Healers that don't want to DPS are like DPSes who refuse to move out of AoEs.

[KokonoeAiyoko]

To everyone, there is honestly no solution to this "debate", obviously no side is gonna be convinced otherwise cause I've already attempted that several times to no avail, and vice versa with people attempting that with others and I.

Just keep playing with the people you prefer, and for those who prefer not to DPS and focus on healing, just avoid the ones who attempt to force you to play in a way that makes you uncomfortable. In turn, the people that want to play as efficient as possible and whom get emotionally bothered by people playing Healer without DPSing, just don't play with these people if it bothers you.

Win win.

[RaijinSupreme]

snip

You say "shouldn't be" but that isn't realistic, and it doesn't make it impossible to do so. Fact is, it happens, and it happens often.

In my opinion, I agree with you. If you plan on healing, learning to stance dance is a part of its meta. Its one of the unwritten, unofficial, and not taught aspects of the game. And you should be able to do so by the time you reach certain content. But I, however, don't let my opinions blind me and allow me to properly judge others who don't share that opinion, or is ignorant to these unwritten, unofficial, and not taught aspects. (I am not saying that you are blinded or anything, I'm just speaking of myself).

While I would love to always run into healers (or rather players of every role & job) that are capable of playing as optimally as possible, what I expect from the players base is the bare minimum of what the game actually teaches and provides. If I allowed myself to expect anything more when I decide to queue in DF with random players, especially when things like POTD has been released, I'd be disappointed by most of the players, all of the time. So I don't. I understand that I am going to be playing with players who don't look up effective rotations, who don't have friends to teach them the proper way, and who don't actually care to get any better than what they are. That understanding helps me not get upset or even at all bothered whenever I do run into players who play poorly.

But maybe that's just me. I rather enjoy this game being stress free, and I do things that keeps it stress free.

[RaijinSupreme]

yep the game might not teach you, so it should be our job as a community to teach. But we're at how many pages now of people defending NOT dpsing as a healer because "nurt mah jurb".

There's a difference in being empathetic & understanding towards players who simply just don't know how to do it properly and would rather not out of fear of messing up, and calling them trash who should uninstall because they don't. Its the tone this thread took since the original post, and its a natural for others to get defensive.

I agree that healers should indeed learn how to dps as a healer since they were given the ability to do so, but its important to understand and accept that they won't always happen, not matter how much we would like it to. As new players enter the game, or old players try out not jobs & roles, its almost guaranteed that you'll run into players who don't play optimally, and I, for one, would rather not let myself get worked up because of it, for I would just end up getting upset every single day, and that's not really why I play video games in general lol.

That's just me though.

[KokonoeAiyoko]

There's a difference in being empathetic & understanding towards players who simply just don't know how to do it properly and would rather not out of fear of messing up, and calling them trash who should uninstall because they don't. Its the tone this thread took since the original post, and its a natural for others to get defensive.

I agree that healers should indeed learn how to dps as a healer since they were given the ability to do so, but its important to understand and accept that they won't always happen, not matter how much we would like it to. As new players enter the game, or old players try out not jobs & roles, its almost guaranteed that you'll run into players who don't play optimally, and I, for one, would rather not let myself get worked up because of it, for I would just end up getting upset every single day, and that's not really why I play video games in general lol.

That's just me though.

What a nice mature outlook, such a shame others won't adopt it. Alas, that's just my opinion. I've played MMORPG's for a long time and there's many things that I'm capable of or aware of that would be quite difficult for others which I've seen so many times in interactions with others. Then there are things that other people do far better than I ever could or I have yet to reach that type of skill just yet and am unsure. There are so many varying degrees when playing a game with random players that there should be no major expectations like this unless you are setting up a party finder.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

snip

I never said I expected it. I don't. With the exception of Savage, I'll roll my eyes and not worry about it. That doesn't mean I will defend the position when giving an opinion, which is what this thread is. What I will do is criticism the design because the overall lack of teaching and easy mechanics is what makes attempting Extreme Primals and Savage so difficult for these players.

[KokonoeAiyoko]

I never said I expected it. I don't. With the exception of Savage, I'll roll my eyes and not worry about it. That doesn't mean I will defend the position when giving an opinion, which is what this thread is. What I will do is criticism the design because the overall lack of teaching and easy mechanics is what makes attempting Extreme Primals and Savage so difficult for these players.

On that very same end, you could criticize the fact that Healer DPS is not actually balanced for this game properly and that the content in this game has leeway in that you can actually DPS and Heal in dungeons, despite it not being intentional to this extreme.

This whole argument is based around a Role design becoming something it wasn't intended to be outright (Healer DPS potency in dungeons). That's why I always feel odd about getting fussed with people who don't. I feel it really comes down to impatience and intolerance of other play styles IMO in an oddly balanced game.

[Taika]

To the discussion about how large part do DPS abilities have in healer play, I think instead of looking at the amount of available DPS abilities (which is substantial), it's more useful to again look how the abilities are used in actual fights. Looking at the highest performing WHM in FFlogs for Xelphatol (for some reason the logs for newest experts weren't available), during their whole dungeon run (done in December) they were using a total of 21 healing ability casts (2 Asylum, 2 Stoneskin, 3 Tetra, 7 Assize, 5 Regen, and 1 Benediction). Please note that this was all the healing required to keep everyone alive for the whole duration (12 minutes 24 seconds) of the dungeon run (+ the DRK tank's Another Victim).

