Should healers now be allowed to play how they choose to play?

[IttyBitty]

True! But they didn't choose to go this route. Any particular reason why? To me, both ways of doing the DPS increase would still result in a DPS increase that matches the power creep curve they have in mind so it doesn't change the core of my point.

Traiting existing spells would have been less effort and achieved the same goal, and since developers are human, the laziest option is usually what you'd go with (I kid ).

The new DPS skills were partially added to add new, flashy animations, but mainly to fill in niches that were missing in the classes' kits while performing their roles in duties. WHM's kit for example had almost all of the HP restoration tools you could ever ask for. They were mostly just missing a reliable emergency heal, which they got with Tetra. Asylum feels like they just wanted WHM to have a bubble too. I don't really think we needed any more AoE regen, and would have preferred it to mitigate damage, but hey I'm not going to turn my nose up at free healing. Assize was a spicy new piece of amazing hotness that fulfilled the same niche as SCH's new Indomitability skill (that is, instant burst AoE heal) that could be flip-flopped to be an AoE Nuke, depending on your stance at the time of cast.

What WHM was REALLY missing (beyond mitigation skills, but that's a different discussion...) was a native AoE DPS option that wasn't Holy (expensive, not always mana efficient to cast), and a way to apply a DoT without having to manually cast Aero 2/Aero on everything. Enter Aero 3. Aero 3 being an AoE is pretty meaningless in most of the solo content you have to do in the game. Heck, Aero 3's duration is longer than most enemies will live than if you just used one of your Stone spells.

The damage component on Assize falls into a similar trap, too - you are rarely ever fighting large groups of enemies when soloing as a healer. Assize gets a pass though because 1) it's free damage (or healing) either way; and 2) it's an absolutely awesome skill that they'd have to pry out of my cold, dead potato hands.

Then we have Broil/Stone 3, which are just direct upgrades to their respective single target nuke. Really the only DPS skill that would have been required outside of duties.

[Zojha]

This is the opposite of a delay - you're now ahead of schedule.

You keep seeing things relative to expectations. But expectations are subjective. Showing up one hour "late" for work might be well within your expectations, therefore, by this reasoning, you would not be late or delay anything. At the same time, your employer might have the expectation that you're on time and thus, by this reasoning, you'd be late and delay the working process. This creates a logical contradiction, since you are now both at the same time, late and not late, delayed and not delayed. Thus, this reasoning fails, as it creates logical contradictions. Expectations are irrelevant, null and void. And since your entire argument hinges on them, so is it.

[Dement]

you assume incorrectly. i also play paladin. but im not talking about stance. im talking rotation, and in shield oath, you still need need to hit those damage buttons to retain agro. but that's for the lesson eh?

and even if this wasent the case. you can still just carry on as you normally would doing the same thing you normally do, you don't have to change anything. its just not the same and does not work as an analogy of the healing/dps debate.

Your PLD is 57. Leveling a PLD does not equate to playing PLD in endgame activities nor does it give you the background trying to stand against tank mains while spouting incredibly wrong information. I would back away from this argument while you can because people who actually main tank classes will tell you how misguided every one of your comments are.

Furthermore tanks dropping tank stance and tanking in DPS stance is quite common and is a very similar analogy to healers going into Cleric stance to DPS. You do it when it's appropriate but you do it to help the group. A PLD sitting in Shield Oath spamming Flash/Rage of Halone is no better than a healer standing around doing nothing between heals.

[craized]

yes my PLD is level 57, but were discussing all content at all levels here. so my point is valid. and even if i haven't hit max level and started on end game i can extrapolate, because i know for instance that if you spam flash you will quickly run out of power and lose agro. by following your usual rotation you have an easier time with agro.

but the point (even though people seem to be going off on all kinds of tangents) im really trying to get across is: its not the same thing AT ALL. not my a margin.
you CANT heal the group via Damage.
you CAN retain agro via Damage.
tanks don't need to change up from their usual rotations in order to dps, because dps is incorporated into their rotation.
healers need to swap back and forth between different spell sets on different targets, not to mention the 5 second CD on cleric stance which can easily cause all kinds of issues on its own if mistimed.
it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out the difference.

[Feyona]

Yeah I've got a bad attitude here. It seems to trigger when I'm around toxic and problematic people (I can buzzword too) who go around using sinister sounding words to try to paint those against them as evil.




It's also really easy to multitask for some and they can concentrate on both their job and what the rest of the party are doing (even more so when you have full understanding of a role). Being aware of a healer doing next to nothing isn't going to drop my dps. It's not like these dungeons are mentally challenging. If I see someone in my group not even trying because think they can use the rest of us as glorified

And you have never even stepped foot in savage you say yet you know all about the sort of difficulty other people may experience and quite easily call them lazy, Your words are invalid, based on assumptions and your own internal conflicts and illusions. Basically you dont kow what your talking about

[ToasterMan]

The best solution to that is to learn. Learn your class so you know what options you have in case you need to drop cleric stance asap or things you can do to help you stay in cleric longer. Learn the fight. Learn when you need to heal and when it's safe to dps. But for some reason, people would rather spend their time on the forums complaining about having to dps instead of playing the game and learning how to do it. That's why this issue will never end unless SE does something about it.

