Healer & Tank DPS (WoW vs FFXIV)

[Bourne_Endeavor]

This has actually triggered me... I never use that word when referring to myself because I save it for the snowflakes, but wtf? Have you even played a Healer or tank in this game in any kind of High end duty content. They are the most demanding roles! DPS is heavily focused on muscle memory for the role to be played optimally, Healers and tanks are reactionary and predictive based roles who also have to pick up the slack if a DPS is lacking in any department.

As a healer, if i'm only paying a little bit of attention as you suggest we only need to do then someone is likely going to die.

Don't get me wrong though the DPS role can be played smart to the benefit of the entire party, but the bare minimum that is required of a DPS is enough for the role to function as intended. The same is not true for healer and tank roles.

I normally would not attempt to butt heads with another forum user so soon, but you are delusional if you truly believe "very simple" and "don't require much attention" to be true for both healers and tanks.

I agree... if you're attempting to optimize. A healer who only heals has arguably the easiest job in the game. They are literally waiting for something to happen. Likewise, tanks who keep up tank stance the whole fight are at very little risk of dying unless they actively mess up. And yes, I have played both at high levels. I tanked A12S. The most difficult aspect was trying to balance mitigation while still getting off a Berserk triple Fell Cleave. Honestly, the General's Might was harder than Alexander because I always tried to power through in Deliverance-- even when establishing aggo. You needed to micro-manage your CDs and the healer had to be on point or he could one-shot you. If I stayed in Defiance the whole time, it's a breeze to heal through.

The true challenge, at least in my opinion, with healers or tanks is through optimization.

[Sylvina]

I see common sense is not your strong suit. If tanks and healers did damage on par with DPS, they would be incredibly overpowered. Hell, if anything, tanks and healers already do far too much damage as it is.

I see reading comprehension is not your strong suit. I said that DPS should not do MORE THAN TWICE TO THREE TIMES the damage, not that Tank or Healer DPS should be on par.

Understanding game balance and the reasons behind it isn't your strong suit either it seems.

[Fealow]

I agree... if you're attempting to optimize.

You can call it optimizing, but for me it's just a case of doing something useful at any opportunity and why would anyone not want to do that?

[zipzo]

I see reading comprehension is not your strong suit. I said that DPS should not do MORE THAN TWICE TO THREE TIMES the damage, not that Tank or Healer DPS should be on par.

Understanding game balance and the reasons behind it isn't your strong suit either it seems.

Could you elaborate on why you believe that DPS classes having X amount more DPS potential than tanks or healers (past Y point) messes up game balance? Healers or tanks having better DPS seems like an obvious one, because then you basically make regular DPS obsolete when you can just bring a bunch of tanks who are less likely to die due to their survivability or healers who can simply make group durability much higher.

Saying that DPS, who's sole role is to DPS, having too much more DPS than classes who aren't mainly meant to DPS would make things imbalanced, seems like an odd evaluation. The two things seem pretty mutually exclusive.

[zar]

There are less DPS in raids in comparison to WoW. Half of your raid here is DPS while in WoW it's around 70%.
Healers here also do significantly more damage than in WoW. They do around 30% of an actual DPS while in WoW you'd be lucky to break 10%.

The encounters in this game are definitely designed around healers and tanks contributing DPS. If it weren't the DPS checks would be absolute jokes.

[Fealow]

The encounters in this game are definitely designed around healers and tanks contributing DPS. If it weren't the DPS checks would be absolute jokes.

Err... anyone want to go grab yoshi P's responses on this matter for this guy?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

You can call it optimizing, but for me it's just a case of doing something useful at any opportunity and why would anyone not want to do that?

Honestly? I don't know. But the whole healer DPS debates lives on because a large enough portion of the playerbase simply refuses to do more than heal. Of course, you get DPS who refuse to aoe during large pulls or tanks that hug their tank stance like it's a long lost friend. At least the loss of Cleric Stance seems to have convinced more healers to at least try DPSing. Some people are just content with getting by, I guess.

