Isn't playing WHM optimally going completely against what SE wants healers to be?

[Dregenfox]

I really dislike the common thread here where if you don't agree with the vision of a class, it means "devs have no idea wtf they're doing". Yes the removal of cleric stance meant that DPS had to be lowered to account for it.

The savage encounters were designed without healer DPS in mind, but ONLY for a certain gear thresh-hold and only if both DPS and tanks are playing optimally. If they aren't then the healers are expected to contribute to DPS to clear those raids.

This means, despite the fact that everyone thinks they're 90'th percentile players, there's a good chance you'll have to DPS as a healer to clear savage. The devs designed it that way on purpose - there's no conflict to that.

You are free to just stand there and heal for non-savage content, if that's what you prefer. Your group will clear it no matter what you do. You can even just afk and there's a good chance the other healer will pick up the slack. But if you want to tackle savage content without being a constant burden to your team you should be learning when to heal, and when to DPS.

You can tell when a WHM knows a fight well because they can plan every single hard-cast in advance to optimize both DPS and HPS. Guess what other class has to do that? BLM's. The two classes are designed to perform best with minimal movement and good skill planning. The more hard-casted cures WHM can get off, the more instants/shields they can pull off, and the more time they can spend putting out DPS.

[Sebazy]

Because people want to play healers to heal, not to play gussied up DPS. This is the only MMO I've played where healers are expected to DPS like this.

Correction, YOU want to play a healer to heal, not play as a gussied up DPS. For every person that shares your viewpoint, there's one that doesn't. The current status quo might not be to your liking, but it offers healers and their teams the choice that they can work out between themselves. Sometimes compromises might need to be made, it's almost like real life!

So yeah, consider finding a like minded team and playing accordingly? Can't find one? Then assemble one yourself! Prove your worth and groups will happily keep you around irrespective of how good or bad your DPS might be. I can tell you first hand that you can still be an asset to your group even if your DPS isn't top tier (Mine is far from that, feel free to look over my logs rankings if you have any doubts).

Beyond that, it's just the way this MMO has panned out TBH. Maybe it's a modern MMO thing as developers try to break the trinity, GW2 flat out didn't have any healers whereas BnS just had very limited healing at first. By comparison, MMOs that have truly have healing heavy gameplay either have comparatively much weaker healers/substantially larger HP pools (e.g. WoW) or are significantly slower paced and less fluid (e.g. Everquest). /shrug, it's just how it is. If you don't like it, perhaps it's time to find a game that suits your tastes better?

[Elamys]

considering the majority of people discussing healer DPS seem to admit "yeah, you should really only DPS because there's just not much healing to be done," whereas the devs have stated multiple times that they don't want healers to be dpsing a majority of the time, does that not indicate a flaw in the design that they are trying to achieve?

I love this game. I don't hate DPSing as a healer. But it often feels like why have a healer role if 80% of the time, I'm DPSing? It's a legitimate flaw in the game's design because it has been stated by the game's designers that they want healers to heal most of the time. It's not a matter of taste.

[gti443]

It feels like they're too afraid to hone in on what they want healers to be, so they just leave them in this weird middle spot and leave it up to the community to make of them what they will.

Tanks are not like this. They're tanks sure, but it's made obvious that you should be doing respectable damage. It's what they decided, and the tanking role is able to progress forward now that they have a clear role identity.

I mean... Direct Hit melded tanks that are allergic to tanking stance is what the community has come up with, not Square. Probably the biggest reason tanking accessories got STR added in 4.05 was because if not people were set to revert to 270 crafted. I'd expect we'll see even more changes, maybe DH nerfed and Tenacity buffed along the lines of VIT = STR last expansion. Given the overall direction of SB so far I'm pretty sure Square would like to see tank DPS taken down a notch and healer DPS to fill in the gap... but the community seems to be fighting that from both ends of the spectrum so... yeah.

I don't get why people are planting their flag on Yoshi's comments though... that the job can scale down to a very... casual no-DPS style of play doesn't mean that's how its designed or intended to be played. I kinda get that some may want to play a pure healer but that's not really what this game is designed around, at least if you want to play at a relatively high level.

