Healer & Tank DPS (WoW vs FFXIV)

[Shurrikhan]

Disclaimer: not played WoW since the end of WoD, but as far as I know the healing has changed very little.

I was a hardcore raider healer in WoW. FFXIV's healing is very different.

The mana efficiency of healers in FF far outpaces WoW, so that allows FF healers to weave in dps. Healer dps is very effective in FF but it hits like a wet noodle in WoW. In WoW unless you have specific healing/defensive/mana gaining mechanics that use dps abilities, there is little to no reason for healers to dps in combat as it's a waste of precious mana and a gcd wasted on stupidly low numbers. (unless you greatly outgear the content)

Additionally out of combat hp and mp regen is several times faster in FF, so there is far less downtime between pulls. If a tank doesn't wait for you to regen mp in WoW you may need all the mana you have for just healing, whereas in FF due to the higher rate of mp regen you are more likely to have a higher percentage of mana at the next pull which leaves more room for dps.

A lot's actually changed since WoD, not that healer DPS to some degree hasn't been around since Vanilla and even been partly meta since BC. Legion has since made healer DPS basically mana-free, which has greatly increased the expectation to fill in wherever possible unless certain that you absolutely need that mana for future heals. Discipline priests, additionally, can ONLY heal through dealing damage.

Not to say that pre-Legion WoW isn't a fine example of what healers can be, but just know that that is where that path of development landed, whether naturally or by additional designer impetus.

[zipzo]

Well at some point we could argue basically every single mechanical concept of a class in an MMO to be easy or thoughtless, if you think about it. Just pick any class, and you can over simplify what it takes to execute playing that class properly. At the end of the day we do have to accept that nothing in either game (WoW or FFXIV) is legitimately 'hard'. Not in the "Nintendo Hard" sense. The difficulty in either game is really the team aspect. To combine the efforts of 4-5 (or 20-24 for that matter) people, all who likely deviate from one another in skill level and playing style...that's really what creates the difficulty in an MMO. Even then, there's concepts of skill floors and ceilings, and some what argue the floor is high enough in a lot of cases where the difference between a good and bad player is not huge, if only subtle.

[loreleidiangelo]

I think you should go back and watch everything wow has right now because some of your infos are outdated

You're not providing me with specific examples as to HOW my information is outdated, and couldn't even remember that Disc Priest's "healing through damage" passive was called Atonement, yet I'm the one who hasn't played WoW of late? Meanwhile I'm citing spell names, their cooldowns, giving specific combat examples of where each healer excels...whatever though.

I freely admit, the last thing I raided was Emerald Nightmare about 8 months ago, so maybe healers HAVE had a ton of changes and they're all one-size-fits-all à la FFXIV now. But when you won't give me specifics, instead focusing on "Disc isn't a shield healer because Atonement" pedantry and just telling me I'm wrong without any rebuttal using actual game info, it makes me disinclined to believe you.

Do Resto Druids have burst healing outside of Healing Touch and Tranquility now? Do Holy Pallies have a way to deal with constant AOE damage other than clenching their buttcheeks and spamming Light of Dawn off CD? Do Holy Priests have any sustain healing outside of ticks from Echo of Light (which has to be maintained through regular healing anyway)? If the new artifact tree turned all the healers into copies fair enough, I haven't played since EN. But when last I raided there you didn't expect your Disc Priest to carry everyone through Ursoc's Cacophony, that was your Shaman and Holy Priests' job.

[Remedi]

You're not providing me with specific examples as to HOW my information is outdated, and couldn't even remember that Disc Priest's "healing through damage" passive was called Atonement, yet I'm the one who hasn't played WoW of late? Meanwhile I'm citing spell names, their cooldowns, giving specific combat examples of where each healer excels...whatever though.

I freely admit, the last thing I raided was Emerald Nightmare about 8 months ago, so maybe healers HAVE had a ton of changes and they're all one-size-fits-all à la FFXIV now. But when you won't give me specifics, instead focusing on "Disc isn't a shield healer because Atonement" pedantry and just telling me I'm wrong without any rebuttal using actual game info, it makes me disinclined to believe you.

