Suggestion as to how to get people to become healers.

[Lambdafish]

With how the game is currently played (and hence designed), both Cleric Stance and tank DPS stances play a major part throughout the group content, so there's no base to this argument.

I agree with this, and I hate people that imply that the healer DPS meta is the communities fault (thanks for blaming us for playing the game in response to the game design guys). Fixing cleric stance actually won't change much as the primary fault lies in both the range of DPS skills and DPS enabling a abilities and content itself allowing for DPS. There needs to be a radical shift in the game design for healer DPS to be any different than it is now.

[Atlaworks]

Let's dissect this.

You are not reading that correctly, if you suddenly change the game to make healers dps less, You will lose players that play healing roles in this game. I do not care if you are sick of it or not, fact is fact and people said so they will quit healing if they impact changes to take such effects. You want to make healing more fun? How about not having us do nothing for 2-3 minutes? that is why healers need respectable dps, something to do.

"If you take away healer DPS, you're gonna lose healers!" Again. Good. They can get out. I want a healer who wants to heal, not one who's so preoccupied with DPS that they'd quit if that aspect took a hit. They can piss off. If you want to fix healers- make healing more fun, don't just make them green DPS. That's how you get healers who focus more on DPS than healing.

Also you are right, I am sick of DPS on tank jobs, take away Deliverance. We should take away, shield oath, sword oath, Defiance, Deliverance, grit, and make tanks do weak damage but take damage like they do now with their defensive ones, otherwise you will have 8 warriors rushes. Stance switching is too complex and needs to be made easier. that is what tone this thread sounds like when talking about why we need to remove cleric.

"I mean, if my WAR in any given party only was playing WAR to DPS, I'd want that pile of rubbish out of my party" (You can easily change job and ill fit)

And you will be very hard pressed to find a tank, maybe you have fun with one of them perma grit drks.

"Waaaaah, if I can't have my healer DPs, how about we take out all tank stances! Offensive AND defensive! That'll show them! And make them weaker too! That's what that guy is saying!" Ya got me, tex. Despite me saying multiple times that "Healers are in a fine place for the most part" and "I'm cool with healers DPSing when they do their job correctly and don't focus constantly on their fucking DPS". I want all stances gone forever and everyone who's not a DPS to do terrible damage forever. You caught me! Now get out. Christ.

...And yeah, if I had a WAR tank who only sat in deliverance and I kept pulling enmity off of, and who told me to stop DPSing so he could DPS more and tank, I'd tell him to get out and kick his sorry arse out of the party too. I don't care about anyone DPSing long as they do their freaking job first and foremost.

and tanks is ok? it is a lot "harder" then cleric is. I still do not understand why people jump on cleric stance and are fine with tank stances when they are more of a pain to do well.

Tank stance dancing isn't actually that difficult- at least to me(But when I run WAR I just use a macro that swaps out Fell Cleave/Inner Beast and Decimate/Steel Cyclone on my hotbar, among other things), but I find it's a simple matter of "get enmity, then punch it". Again, first I do my job, then I make time to DPS. And DPS stances exist for a reason- tank swaps are a raid mechanic, and when you have two tanks and only one can be tanking the boss, you don't want the other to generate as much enmity. There's reason for it.

People jump on Cleric Stance because that's how party members die- when the healer wants to DPS more than they want to heal, and shirks their actual duty.

But, moving on to a more sensible post...

Many healer players, myself included, are playing the jobs precisely because they're hybrid type jobs in this game. If they were simplified by dropping half of their toolkit, many of those people would stop playing them. And wanting to play a hybrid type job (especially one that can be pretty demanding to optimise in the hardest content) does not make anyone "a pile of rubbish" as a player. In fact, one could argue the opposite.


With how the game is currently played (and hence designed), both Cleric Stance and tank DPS stances play a major part throughout the group content, so there's no base to this argument.

If you're more focused on DPS than healing, I don't believe you should be playing a healer- you should be playing a DPS. I don't want you guys to stop DPSing, I'm cool with it happening, but when when every healer arguement is whining over their DPS and how they want more and they hope they get holyga for the next expansion instead of an actual valuable toolkit skill, it makes me think those folks need to take a step back and look at the role they're queuing for.

I'm not asking for half your toolkit to be gone. That would be stupid. I'm saying that the class who's role is healer shouldn't be so focused and obsessed with DPS- half their toolkit shouldn't BE DPS skills in the first place. Do your job first, ya damn layabout. And when you want more skills, maybe think of ways to make healing more fun instead of "Give me more DPS". You're not a DPS. Want more, go play a DPS. Need one that is a hybrid but has big numbers that you want? Go play summoner.

[Belhi]

I hate the stance dancing play-style and it is the main reason I don't touch healing in this game. People like their stance dancing I get that, but that doesn't mean those who don't like it shouldn't have an option. I wish cleric stance was removed and replaced with something specific for a single job (preferably scholar). That way those who enjoy stance dancing will have their option and those who don't have theirs.

I get where your coming from but frankly without it healing classes would become a lot more boring, particularly in non raid content. Healing mechanics tend to be rather simple with quite a lot of downtime and Healer dps rotations are almost mind-numbingly simple. The stance dancing is really the only aspect of it that requires some focus.

