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

[HoodRat]

I'm starting to see a pattern here.

[Feyona]

classes are not divided by the T/H/D label but are united by one common goal: KILL THE THING AS FAST AD YOU CAN. Healers do this by keeping everyone alive while supporting them foremost, but they also provide a substantial amount of deeps. Not using all the tools provided by the game to achieve the goal intentionally hurts not only you, but everyone else. There is not a single fight in this game that requires more than half my actions to be heals. If you have a bad experience it's just that. But don't let it discourage you from doing 100%. Speaking of this savage raid tier in particular, I don't think I have below 95℅ cleric uptime on any of the fights, my co healer 75℅.

without healer dps or with it you would still be doing the same trying to kill while healers keep you alive. I see your point though it just speeds it up and skips stuff. Im not sure no healer dps would actually hurt people though

[IttyBitty]

Your GCDs are a resource (ie time). Ideally you want to use your resources in the most efficient manner as possible. sometimes the most efficient use of your GCD is "healing" (be it restoration or mitigation). Sometimes it is DPSing.

The more GCDs you use in an efficient manner, the faster enemies die, and the faster duties are completed. If you let GCDs go to waste because "I'M A HEALER NOT A DPS" (as if this changes anything) then you are wasting resources, meaning the other party members have to put in more work than you to compensate. If you can't see how using 3 out of 20 GCDs compared to 19 out of 20 GCDs can be considered as "lazy", then nothing will make you see the light. You can say "Let me play how I want to play" or "This is a game, not a job" all you want. You expect DPS and tank players to have as much uptime as possible. You should expect no less of healers.

If there were other things for healers to do that used their GCDs and were as efficient as contributing damage, then they'd be doing that instead. Unfortunately, there isn't, and likely will not be. Incoming damage vs heal potency is unlikely to radically change in any way whatsoever.

Healing is beneficial when it is required. Contributing DPS is always beneficial, so long as nobody dies a death that you could have directly prevented without babysitting. Overhealing wastes your GCDs, your mana and generates emnity for no real benefit, thus is practically a cardinal sin.

Ergo, DPSing is the only viable use for your GCDs when there is nothing to heal. That is really all there is to it.

[Saito_S]

This thread is incredible. It keeps looping back around to the same arguments; to paraphrase Kitfox: "It's like the previous (pick a number) pages never existed."

who is ignoring your argument? Think its the other way round. The answer is always the same, dps or gtfo, well sorry if your disapointed but I will not be leaving the game. And will probably still ask for a role choice. Minority though my views may be in here there may be many that would prefer one. So it simply isnt just me asking for something, no one else wants as you would like to think. Your way of playing is the coms way not everyone elses, it was never part of the design.

Then why are healing requirements so low? I mean, how obvious can they make it? Do you really need a member of the dev team to get up on the stage at a FanFest and be like "Yo, my healers! You gotta DPS! You GOTTA!"?

Or do you really believe that the intention of the devs actually IS for healers to be able to just stand around or spam dance emotes while the rest of their party must continue fighting the boss at full throttle?

You are getting WAY too hung up on strictly-defined "roles." You're not "changing roles" when you activate Cleric's, you're just using a skill that healers (and only healers) get, to make your offensive contributions more effective. In ANY team-based game, "do what helps your team" is what you should be doing. Just standing around doing nothing NEVER helps your team. The difference is that, within this style of MMO, it's unusual for healing requirements to be this low. So you have this downtime from actual healing that other games may not have. Doesn't change the fact that standing around doing nothing while your team does all the work isn't okay, and means you're getting carried big time. The continuing attempts to justify 1 player out of 4 (or 1-2 out of 8) contributing way less to a run just because they rolled healer, continues to baffle me.

