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

[bounddreamer]

I think a lot of the confusion and misunderstanding in this thread results in the switching back and forth between healer dps in casual content, to healer dps in savage content, and back again, and mixing the two. Especially since Feyona brought in her personal experience with learning savage content with a casual group. And there's been a lot of assumptions and more confusion stemming from that.

After a ton of back and forth I think, at last, I get where Feyona is coming from. A lot of people keep coming back in to stir the pot, though.

I think all of us can agree a healer shouldn't be required to dps if they're not comfortable. There's a variety of situations where this can happen: duty finder, party finders where you don't know the other healer or they're just not up for main healing, dungeons where you're new or returning, etc. And savage when someone is learning the fight and new to a group and maybe hasn't learned how best to synergize with their co-healer as well.

That doesn't mean there is no room for improvement or that a person is going to stay at that level in all situations.

When Dun Scaith first came out, I could never seem to fit in dps beyond dots in the opener. Now if I'm running with an FC co-healer, I can do more. When I ran Zurvan EX on my own in party finder, I only found one or two WHM who were good enough and geared enough to give me room to dps most of the fight, but when I ran it with my static I could do full dps on the opener then my static main healer and I split the dps and healing very evenly for the rest of the fight.

We should foster a supportive community, not a hostile one. Encourage dps but don't get mean about it if someone declines. Barring a few examples of people filling their time by dancing or jumping around in circles, most people are just doing their best.

I think we're all on the same page about this, we're just using different words and perspectives to frame our arguments.