I agree with this, and I hate people that imply that the healer DPS meta is the communities fault (thanks for blaming us for playing the game in response to the game design guys). Fixing cleric stance actually won't change much as the primary fault lies in both the range of DPS skills and DPS enabling a abilities and content itself allowing for DPS. There needs to be a radical shift in the game design for healer DPS to be any different than it is now.

To be fair, I don't think the current healer DPS meta is intentional design on SE's part. I think they just messed up healing gameplay to make it have too much downtime and players adapted using the available options. At its core, the source of this issue is the healing gameplay structure and balance in this game. Sadly the existing Meta is probably so established that trying to revert it would probably be very unpopular. It does restrict somewhat the ability of healer gameplay to expand as far as actual healing goes. New healing spells just make existing healing easier and give healers more time to dps. I think this lies at the fundamental core of why balancing healers has been so troublesome. The best that can be hoped for is for them to try and shift healer gameplay towards support as well as healing.

[Tint]

just give us a healer wich don't dps, but has other tools to increase party dps. and keep other healers who can dps themself. then people who like the hybrid healer-dps style have their class, and the heal-only healers have their class too and everyone is happy. especially the heal-only players who refuse to use the tools to increase the party dps, since "it's not their job"...
AST would be the perfect candidate for such a class, but i guess it's too late for such a drastic change. but another healer with those kind of buffs would be strange too...

[Shurrikhan]

just give us a healer wich don't dps, but has other tools to increase party dps. and keep other healers who can dps themself. then people who like the hybrid healer-dps style have their class, and the heal-only healers have their class too and everyone is happy. especially the heal-only players who refuse to use the tools to increase the party dps, since "it's not their job"...
AST would be the perfect candidate for such a class, but i guess it's too late for such a drastic change. but another healer with those kind of buffs would be strange too...

it's just enemy-targeted damage contribution vs. ally-targeted damage contribution... I don't really understand how it would make a difference, except that it's damage floor could be crippled depending on your party members. The best outputs (like AST presently) are already going to be capped by some attempt at balance among actually good players. The same mechanics that would provide for that though would be shit when lacking said good players.

[ShinMetsu]

Personal opinion, if they took away cleric stance, i'd be inclined to not play healer in dungeons anymore.
I really enjoy the stance dancing aspect of healing

[Sida]

One thing to consider is the wide range of player skill, in other than the most high end content. For example in the "casual raids", such as Dun Scaith. With good party (and hopefully good alliance) the healing challenges are trivial and leave much time to dps. That there is the "healing is boring"part. However on another party, people keep messing mechanics, co-healer keeps dying, and I need to use all healing tricks in my sleeve to keep the thing from wipe. No time to dps, no mana to dps. If the healing challenge was higher, it would make it more interesting in the first case, and nightmarishly impossible in the latter. One could argue the game shouldnt cater so much for the "casual" players but it's already established this game is made friendly for them.

Silver line is, though... if you want healing challenge as healer, go play with randoms.

[Sebazy]

"If you take away healer DPS, you're gonna lose healers!" Again. Good. They can get out. I want a healer who wants to heal, not one who's so preoccupied with DPS that they'd quit if that aspect took a hit. They can piss off. If you want to fix healers- make healing more fun, don't just make them green DPS. That's how you get healers who focus more on DPS than healing.

And I'll say it again, you clearly don't understand how little healing is actually required in the bulk of content in this game. I suspect most of the people who are objecting to healer DPS being removed are of that mindset because frankly, there's very little else to do even as an AST. It's not that half of our toolkit is DPS, it's that the majority of encounters entirely revolve around doing DPS.

Some math for you. Looking over the last expert I logged, I cast 55 heals in a 17:30 run with 401 casts in total. So lets go with 1 in 7 casts being a heal, the rest being dps. Cleric stance was up for over 80% of the run. The run was entirely safe, no one died, no one was sweating. So what's going on here?

I'm a career healer/support who's likely cast more heals than many people on this forum have had hot dinners (And I've got a 4 digit magelo profile to back that up). Why am I doing so much more dps than I am healing? Because there is literally nothing else to do with my GCDs beyond giving in and just watching rubbish on netflix/youtube whilst mashing 1 key with the tank on follow. I'd much rather be buffing, healing and doing actual support work like I could in FFXI with my BRD but that's just not an option and frankly with 4 man groups, I'm not sure it's even a possibility.

If you want to play the disagree=kick game, save it for SE themselves as this situation is entirely their fault, AST in it's current form is both a massive mistake and a missed opportunity. Unless we get a new healer class mid expansion or the class design team manage to do a full scale rejig of AST around buffing rather than personal DPS, things just aren't going to change unless Yoshida is willing to up the base difficulty of the game as a whole for healers whilst also dialling back the speed at which players progress with gear.

[Nyxn607]

I would personally enjoy if the developers made the content in such a way to make it just hard enough that healer's wouldn't be able to DPS at all. I am rather annoyed with all of healer dps/cleric stance threads at this point.

In my personal opinion, if you don't like how someone else plays, stop playing MMO's. Not everyone is going to play the way YOU want them to. YOU do not own/control the MMO. In contrast, if you are going to get butt hurt any time someone suggests another way to go about playing your class, again you should stop playing MMO's.

Now I will sit back and watch people get butt hurt over this comment.
/grabs popcorn.

[Sebazy]

if you are going to get butt hurt any time someone suggests another way to go about playing your class, again you should stop playing MMO's.

Or better still, accept that it's a big wide world and that not everyone is going to share the same viewpoint

A valuable lesson for life this <3