Now during that same run, the WHM cast 194 DPS spells (39 Holy, 63 Stone III, 7 Assize, 19 Aero III, 16 Fluid Aura, 26 Aero, and 24 Aero II). Now if this WHM would only have been healing, they would have used only 21 abilities. With DPS, they used 187 more (not counting Assize twice)! Their total amount of abilities (including Protect etc.) in the instance was 279, and of that the healing formed only 7.5% and DPS 67% (excluding Assize). The WHM did 1557.5 DPS and was the top DPS in the whole party (they also used 4 potions during the run to achieve that).

Of course this is an extreme example from really good players overgearing the dungeon, but it still shows how much DPS a healer is able to bring to the team while still keeping everyone completely safe, and also how large is the amount of DPS abilities in comparison to healing abilities when a healer job is played to its fullest effectiveness. Now no one is asking this level of performance from anyone, especially in Duty Finder, but it is a real shame to see healers just throw this potential away completely - and just because "I'm a healer so I won't do anything else".

Personaly, I am curious why we are avoiding the elephant in the room when it comes to these discussion. I hate to ruffle some feathers, but aside from healers able to dps during downtime, there is another reason why groups want their healers to dps and that is to compensate for low dps.

This is rarely true, actually. In fact, if you look at the FFlogs, you will see the highest healer DPS players also having highest DPS DD and tank players (in general). There is no ceiling to DPS (well there is one defined by the 100% perfect performance and gear, but for most players it stays theoretical), unlike there is for maximum damage in a boss fight, so one party member adding to it doesn't lower it for anyone else. In fact, a healer adding to the party DPS is possibly able to increase the DPS of the DDs and tanks as well, since the fights will go faster. It is of course true that healers are able to compensate for poor DPS performance in some cases, but I don't think many people would argue they should DPS because it's their duty to cut other people's slack. Just like people don't generally argue that a DD should use their best available rotation only to cover for those who are doing less.

[Empress]

I like how people complain about said healers dps during dungeons, yet don't realize that more than 90% of DPS users in the game can barely go past 400 dps :P

[Misutoraru]

Win win.

i think one of the issue would be what party we are talking about
for DF, i would takes time to observe my tank, my dps
to observe how their skill, how their equipment, how well their movement
boss fight mechanic is predictable, but the ability of 3 random people isnt
so i think ppl have to lower their expectation in DF, that's what a DF is
it is not PF which leader can set rules before everyone joining

[aleph_null]

On that very same end, you could criticize the fact that Healer DPS is not actually balanced for this game properly and that the content in this game has leeway in that you can actually DPS and Heal in dungeons, despite it not being intentional to this extreme.

I think there will always be opportunities to dps (or do anything else to fill that time when you don't need to heal) due to player skill gap and gearing up. The latter is quite obvious, if you need 10 heals at i250 when you first clear a raid, then you'll probably need let's say 8 heals at i270 when farming the same raid floor, due to the raw healing increase and everyone's def/mdef/hp increase alone. If you consider better strategies and/or phase skips, probably even less.

Other than that, the best players/groups who coordinate their defensive utilities well (between tanks/healers/dps) and maximize their toolkits will be able to perform better than average healers in PUGs, so if you make the healing checks intense enough to make those players have to heal near full time, that content won't be accessible to PUGs, and we get another gordias savage, except people now struggle with healing checks instead of dps checks. The current performance gap between skilled healers (also supported by their groups) and average healers is too big, if you want to have an idea about this try to check the speedrun videos or fflogs of the fastest groups, and see how little the number of heals cast by the healers (and they can get away with it because of extremely optimized cd usages between tanks, healers and the ridiculously high group dps to finish fights/phases faster than normal groups). On this end, I feel that the devs already have some idea since I remember they mentioned things about reducing the gap between skill floor/ceiling by the 4.0 battle revamp (how well will that work, we obviously don't know yet, but at least it seems like they're going to the right direction). Right now it's pretty much impossible to make contents demanding enough to make good players heal a lot while making it still clearable by average PUGs.

I don't know if you have any savage raid experience, but I'll assume you know the faust z fight (savage is the same as normal, just higher boss hp and dmg). Typical RF/PF PUG run would have one healer full time healing the two tanks from the beginning, alternating heals between the two (they take tank busters every 7-10s), and the fight will end at around 1m20s. The other (off) healer will dps at the start and probably start helping with heals after certain point in the fight when the tanks run out of cds so they take more dmg, and the tanks may have to go back into tank stance. Meanwhile the fastest savage faust z clear is around 40s (twice as fast) and both healers and tanks stay in cleric/dps stance throughout the fight. Not a single healing spell cast after the pull. Prepull shield/regen and fairy heals are enough to keep the two tanks alive. From that point of view this fight has ridiculously easy healing requirements, but if you increase the tank buster damage/frequency until these top players need to heal often, the average groups who finish the fight in 1m20s or even longer will probably have no chance to clear it.

Of course if they can introduce ways to fill those downtime for healers without dpsing, I'm all for it. Maybe introduce short duration buffs that can be cast on party members, or anything that can make up for the lack of healer dps. Basically right now dpsing is the one and only way to fill that downtime once you satisfy the minimum healing requirements of a fight. More options would always be welcome (I have similar view for ideas about things for tanks to do to help the group other than simply dropping tank stance, but as of now turtle tanking won't help the group as much as dropping tank stance since the extra tankiness won't make healers dps increase as much as you lose).