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

[Shurrikhan]

Healers never did damage for the sake of damage in WoW, only because something else was attached to it. The debuff part is the sole reason for damage skill usage in your "damaging debuffs". Healer damage was also on par with what FFXIV healers do now without Cleric. Somewhat high mana costs combined with the 5-second rule really put a hold on any dreams about damage, and accuracy and partial to full resists were also problems.

I'm pretty sure Seal of Light didn't even do any damage when judged back in vanilla, or if it did, it was in the low hundreds, meaning it didn't even register in the 40-man raids. Debuff caps in the beginning and it healing for something like 20-30 per melee hit meant it was used maybe once a year. I think it even had something like 40 charges shared with everyone.

Umm... I did, in Vanilla, and Crusade, and Wrath, and Mists, and Warlords, and whole lot in Legion now that they removed or flattened the mana costs on most DPS spells. This has been the norm among guildmates, even among Dungeon Finder groups. Given healing downtime and sufficient mana, downtime is used. Simple as that. Some healers have higher opportunity costs for it than others, but most of the healers I favored for their versatility also tended to do 20-40% of what the DPS were doing on dungeon spams pre-Legion. In Legion, I often outdps them at the same gear (not likely the same skill) level while still keeping everyone up fine. It is not normal for a Mists+ healer to stand around doing nothing when healing isn't necessary at that global, unless they're already damn near oom. I have many times seen healers kicked for refusing to DPS during downtime in non-intense content, in the same way a slow or ineffective tank may be kicked (generally according to average replacement time when people start getting annoyed).

Fun fact: The "I only heal" healers there, too, tend to be worse at healing, regardless of spending no globals on any other task, save for when there's enough damage and few enough mechanics to allow their eyes to remain fixed to their heal grids.

You're playing with a very small group of people then because in 12 years of PUGs I have never seen a healer get kicked for not DPSing, and my main is shadow priest first, so it's not because I'm the healer all the time. I have also never been in a raid group where I was expected to DPS unless some rare situation called for it, like, as mentioned, pushing an add. Healers in WoW almost always have something to do that better contributes to their healing.

:: Went ahead finished up my sub before editing. Over a week at the bonus heroic and a brief, catch-up-level mythic spree per day, only 4 healers didn't DPS during their downtime; 3 were kicked. The last, part of one of the mythic sprees, was a friend of the rest. This is random sample PuGing we're talking about, save for a larger portion of the group premade in the case of the non-kick.

While I'm sure this has increased since Legion, even in Mists I was frequently seeing a healer replaced for not making use of downtime during anything overgeared or done in succession (e.g. one party for multiple quick runs), and have seen what healer damage is doable in Challenge runs make or break a fight. Now in Legion, more often than not, if there's a healer with noticeable downtime in Mythics, he gets replaced (almost guaranteed if there's a length or dungeon downtime such as after Fenrir in HoV). Just yesterday the message to the replacement was "are you going to make use of downtime?"

I'm not saying the proportions are nearly alike. Only a few posts before the last I had said that one could much more easily argue that Legion DPS expectation from healers comes from XIV rather than the other way around (as they were suggesting), but both are in fact mere consequence of their fights and arsenals—amount of downtime, relative contribution from DPS, toolkit synergies, and relative mana cost (largely overlapping with the prior factors). I simply disagreed with the idea that "healers never dealt damage for the sake of dealing damage." My anecdotal experience cannot qualify the norm (though I was largely guild-less or a sub or PuG/composite-team raider), but given how prevalent it was for and around me over hours of daily play over every expansion as each healer... it at least contradicts that absolute. I meant to point it out as hyperbole, given one simple fact: people, given enough resource, ought not and typically prefer not to be idle. When DPS is what you have left to do, you DPS. (And, with more skilled players, if DPS at a particular global would cause the fight to clear sooner than another action, you DPS.) There were no hard rules to prevent that there any more than here.

(Heck, the whole "healers are scaring my man-tits off by DPSing nonstop" was something I saw as far back as from mana-synergistic hybrids (e.g. Balance-Resto druids) in Vanilla. HoT-and-roll (and OoC). I did this myself frequently, often outpsing the least geared DPS while still keeping everyone up just fine, and drinking only when the DPS casters had to. Unless there was a Warlock who was using me as a mana-IV. Though I didn't have quite the free mana or synergy, the same was generally true of my Priest and Paladin even as far back as then. It's not some modern fad. It's been there since I started into MMOs at least, and I'd wager well prior to that, too.)

[Elamys]

I have many times seen healers kicked for refusing to DPS during downtime in non-intense content, in the same way a slow or ineffective tank may be kicked (generally according to average replacement time when people start getting annoyed).

Fun fact: The "I only heal" healers there, too, tend to be worse at healing, regardless of spending no globals on any other task, save for when there's enough damage and few enough mechanics to allow their eyes to remain fixed to their heal grids.

You're playing with a very small group of people then because in 12 years of PUGs I have never seen a healer get kicked for not DPSing, and my main is shadow priest first, so it's not because I'm the healer all the time. I have also never been in a raid group where I was expected to DPS unless some rare situation called for it, like, as mentioned, pushing an add. Healers in WoW almost always have something to do that better contributes to their healing.

If they are damaging, it's because the damage has a mechanic tied to it that affects their healing. For example, in Warlords on Holy priest, when I was low on mana (because they for some reason decided to nerf spirit and then remove all active mana regen abilities...) I could spam Smite, which was mana neutral, to fish for Surge of Light procs while waiting on my mana to regen. That's not DPS for the sake of making things faster. That's DPS because I need healing from it.

I don't play WoW anymore since Legion launch, my friend tells me that only now is there a mentality beginning to emerge that healers should do some DPS, because DPS abilities on healers cost pretty much no mana now.

To say that there is no game where healers just heal, and then point to the biggest MMO in history as requiring healers to DPS when it doesn't, is laughable. Very few damaging attacks that FFXIV healers have contributes something to their healing, and it's pretty much limited to Assize and Energy Drain, restoring MP. The reason for this is because heals in WoW are much weaker. In XIV I can top up a bar in two-three casts. In WoW, I cannot. I HAVE to heal way more. It is much more demanding on my time. There's almost always something I can do that is better contributed to my healing. Mana cost has historically prohibited healers from DPSing anywhere close to the level we do in XIV, and now what prohibits it is the sheer amount of time healing. There are also no pet healers like Scholar, so we don't have healers that just AFK the whole time. I see plenty of healers who do damage, but not because they were told to lol. It's very rare to find any appreciable amount of downtime to do so in serious content.

As far as how this relates to XIV? I like to DPS as a healer, I feel I'm rather aggressive about it in comparison to average, but it's mostly because I don't like having nothing to do. I DPS in WoW for the same reason when I can. If I see a healer not DPSing I usually won't say anything unless it's a scholar or we've wiped a few times. I'd rather have my healer be healing than to get locked to Cleric because they're not comfortable with it or whatever.