Suggestion as to how to get people to become healers.

[Mycow8me]

Oh so your latest run was back in january. Noticed you deleted that comment, any reason for it? Good thing I qouted it.

Look you can deny it all you want, healer switching is much more common than a tank switching. I doubt you even play tank but I ain't going to assume and I aint going to go check your profile cause I don't care enough.

They are still incomparable when an offtank can spend nearly a whole fight in dps stance due to having no other purpose than 1 mechanic. Even the main tank will not have to switch much if any at all.

No I don't have numbers for comparison, even IF i did, there's no way to prove were not just making numbers up. I DO however have my own experience as a warrior/scholar for comparison and the amount of switching between those two is like night and day.

Edit: You need to undestand something Taika. When a Maintank lowers their tank stance, they are directly causing healers to heal more thus lowering their DPS capability in the process anyway. If the tank switches to dps stance for some of the fight (except DPS clock mechanics) healers can see less switching anyway. Tank DPS is more important than healer dps cause they are consistently dpsing even in tank stance just to hold hate and their dps is also figured into the bosses calculations. I still believe this comparison does not work even if you are trying to make it seem so.

I still don't buy it, especially concerning off tanks which number you didnt bother to post. A main tank may have to switch a bit to boost dps but off tanks very rarely have to switch out of and back into. Warriors have to make a choice since their cooldown is 10 seconds long anyway. Ama chose the wrong tank to pick on for tank swapping in the first place. Your numbers don't mean anything to my experience, just sayin.

[Sebazy]

Whaaaat, I feel short changed here, my tanks generally opened with a combo in defensive stance and pretty much never went back. if I go back to January (We killed it earlier, but it wasn't until here that we started using a warrior pull and holmganging a few heat/spears), our warrior used just shy of 20 GCDs in defiance (spread across 3 occasions) throughout the entire A12S encounter. In the same kill our DRK used Grit twice, once just after the intermission to stop me pulling agro during the first stasis and again just after the second stasis as a mini cooldown.

On the flipside of the coin, myself and my co healing SCH used Cleric stance 9 times each, I had a 15% total uptime and my SCH was at 90% =o

This is something that really varies from group to group, I push a ton of HPS to allow my tanks and co healer to spend most of the fight DPSing as hard as they can. Other groups may have a more balanced approach to this (as Evy's demonstrates).

[Taika]

Whaaaat, I feel short changed here, my tanks generally opened with a combo in defensive stance and pretty much never went back. if I go back to January (We killed it earlier, but it wasn't until here that we started using a warrior pull and holmganging a few heat/spears), our warrior used just shy of 20 GCDs in defiance (spread across 3 occasions) throughout the entire A12S encounter. In the same kill our DRK used Grit twice, once just after the intermission to stop me pulling agro during the first stasis and again just after the second stasis as a mini cooldown.

On the flipside of the coin, myself and my co healing SCH used Cleric stance 9 times each, I had a 15% total uptime and my SCH was at 90% =o

This is something that really varies from group to group, I push a ton of HPS to allow my tanks and co healer to spend most of the fight DPSing as hard as they can. Other groups may have a more balanced approach to this (as Evy's demonstrates).

Yup, really depends on the group! Me and our AST seem to split our DPS more evenly (he's ranking 61% and me 76% on A11S pre-echo) than you and your cohealer. Whatever works the best for each team!

[Sebazy]

Oh and as a bit of a footnote to the tangent this discussion has taken and how it might not be entirely clear to casual players.

I'd like to point out that these kind of endgame strategy variations simply wouldn't be possible without cleric stance as it is. Simply put, I suspect Evy and myself would be discussing the ratio of toilet breaks and dog walks vs actual heals if it wasn't for the depth that cleric stance and healer DPS in general affords us.

It might not be the depth that we want, but it's all the depth that we have right now

[Naunet]

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.

As a healer... I would love this.

[Stormbad]

The bottom line is, people just generally don't want to be healers and tanks because of the perceived level of responsibility is higher than a dps job. Now, as experienced players, we know that isn't true as all jobs share an equal level of responsibility. But to a new player starting the game (especially if they don't have past MMO experience), they will go the safer approach and choose a dps job.

Also, I clearly recall when 2.0 first went live, there were massive complaints that there were no healers and tanks and a huge glut of dps. There were several posts here, on reddit and on FC specific forums asking people why and the majority responded with that tanks and healers are boring while dps jobs are exciting because they get to do damage.

