Will Healers Still be Forced to DPS in 4.0 Due to Lax Content?

[Ghishlain]

If there isn't enough healing to be done I'll roll a damage dealer instead. My intention wasn't to heal easy content and twiddle my thumbs.

The question was "will there be enough damage to keep a healer busy purely with healing" not "can I get away with not doing damage if the content does not stress healers."

It's a shame - I love the Final Fantasy WHM aesthetics - but my answer is probably to role a BRD and steer clear of healing in this game. It's better to push the limits of interesting mechanics than supplement your job's core role with a simple version of another job's tools.

It's probably a safe bet to stay away from healer's since there's no reason to doubt that healer design for the content will change to dramatically in the near future. Even if there is a spike in healer requirement, usually that gets mitigated as ilvls get higher and higher thus reducing the healing requirement. Unless there's a dramatic shift in how damage is done (IE, every conceivable piece of damage received is a percentage based attack - thus making ilvl irrelevant), you'll eventually come to a point with your gear upgrades where you'll be afford the openings you need to do something other than heal.

If healing requirements does make a dramatic change in 4.0 though, you'll definitely hear about it as I imagine there might be a lot of salt surrounding that too.

[Dyvid]

interview w/ Yoshi-P by MrHappy1227
https://youtu.be/5la_nyC5BO0

cit.
Question 3.) So... Healers now have their DPS scale with Mind and Accuracy is no longer an issue. Do you think this will lead to players having even higher expectation of healers to contribute DPS to content since it is much easier thing to do now?

Answer: First of all, we do not expect healers to contribute do DPS. However we know a lot of the cutting edge players enjoy this aspect about the job and that those progressing in the raids early on use it help clear the fights. We decided to make it so that the idea was more approachable and less punishing so that if a player wants to try it, they aren't sacrificing all of their healing capabilities to do so like they were with the old Cleric Stance. We didn't like seeing healers doing entire dungeons in Cleric Stance, especially if they forget to switch back and heal!

This is all fine and dandy but unless makes changes in content where Tanks have to stay in tank stance and healers have to focus on healing, nothing is going to change.

[Kaonis]

We won't know till EA, but I think many of us are expecting it to be the same as before. I'm no healer main, but I like to heal on occasion, and even while leveling I manage to find the time to toss out a decent bit of damage between heals. Very rarely have I found a situation where I need to 100%, and usually it's just because my gear isn't great, people are just not dodging anything, or the tank is taking a ton of damage on a big pull. The ironic part too is big pulls are consistently the only thing where enough damage is going out that I need to spend more time healing, and the devs seem to be trying to discourage big pulls between the upcoming AoE nerfs, and all the gating they have tossed in over the years.

[HappyHubris]

Thanks for the feedback, guys and gals. BRD it is.

[FoxyAreku]

If there isn't enough healing to be done I'll roll a damage dealer instead. My intention wasn't to heal easy content and twiddle my thumbs.

The question was "will there be enough damage to keep a healer busy purely with healing" not "can I get away with not doing damage if the content does not stress healers."

What you ask for just simply does not exist in this genre.

Even playing the highest difficulty raids in WoW with very high heal checks-you're still expected to throw dps when applicable (some classes even reward you for it by giving mana back!). There is no such thing as a class that is made to heal and only heal in any MMO that I have heard of. You will always be deemed lazy for doing so, it's not just this game. Some communities are just more accepting of lazy players than others, but really I'm not sure why people are surprised by this. Why would it ever be acceptable to just stand there not contributing at all for any length of time?

Unless we end up with a boss fight where the goal is to heal an NPC up to 100% while protecting them, there was a fight like that in WoW before, the only time where damage spells were bad lol.

[Cynfael]

One of the challenges with healing in MMOs is that your role contribution scales inversely with content familiarity; as your team's gear and mechanical comfort increase there is less damage taken and thus less healing for you to do.This issue doesn't just occur for mastered content; if an encounter is undertuned your healers will have to cope with the missing damage. This is typical of raids in many MMOs, where "trash" pulls put healers to sleep in between boss fights.

From what I've read of FFXIV, most of the game's content just isn't tuned to give healers enough to do, resulting in an expectation that healing jobs will push out damage between healing GCDs. This could be considered undertuning or a deliberate design decision. Either way, healers are expected to output damage as well as heal, to the point where 4.0 healer DPS reductions are a significant concern within the community.

I personally enjoy devoting myself to healing mechanics on healing roles. Is 4.0 shaping up to require more healing, or will it be healing light like 3.X?

Almost all content outside of Savage is mechanics-light in general.

- You don't need max DPS to clear.
- You don't need the toughest, most skilled full-time tank.
- You don't need a healer who heals both efficiently and constantly.

If you want to heal in a game that demands virtually nothing but healing from healers, you need to look elsewhere for that particular role.

I think that most players who couldn't get past CS (no, I don't get why, but they apparently exist) will find that they can enjoy filling dead space with the odd offensive spell at least.

Also, let's be honest: there are plenty of healers out there who still spend all of their time healing because they haven't yet figured out how to do it optimally. These people are still a few steps away from being concerned about not having enough to do.

[Elamys]

What you ask for just simply does not exist in this genre.

Even playing the highest difficulty raids in WoW with very high heal checks-you're still expected to throw dps when applicable (some classes even reward you for it by giving mana back!).

did you actually play the same world of warcraft i did because what?

[Kaisha]

If they actually made healing a challenge I wouldn't mind it. As it stands I was able to do full pulls in Baelsar's Wall at the minimum iLvl while wielding an i130 book on my SCH alt character.

Otherwise if enemies are going to tickle the tanks or busters are far and few between on busters/raids, I'm going to always be casting, whether it be heals as necessary, or dealing damage.

[TaleraRistain]

There is no such thing as a class that is made to heal and only heal in any MMO that I have heard of.

Clerics in EverQuest say hi

[Acidblood]

If they actually made healing a challenge I wouldn't mind it. As it stands I was able to do full pulls in Baelsar's Wall at the minimum iLvl while wielding an i130 book on my SCH alt character.

Otherwise if enemies are going to tickle the tanks or busters are far and few between on busters/raids, I'm going to always be casting, whether it be heals as necessary, or dealing damage.

Must have had a good Tank then, otherwise the first (full) pull and last boss can be a bit rough (well, relatively at least).


As for the topic generally, requiring full time healing can be achieved (see: Vanilla WoW), but it takes a different mindset for content design; namely that the content needs to be designed such that the average Tank CAN NOT withstand the damage from a single encounter* (let alone 2 or 3), with crowd control, careful pulling (pat inc!), and / or exceptionally good healing making the difference between life and death... FFXIV is a hell of a long way off this, and from comments about the difficulty of 4.X being roughly on par with 3.X, I don't think this is changing any time soon (but hey, maybe they didn't just leave Repose on WHM as a bad joke).

* By single encounter I mean a single group of linked mobs with cannot be pulled separately, or a boss with adds that need to be off-tanked, kited, or otherwise controlled by someone other than the main tank.