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

[MarinaShore]

My focus is your shifting of blame towards the DPS, who already take fair criticism for bad play. Just so we're clear. Even a subpar Dragoon is still contributing whereas a heal only healers is effectively useless upwards of 80%. I'll roll my eyes at both, however at least one is going something.

A DPS' role in a dungeon is to DPS. I am not "shifting blame", I am holding the majority of DPS I come across accountable for not being able to perform their function. If DPS are competent and playing their roles correctly, healer DPT might save you a full minute on a run. Things will die quickly enough that a healer will barely have time to cast 2 AOEs. Just so we're clear. A healers role is to heal, DPS is an optional element for them, not a requirement.

Perhaps my solution should be to call out all the poor DPS I come across in party chat and then vote dismiss them, since that seems to be the acceptable way to treat healers.

[Cyrocco]

A DPS' role in a dungeon is to DPS. I am not "shifting blame", I am holding the majority of DPS I come across accountable for not being able to perform their function. If DPS are competent and playing their roles correctly, healer DPT might save you a full minute on a run. Things will die quickly enough that a healer will barely have time to cast 2 AOEs. Just so we're clear. A healers role is to heal, DPS is an optional element for them, not a requirement.

Perhaps my solution should be to call out all the poor DPS I come across in party chat and then vote dismiss them, since that seems to be the acceptable way to treat healers.

Oh my goddddddddd, the point isn't how much DPS there is in total, or how much DPS you do.

The point is this: https://youtu.be/jBgMe5uHPsE?t=17m13s

[Waliel]

Take a look at the Mistwalker Monk healer. Apart from one minor CD, Mana Tea, its mana recovery IS melee DPS. Holy Priest healing partly benefits burst damage as well. In WoD, Holy Paladin's filler damage also prevented targets from critting. Since Vanilla, its damaging debuffs supplied raid healing. Healer design has always had some expectation that direct damage will outweigh healing for certain globals.

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.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

A DPS' role in a dungeon is to DPS. I am not "shifting blame", I am holding the majority of DPS I come across accountable for not being able to perform their function. If DPS are competent and playing their roles correctly, healer DPT might save you a full minute on a run. Things will die quickly enough that a healer will barely have time to cast 2 AOEs. Just so we're clear. A healers role is to heal, DPS is an optional element for them, not a requirement.
Perhaps my solution should be to call out all the poor DPS I come across in party chat and then vote dismiss them, since that seems to be the acceptable way to treat healers.

First and foremost, healer DPS will shave off considerably longer than one minute. Just look at the video Cyrocco linked. Neither DPS performed poorly yet Taika still took over 21 minutes to complete Xelphatol-- a dungeon you can easily complete in 15 minutes or less. I have even managed to clear it in under ten, albeit that was a rare all raiders DF party. Regardless, you missed my point again. Taika's video demonstrates how inefficient she was when not DPSing. I'll reiterate, even a subpar damage dealer is still doing damage. A heal only healer is useless for large portions of the fight. While optional yes, people dislike seeing others do literally nothing while they pull do all the work, thus why non-DPSing healers draw the most ire.

[Cynfael]

First and foremost, healer DPS will shave off considerably longer than one minute. Just look at the video Cyrocco linked. Neither DPS performed poorly yet Taika still took over 21 minutes to complete Xelphatol-- a dungeon you can easily complete in 15 minutes or less. I have even managed to clear it in under ten, albeit that was a rare all raiders DF party. Regardless, you missed my point again. Taika's video demonstrates how inefficient she was when not DPSing. I'll reiterate, even a subpar damage dealer is still doing damage. A heal only healer is useless for large portions of the fight. While optional yes, people dislike seeing others do literally nothing while they pull do all the work, thus why non-DPSing healers draw the most ire.

This is a great point, and it still amazes me that we have to get this granular to explain what ought to be an intuitive concept.

For people who know how to play (i.e. did not start playing healer yesterday), there is no reasonable justification for consistently standing around waiting to heal, and that will be even more the case when the minimal barrier of existing Cleric Stance is eliminated.

"I don't DPS while healing because it's the most effective way to play," said no one, ever.

It's usually one of the following hot mess arguments:

- "It's not fair to expect me to DPS because I already have one job" (Good luck helping this person realize that DPS is a shared party responsibility, not a task you compartmentalize and entrust 100% to the dedicated DPS role. They also like to exaggerate the difficulty of healing and pretend that every party they join is a train wreck, not admitting the possibility that they themselves may be helping to wreck trains all over Eorzea)

- "Why do I have to make up for bad DPS?" (This person is usually looking for someone to blame for what they perceive as extra work, never mind that even poor tanks and DPS are already much more active button-wise than a pacifist healer)

- "I don't like to hit things, and you can't make me." (Fair enough; no one can make you play well, but let's not pretend that it's some kind of right rather than a purely selfish and/or spiteful choice)

[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.)

[LegoTechnic]

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.

This was true in raiding and end-game dungeon content up through most of Wrath of the Lich King, I guess, but the primary reason for this was mana cost and poor recovery of it over long durations, as well as random damage targets that forced localized AoE spam (such as chain heal). In the Burning Crusade especially there were raid fights where you couldn't react to specific players taking party damage, such as Brutalis, so you just spammed AoE to cover everything. Alternatively there were fights like the Shadow Council where you had your specific targets, but the fight dragged on so long and mana regen only got you so far even with mana potions, so you had to conserve your mana lest you run dry at the end and cause a wipe. Even after the shadow priest buff that made them super mana batteries they just implemented fights like freaking M'uru where you took turns spaming between the tanks and general AoE because keeping 24 people up through that nightmare was a horrendous experience. In fights like those you needed every extra tick of inactive refresh you could get.

But in dungeons? Hell yes we threw out Smites, weak as they were, but only if it was safe to do so. A lot of that depended on crowd control though, which ffxiv completely lacks, because trash pulls back then in WoW could easily legitimately wipe the floor with you, but if they were properly sheeped/trapped/sapped/etc and there was just one or two things up then you better believe we smited to get them down before one of those CC timers broke. Sometimes (rarely) we even mind-controlled. This was true in most trash situations, because sitting on your thumbs doesn't do them any good.

[Ayer2015]

Oh my goddddddddd, the point isn't how much DPS there is in total, or how much DPS you do.

The point is this: https://youtu.be/jBgMe5uHPsE?t=17m13s

And how often do you actually see that? I never do.

[Cyrocco]

And how often do you actually see that? I never do.

Actually see what? Healers sitting around wasting their time? Never. Because I'm the healer.

[Thunda_Cat_SMASH]

The healing classes in this game are fairly underwhelming as far as mechanics and play styles go. If you don't find the healers AFKDPS centered philosophy, you'd be a lot better off swapping to another role entirely, as healing in this game, even in the hardest content, had always been a bit of a joke.

Bard does look a ton of fun in SB, though I'm still sticking to Warrior/Paladin.