Oh I already know what I'm doing. I DPS all the time. I just try to look at it from someone else's point of view. 5 seconds is an eternity, a lot can happen during those five seconds (And another two for the cast itself if tetra is on CD). If a dps gets himself killed because I wasn't able to heal him in time due to swapping into cleric, guess who's fault that is?

[Dsync]

And you have never even stepped foot in savage you say yet you know all about the sort of difficulty other people may experience and quite easily call them lazy, Your words are invalid, based on assumptions and your own internal conflicts and illusions. Basically you dont kow what your talking about

I have made it quite clear that I'm talking about dungeons. I know that people are oft expected to do damage in savage, but I leave those arguments to people who do savage. You're talking about doing damage in all content. Nice try trying to dismiss my words when you've once again changed the target. Such dishonesty.

People aren't required to put up with you in game. If you do not do damage, and the party doesn't like that, then that's tough for you. You are not excluded from the content, you are excluded from the party. You can still do the content.

Yes you should be excluded from a group that doesn't want you. If you won't learn from that exclusion and find yourself getting excluded again, then maybe look at your own attitude towards the content.

[Feyona]

I have made it quite clear that I'm talking about dungeons. I know that people are oft expected to do damage in savage, but I leave those arguments to people who do savage. You're talking about doing damage in all content. Nice try trying to dismiss my words when you've once again changed the target. Such dishonesty.

No, many of your posts have been aimed at me and where have I been dishonest? If your talking about the parse look it up yourself, your not the first person to try that approach to discredit what I say but you cant discredit the truth nice try. look up 62 or something percentile dont know exact figures but if your going to call people lazy get your facts right first. At least Im 50 or so player base of parsed reports for dps heals on that fight not that it matters but as proof in this case that Im not lying to anyone. And Illalso tell you why it doesnt matter, because it could have been the other healer dpsing and my activity would maybe have been heals as in the case uof the 'low' dps thing in an earlier post, active? Yes and not cos I dont dps sometimes

[Dement]

yes my PLD is level 57, but were discussing all content at all levels here. so my point is valid. and even if i haven't hit max level and started on end game i can extrapolate, because i know for instance that if you spam flash you will quickly run out of power and lose agro. by following your usual rotation you have an easier time with agro.

but the point (even though people seem to be going off on all kinds of tangents) im really trying to get across is: its not the same thing AT ALL. not my a margin.
you CANT heal the group via Damage.
you CAN retain agro via Damage.
tanks don't need to change up from their usual rotations in order to dps, because dps is incorporated into their rotation.
healers need to swap back and forth between different spell sets on different targets, not to mention the 5 second CD on cleric stance which can easily cause all kinds of issues on its own if mistimed.
it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out the difference.

DPSing as a healer is different at different levels of content. It's much more difficult to Healer DPS in level sync'd content than it is in non-sync'd so endgame dungeons you have ridiculously overgeared tanks and healers where the healer literally doesn't have to heal more than a handful of times.

As to your points:

Damage is a form of mitigation. The quicker things die the less damage they do the less healing required.
Tank damage in tank stance using enmity combo is the baseline. Yes you're doing damage but that damage was going to be done no matter what as the very basics of your job, no one believes this to be the equivalent of "tank DPS"
To actually do "tank DPS" above your baseline - tanks need to use different skills and in the case of PLD/DRK entirely different rotations; in the case of WAR it manifests as burning your defensive GCDs for abandon stacks which can have its own risk/rewards. Furthermore, this is performed without the benefit of enmity multipliers from tank stance and again with PLD/DRK the DPS combos do not generate the same enmity as the enmity combo.
Cleric Stance is a 5 second cooldown oGCD with no resource requirements. PLD/DRK has resource requirements to change stances and must be used as part of the GCD. WAR has a 10 second cooldown to swap stances... which can easily cause all kinds of issues on its own if mistimed due to aggro loss from geared DPS or overhealing healers.

The differences aren't nearly as much as you want to make them out to be.

[Dement]

Oh I already know what I'm doing. I DPS all the time. I just try to look at it from someone else's point of view. 5 seconds is an eternity, a lot can happen during those five seconds (And another two for the cast itself if tetra is on CD). If a dps gets himself killed because I wasn't able to heal him in time due to swapping into cleric, guess who's fault that is?

Fault would depend on what gets the DPS killed... if he stood in a cleave or an AoE or some other avoidable damage then it's the DPS' fault. If he died because he wasn't topped off before the healer entered cleric's stance and raid wide damage caused the wipe then it would be the healers.

Outside of very scripted tankbusters, though, there really isn't anything that can drop a tank from 100% to 0% in 7.5 seconds unless the tank isn't properly using their toolkit or is really undergeared.