do high dmg (which is then healed through 1click thanks to our op aoe heal)
It would probably be through the boss AA, if you raise the AA enough to the point where you effectively need one healer spamming the tank and occasionnaly the help of the second one.
Well... unless this is a weird ass fight where there are no raid dmg, you couldn't realistically drop the tank heal, even for 5sec, as the tank would probly die, leaving one healer to the raid heal.. which is already how it is played.
But this would simply lead to health bar being much more spiky which would probly not please most casual healers.

On the other hand, reducing our heal potency and keeping the same kind of dmg output boss currently do, if done properly, would still force both healer to constantly heal, but instead of fearing that the tank get bursted during that 5sec you're in cleric stance, this 5sec you're not healing would just be heal you have to catch up.
This could also allow different mechanics than burst, weakening debuff, and simple OS to punish the raid.

I'm not a big fan or player's health yoyoing every few sec. I do not miss burning crusade tanks passing from 100 to 0 in 0.8sec.
So I'd prefer having less potent heal.

I mean, ultimately, think of the current raiding meta.
But divise direct heal by 2 and aoe heal by 3. (and perhaps, to make the switch to cleric stance a more meaningfull act, increase its cd to 20sec)
Healer would probably be able to heal through the current mechanic (spare a few one that would need a nurf, like A11 burst on one player).
If most of the time one healer is enough, then 2 healer full time should also do the trick.
People would still agree that heal dps is prefered, but since healer would take much more time top the raid, (and if on top of that you do the 20sec cleric stance thing), then this conversation would probably doesn't exist as the number of group reaching that point, where you can effectively lose one healer for 20sec would be something much harder to reach and more "hardcore" (at this points it means you have 1/4th of the current heal, for 20sec...

And that's assuming there is something wrong, which is arguable.

There is something wrong with the current system, otherwise this post wouldn't reach this amount of pages and It wouldn't be a recurrent topic on english and japanese forums and reddit.
I mean, do you see people creating thread to say as healer they love to stance dance and apply dmg? No you don't. Because these people either don't care or like the system. (Most) People don't go on forum to say how much they love one aspect of their job. They either ask question, do request, propose idea or complain. Or ultimately do guides.

Right now what you see is a new post about the dps heal issue every now and then and people arguing wether or not they should dps, what it means to be a healer etc etc etc...
When this topic will reach its end, you'll just have to wait a few month before seeing someone asking "why should I dps?" or "why don't healer want to dps?"

So the fact this topic is something recurrent proves there's something wrong.
I've never seen a post remotely close from that on WoW and Wildstar forums, this is only a FF14 issue (thanks to cleric stance...)

So please don't say you're not even sure it is an issue because you might enjoy the current system.



edit: clarified the healer post part as it was ambiguous