[zipzo]

You can call it optimizing, but for me it's just a case of doing something useful at any opportunity and why would anyone not want to do that?

I'm not intending to be confrontational but this is a bit dishonestly worded.

Just because a healer is not doing something in a given moment doesn't necessarily and automatically mean that said moment was wasted potential. For example, what if not casting in that moment, allowed them to save the extra MP to land a final heal that saves the tank in the final moments of an encounter?

That moment they don't DPS could lead to a moment that those extra resources actually allow them to do something greater than the net result of having DPSed in said moment. Maybe the "standing around" was the useful action, in that case.

So I think this sort of rhetorical question isn't really a fair way to argue the point you're trying to get across.

[Kyrph]

As someone who raids pretty hardcore in wow and not so much in ffxiv I can say that I love the fact that tanks and healer have the opportunity to put out some nice dps. No matter how much I optimize my tank demon hunter in wow when it comes to raiding I will never come close to the kind of dps as the dps can put out and it makes me feel like learning my rotation and trying to put out as much dps as I can is a bit lack luster though it does help for some pushes. Healers don't even have the opportunity to dps and when they do it isn't even close to enough to make a difference. I feel like a lot of the community ffxiv takes it for granted and uses lame excuses like it isn't needed at all, which it may not be but wouldn't you want to play your job to its full potential to better your play and help out your party?

I am not saying there is anything wrong with not dpsing as a healer just my opinion.

[Taika]

This has actually triggered me... I never use that word when referring to myself because I save it for the snowflakes, but wtf? Have you even played a Healer or tank in this game in any kind of High end duty content.

I don't know, I've only raided as a healer from First Coil to Creator Savage (and before that in 1.0), does that count?

As a healer, if i'm only paying a little bit of attention as you suggest we only need to do then someone is likely going to die.

I did not write that healers wouldn't have to pay attention to what's going on. What I said was that, unlike in many other games, healing in itself doesn't require much attention. For example, you don't have to play whack-a-mole with party health bars, and the amount of incoming damage is known beforehand. As such, if nothing goes wrong, you will pretty much use same healing spells in same order throughout the fight. Talking about farming raid content here, and optimal situations, learning fights is different of course. Similarly, as a tank, when you learn the fight you will be finding your optimal cooldown rotation and when you will be dancing between tank and DPS stances, and then you repeat that rotation for every single clear (unless you find something more optimal). For either role, you will not have to stand on your toes to prepare for something unexpected to happen, because it won't. And I don't say this meaning to downplay the difficulty of the two roles: I have very high appreciation for excellent tanks and healers. As someone said in this thread before, their difficulty lies in optimisation, which in practice means balancing healing/tanking with DPS. Whereas for DDs the difficulty is in their basic function: keeping up the rotation and then optimising that for each fight. My point was, if a tank is focusing only on taking, or a healer is focusing only on healing, that doesn't require as much attention and effort as playing a DD job fully in raid content. Now if they're played to their full extent, including DPS optimisation, they certainly do.

Just because a healer is not doing something in a given moment doesn't necessarily and automatically mean that said moment was wasted potential. For example, what if not casting in that moment, allowed them to save the extra MP to land a final heal that saves the tank in the final moments of an encounter?

This doesn't really happen in healer play in this game, or at least the scenario is very unlikely, as already explained earlier. Healers have strong resources for recovering MP and other jobs are able to give MP to healers as well. Furthermore, the most MP-cost-heavy things are raises, which are often handled by SMNs and RDMs. It's much more likely that the one GCD not used on DPS will cause the group to wipe to enrage (and that too is a strectch). Of course, as a disclaimer, I haven't done any raid content this tier as a healer, only the extremes, and only seen OS1 and OS2 so far, so I don't know if OS3/OS4 somehow require a lot of MP saving or something. But as a general rule, healers, like all the other jobs in the game, are expected to use every possible GCD actively and effectively.