Healer & Tank DPS (WoW vs FFXIV)

[loreleidiangelo]

I raided WoW at mythic difficulty until the first big content patch hit Legion (by which point I'd had enough).

The healing design there is that healers are intended to be throwing out heals most of the time. If you don't outgear the content by a fair margin, you aren't going to have much free time to actually throw out any damage. And WoW healer damage is also pathetic by comparison to what the DPS and tanks can do. The one exception was discipline priest, which was designed around healing through casting offensive spells, and even they didn't have amazing DPS (if you had solid uninterrupted DPS and never had to stop to do healing, you could match a tank or a bad DPS of your own gear level).

That doesn't mean that healers in high end content don't still throw out damage. In fact, it's a very good idea to since all WoW healers have at least one mana-free method of dealing damage. And that damage can be important when pushing through new content. But in a 20 man raid, your 3-5 healers are going to account for maybe 1% of the raid's total DPS. A little more if you have a discipline priest (unless their design was radically changed since I last played), but overall not a significant amount.

And as for dungeon content, if you're doing mythic plus dungeons, you are going to be far too occupied trying to keep the group alive to have much of a DPS window.

Compare that all to here, where the healing comes in periodic bursts, and where in between those bursts you generally don't have a lot to do because your healing relative to a WoW healer is much more potent, and where a simple regen can do most of the work to negate a boss autoattacking the tank. That leaves you with time where you're not doing anything. If you're not doing anything, then there's no reason not to throw out some damage spells unless you know for sure that you risk running out of mana later into a fight if you throw one more nuke out. Healer DPS is very strong and can make up a significant portion of a group's overall damage when played well.

That's why it's made out to be an expectation here, and why in WoW people rarely care about it. The way the tanks and healers are modelled are very differently. In WoW, healers are intended to do little else besides heal, since tanks take a constant beating and healers can't just spike a tank from near death to a comfortable health level with 1 OGCD.

This is the truest and most correct answer, I think. Talk all you want about which is "better", it really just boils down to the fact that the tank and healer roles in World of Warcraft are designed with completely different end goals in mind. Tanks have a bunch of powerful cooldowns that in some ways can trivialize most easier content, and when things like Essential Dignity crit for half a tanks' health bar and almost all of a DPSs' health bar the combined result is really just that the only way you can remotely engage yourself is by trying to optimize your damage.

If XIV ever TRULY wants to get rid of the "tank and healer DPS meta" they need to start by nerfing the crap out of their general kits, and I'm not sure how well that would go over with the lower percentile of the playerbase.

EDIT: On further reflection, a lot of it is how CONTENT is designed, too. There are large spikes of damage, but at set intervals, so raid encounters are generally more about powering health bars back to full before the next "eff you" AOE or tank hit, and a ton of the mechanics for the most part are meant to be the sort that if you screw them up even marginally, you just get one-shot or possibly even wipe your entire raid group depending. In WoW, things aren't exactly set in stone (there's still limits to how "random" the fights truly are, of course), so for the most part there's a big constant emphasis on tanks always having a cooldown up and healers always having the party over a certain percentage of health just in case. In WoW raids are more about outlasting the boss; in XIV, it's more about dancing the mechs while optimizing so you don't hit enrage.

[Shurrikhan]

In WoW raids are more about outlasting the boss; in XIV, it's more about dancing the mechs while optimizing so you don't hit enrage.

This really is the best summary available.