Do Resto Druids have burst healing outside of Healing Touch and Tranquility now? Do Holy Pallies have a way to deal with constant AOE damage other than clenching their buttcheeks and spamming Light of Dawn off CD? Do Holy Priests have any sustain healing outside of ticks from Echo of Light (which has to be maintained through regular healing anyway)? If the new artifact tree turned all the healers into copies fair enough, I haven't played since EN. But when last I raided there you didn't expect your Disc Priest to carry everyone through Ursoc's Cacophony, that was your Shaman and Holy Priests' job.

Honestly I don't care that much of wow to remember all the names of the mechanics tyvm, however I do remember that disc mastery is now focused on atonement and they do have a group heal now that applies atonement, as for the rest
druid do have burst healing Cds like swiftmend and tree of life, yes PLD don't have a sustained aoe heals, don't really know what you want to imply with sustain healing for priest outside echo.
That said If you think that wow healers are that much different from each others fine by me, I think otherwise and prefer how things are here afterall this is the game I am playing

[Vayanne]

To sum it up from a healer's perspective, game mechanics in WoW make DPS-ing as a healer unrewarding and meaningless, and far too often detrimental to the raid’s survival.

The so-called Fistweaver Monk that was touted as fulfilment of the “fantasy of healing while doing damage” wasn’t viable in hard core raids and was scrapped after two expansions. It is extremely rare for a healer’s damage to save the day – say the boss has one-wet-noodle hit HP left, the healer is the only one standing and manages to finish the boss off. No matter how hard you work your ass off, you’ll barely make a dent. As a Restoration Shaman, I enjoyed my 30 seconds of glory at the start of a fight when I threw in my CDs and my DPS reached (sometimes surpassed!) that of the tanks… Then it was back to below rock bottom. I still used every little opportunity I had to throw some cheap damage spells but just because I like to keep casting. With a Mistweaver Monk and Druid, however, I could barely afford even that, because I had to keep my hots rolling.

And there is a dark side to healer DPS particular to WoW.
In the toxic damage-meters-are-gospel environment of WoW there is nothing worse for a DPS than to be below a healer in damage. Sometimes nasty high-level healers would join raid finder and humiliate inexperienced, undergeared DPS by beating them on the meters and laughing at them.

[Penthea]

A lot's actually changed since WoD, not that healer DPS to some degree hasn't been around since Vanilla and even been partly meta since BC.

Depends on the sort of team you had. Most of the raid groups I was in tended to force healers to work harder than demand dps be better at dodging. So that often left very little room to do anything that wasn't constructive to effective healing. I played a priest and I was often forced to go disc in these situations. Other times we did encounters with less healers to have more dps, so that also left little room for healers to use gcds for purely offensive purposes.

Legion has since made healer DPS basically mana-free

That's good. At least now it balances the fact that the majority of healer dps is pretty poor.

[YitharV2]

I don't reject the idea that enmity/threat, defensive cooldowns, and positioning work in sort of a triad, complimenting one another. I think when you take away any one of those 3 things you make the entirety of the role less interesting. I wouldn't want to give up any of the 3.

Just in my case, taking away the necessity of enmity/threat management would be (is) the most egregious cut, which WoW did.

There can be different things we like about a role, that's ok, but that doesn't mean I don't value the other remaining elements of the role, or think we could do without them.

I agree that it's not 100% an automated element of gameplay, but it's almost as boring if not the same as passive mitigation. I mean, even though this is bad gameplay, all you need to do is stay in tank stance and spam 1-2-3 aggro combo or Flash and you're almost guaranteed to hold aggro. The problem I have with FFXIV is that it's too simple. In other MMOs you'd have to actually optimize DPS to hold aggro but here it's do your 1-2-3 combo. That's why I say it's about as boring as passive mitigation. What I found fun in another MMO is combining the challenge of holding aggro with optimizing DPS (which means taking less aggro on gear) and mitigating constant damage.

I also agree with Shurrikhan that in a vacuum enmity can't be meaningful or functional. It's when it's paired together with mitigation and positioning that it's meaningful.