[Vexander]

Also, I clearly recall when 2.0 first went live, there were massive complaints that there were no healers and tanks and a huge glut of dps. There were several posts here, on reddit and on FC specific forums asking people why and the majority responded with that tanks and healers are boring while dps jobs are exciting because they get to do damage.

Well, we just need more exciting healing mechanics. Maybe a Healer who can slap a buff on a target to convert a certain type of damage to healing? So a mob uses, say, Thunder on your tank, the healer slaps Thunder Aegis on them, and suddenly instead of taking 2,000 or so damage, they get healed for 1,000 instead. Give the buff a short enough duration so that the healer has to pay attention, but not so short that those with poor connections could never play the class. Naturally they'd still have all the usual healing staples such as direct heals and absorbs/HoTs, but it could prove for an interesting mechanic, especially if there are ways to improve it a bit further. Maybe absorb water damage and the healer regens some MP or something.

[Kosmos992k]

The bottom line is, people just generally don't want to be healers and tanks because of the perceived level of responsibility is higher than a dps job. Now, as experienced players, we know that isn't true as all jobs share an equal level of responsibility.

I'm sorry, but this is not true. You will seldom, if ever see anyone berating a DPS for not knowing every fight, or not being able to pull the entire dungeon. No DPS will ever be blamed for a wipe unless they were specifically assigned the mechanic that wiped the party. Theoretically yes DDs should have just as much responsibility, in practice and in my experience they absolutely do not carry the can unlike tanks and healers.

[Ama_Hamada]

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 actualduty.

Doing improper tank stance dancing is how people die and wipe, cleric stance does not do it. It is not cleric stance fault if people are trying cast cures while under it for 5 minutes till someone dies is not the fault of cleric stance. It is misplacing blame, even look at the video of doing a12s with no healers, lul, it is amazing what tanks can do when they know what they are doing. The only job that notices if tanks are really doing a proper job is an aware healer, holding hate is not all you do as a tank, you should be migrating damage and a for a lot of people, it is a difficult concept, provoking full time healers from thinking it is their fault.

Why are people like ama using tanks as a comparison to healers clerics stance (probably cause I said I didn't care about the conversation anymore unless warrior was brought up, your a piece of work ama). Do you even realize how often a tank has to stance dance in a fight in comparison? There are fights where the Off tank is literally only useful for 1 mechanic (the rest is downtime) and the whole rest of the fight they are a DPS. The main tank can spend literally almost the whole fight in defiance/shield oath/grit while the offtank can spend almost the whole fight in deliverance/swordoath/nongrit. A very adept healer will have to switch numerous amounts of times, its not even about being hard at that point, its more about an annoyance, especially just to recast DoTs every time they go down if you want to optimize dmg. This comparison doesn't work, so don't even try it. A warriors entire toolkit is self heals and DPS which means they should be DPSing with no other alternative like a healer has which its main role is to heal. They could add more off tank mechanics but thats another debate for another thread.

Also if you lower tank DPS (which is fine with me) you may as well just lower healer dps instead since they don't have nearly as much downtime which defeats your own damn argument. Are you the one trolling now?

Because I am sick of seeing people attacking cleric stance when real issue is tanks! Plus tank stance switching is more complex then a cleric toggle, so it is just me being curious why people seem to put cleric in such a bad light and think dropping it will add more healers, and nothing is said on tank stances.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

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.

That isn't the fault of players but simply how the game mechanics work. We focus on DPS because once healing/mitigation checks have been determined, there is literally nothing else to worry about. Very few healers, even at the hardcore level, want more DPS abilities. In fact, many want steeper heal checks, thus allowing them to focus on the main aspect of their job. I, for one, dislike the sheer amount of down-timed I'm afforded even in Creator Savage. Case in point, due to how tanks optimize and immunity through the entire first phase of A12S, you have exceptionally little healing requirements. If properly timed, the first healing spell you'll even need to cast is on the DPS when marked for Prey. After the wombo-combo of Mega Holies, you'll have free reign to DPS once again during all three sets of adds. This is what further emphasized the DPS meta. You simply won't be doing anything if you aren't actively DPSing. What I just outlined is supposedly the hardest content in the game. Let's shift to the easiest; dungeons. I'll spend 50-80% in Cleric. That, in my opinion, isn't a good thing. Unfortunately, the devs seem terrified of upping healer checks and better facilitating a need to actually heal fairly consistently. Until they do, the healer DPS meta will only become more widespread.