You and Neela keep saying that healers "weren't meant" to DPS, that Cleric's was just "meant" for solo play only, etc. Based on what? According to whom? You keep saying "this isn't part of the game's design", you insist that it's ONLY something "the community" came up with after the fact. Well... prove it. Both of you, and others who defend this idea that healers should be allowed to only heal, admonish "my side" of the debate for supposedly twisting the intention of the devs for our agenda. But you're taking it a step further: you're acting as if YOUR interpretation of the devs' intentions and the game's design is proven, indisputable fact. Where's your evidence that the devs intention was for healers to be able to only heal, all the time? You have to overcome the magazine article that's been linked a couple times, the Novice Hall Dialog, and the simple fact that the low healing requirement in the game as a whole is clearly an intentional design choice.

Even if it hadn't been an intentional design choice: you guys are saying "the community" decided that healers should DPS. Well, what was "the community" supposed to decide to do with all that downtime? Even if it WERE the case that the devs never intended for healers to be expected to do some DPS, they gave us a game where there's this huge healing downtime.

Again, you may not like this design. You have every right to your opinion that it's a bad design for a game of this type, if that is indeed your opinion. But this is how the game works. Deal with it.

[CreinCrein]

It does hurt them though, like physically hurts them . You can push the last buster in the first phase of A12S, saving a tank cooldown as well as the mana it takes to top/mitigate him. You can kill it before last phase too, skipping the massive raid damage resulting from puddles/holy bleed.

[bounddreamer]

Then why are healing requirements so low? I mean, how obvious can they make it? Do you really need a member of the dev team to get up on the stage at a FanFest and be like "Yo, my healers! You gotta DPS! You GOTTA!"?

That's literally what it would take for this argument to end, and it will never happen, because the devs are too polite and they believe they've been obvious enough in their responses and the in-game context.

The root cause of this particular thread is that OP is a Scholar who believes with every fiber of her being that she should be left alone to heal only, and never sully her hand by turning on cleric stance and using damage dealing abilities. This strange proposition of SCH as a pure healer truly baffles me.

[Feyona]

This thread is incredible. It keeps looping back around to the same arguments; to paraphrase Kitfox: "It's like the previous (pick a number) pages never existed."



You and Neela keep saying that healers "weren't meant" to DPS, that Cleric's was just "meant" for solo play only, etc. Based on what? According to whom?

Again, you may not like this design. You have every right to your opinion that it's a bad design for a game of this type, if that is indeed your opinion. But this is how the game works. Deal with it.

well yes things will be decided by the developers ultimately, not me or you. We will all find out in time.

[bounddreamer]

well yes things will be decided by the developers ultimately, not me or you. We will all find out in time.

Devs make the game. We play it. Did the devs intend for us to queue for Zurvan with one tank? No, but people farm it that way. Were Ravana, Thordan, Sephirot etc intended to be solo healed? No, but we farm it that way.

They gave us the sandbox and the tools. If we make something that's not a castle, it's still within the allowed parameters.

Give me cleric stance and damage dealing abilities, I use them.

Take away cleric stance, e.g. PVP, and I'm going to focus on healing and preventive abilities like shields, stoneskin, keeping party members in range, etc.

[Feyona]

That's literally what it would take for this argument to end, and it will never happen, because the devs are too polite and they believe they've been obvious enough in their responses and the in-game context.

The root cause of this particular thread is that OP is a Scholar who believes with every fiber of her being that she should be left alone to heal only, and never sully her hand by turning on cleric stance and using damage dealing abilities. This strange proposition of SCH as a pure healer truly baffles me.

Im a little tired to keep arguing against this unyielding stance that sch is a dps. I did see somewhere that it is being considered that the roles are being wanted to be defined again, scholar is being changed, and that the devs didnt want healers to be forced to dps. I guess we all have to find out.

[Lyrica_Ashtine]

well yes things will be decided by the developers ultimately, not me or you. We will all find out in time.

Well in that case, if healers were truly not supposed to contribute in damage (according to you), elaborate why this is in Hall of the Novice: