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

[Deliciou5]

As ive said Im not opposed to healer dps whoever wants to. I would like to see healing more valued or respected though. I would like a choice of dpsing or not for the sake of enjoyment, but if healers dps stays then would like cleric changed into something that makes it not so stress inducing. There could be many different ways of doing this, like not having a cd or even making dps part of the job without stance changing. Other games havent got this 'awkward' mechanic. Its awkward because it was never intended to be used like it is.

All i see is that you don't enjoy it, it seems like healer is not for you. Since there is very little justification for not dpsing in most forms of content. I just ran expert earlier today and more often than not my heal over times were enough to keep the tank and party alive, i threw about 20 cures total throughout dungeon and once in a while used a cooldown. It was ridiculously easy to not heal as much. Cleric stance is barely noticed by me anymore since iv'e become so used to using it. Things are only awkward or unwieldy if you are not good at it from a lack of practice.

Until SE changes the meta for healers where Heals per seconds are more demanding and buffs/debuffs become way more efficient than damage...then i don't see the importance of doing damage while minimally healing going away any time soon. You just gotta own up to the fact that if you don't try to end the battle as quickly as possible using all your toolkit then you are objectively sub-optimal, if not bad at your job.

SE designed healers this way because a lot of mmo's had healers have dps abilities to fill their time with something more than healing. The game isn't designed for heals to be in much demand like the more slowly paced battles of mmo yonder years. I played FFXI and as whm in that game i was mostly curing,praying for mana,hasting everyone and MAYBE throwing a dia or 2 when i had the chance, however the design of that game was for everything to be much harder and slower paced, this game is inherently designed to spam as many abilities as possible and be far less tactical overall.

Doing more damage is always the most efficient thing to do in almost any situation. Until SE overhauls and redesigns the battle system from the ground up and makes it less about dps, this will always be the meta. There is no Crowd control, or anything else for healers to do that is required or necessary to complete battles. Just throw some HOT's up and throw the occasional instant heal CD or cure at tank or dumbass party member who doesn't know how to dodge, then sit in cleric stance for 80-90% of the fight. However savage and exetreme primals have different approaches and require more tatics and teamwork, thats why you seen in my previous posts how there is more planning and nuance involved in the healing. For most post level 45 content though, it's always better to dps and use your full tookit to mitigate dmg to create larger windows for it.

It's not awkward if you actually just do it all the time and get used to it, and don't try to find emotional reasons or BS excuses to not do it more often than not. If you are playing your healer correctly then you won't be spamming heals(unless things go wrong), and you won't be standing around for 90% of the fight unless you are trying to build up some MP for the next pull.