[RyuDragnier]

I honestly think one of the biggest problems with healing is that ast isn't a unique healer in its own right. Take away the card mechanic and what you got left is a very two dimensional healer that has a boring version of whm and sch healing kits. Yes the card mechanic is supposed to make up for that but frankly the rng of it is often very punishing. Ast need a prominent healing mechanic unique to them instead of just having the pseudo whm and sch stances.

Remove the Sects, make a slot to hold another card in, this one effects the healing for the Aspected heals. Bole gives shields, Balance increases heal potency, Arrow reduces spellcast time, Spear increases the odds of it being a crit, Ewer decreases the MP cost and Spire makes it an HoT. There, we've made AST unique since it's dependent on the cards to really effect its spells. Hell, you could possibly make this slot effect all of the spells on the class instead. This changes up the class depending on what card you pull out, and is a unique feel compared to SCH and WHM.

[Dregenfox]

considering the majority of people discussing healer DPS seem to admit "yeah, you should really only DPS because there's just not much healing to be done," whereas the devs have stated multiple times that they don't want healers to be dpsing a majority of the time, does that not indicate a flaw in the design that they are trying to achieve?

I love this game. I don't hate DPSing as a healer. But it often feels like why have a healer role if 80% of the time, I'm DPSing? It's a legitimate flaw in the game's design because it has been stated by the game's designers that they want healers to heal most of the time. It's not a matter of taste.

Where did you get this quote from the devs?

[Exiled_Tonberry]

Where did you get this quote

Not sure where he got that exact quote from, but even the novice hall, the content meant to TEACH you your role tells you to aid in dpsing if there's nothing else going on.

So the game tells you to DPS, and gives you tools to DPS quite a bit. Yet Yoshi actively talks against dpsing. At the same time, mechanics are being made on healing jobs that actively encourage more healing, but the way damage is dealt hasn't been changed to accommodate this so you just go back to the same heal outgoing damage, go back to DPS rotation.

Can you see the problem? It's as if no one knows how they want healers in this game to actually work. Do they want us to focus more on healing? Do they want us to DPS more? Do they want us to do both? Then why talk down on us dpsing and overall nerf our DPS potential? Why create WHM, call it a pure healer, yet makes it's main contribution to the raid it's high healer damage?

It's a real mess.

[Elamys]

Where did you get this quote from the devs?

There are two quotes in particular that Yoshida has made on the subject.

The first one is from a pre-Stormblood interview with...was it Mr. Happy? I don't watch a lot of the video interviews and I don't really follow streamers.

Q3.) So...healers now have their DPS scale with Mind AND accuracy is no longer an issue. Do you think this will lead to players having even higher expectations of healers to contribute DPS to content since it is a much easier thing to do now?

A.) First of all, we do not expect healers to contribute to DPS. However we know a lot of the cutting edge players enjoy this aspect about the job and that those progressing in the raids early on use it help clear the fights. We decided to make it so that the idea was more approachable and less punishing so that if a player wants to try it, they aren’t sacrificing all of their healing capabilities to do so like they were with the old Cleric Stance. We didn’t like seeing healers doing entire dungeons in Cleric Stance, especially if they forget to switch back and heal!

That being said, and I want you to really reinforce this to your viewers, I firmly believe it shouldn’t be mandatory and we do NOT have the expectation of them to DPS.

This one is from a rather old interview:

Yoshida: Yes. Since all DPS jobs will be increasing up through level 60, it makes sense to have the white mage's DPS extend by a proportional amount as well. For development, such as with Bahamut's Coils, the development team assumes what the item level should be for general equipment on players when they clear a raid. They sum up the basic DPS for four DPS and tanks at that assumed item level and cut that by about 10-15% for the minimum clear DPS. Healer DPS is not taken into account when this is set.

Certainly for people who are at world's first level, their goal is to clear it at as low an item level as possible, lower than the one assumed during development. So if you look at the fight and figure out that if it's not numerically possible to clear with four DPS and tanks, you'll need to make up the gap with DPS from healers. Then when those publish clear videos and other people see the healers DPSing, they might think that healers need to be DPSing even though its a situation that only arose because their clear would have otherwise been impossible. While we could take this into account, and assume a different item level in the next update which would then make it impossible to clear even with the healer DPS, we'd eliminate this type of play for highly skilled players who use communication, items, and a high level of understanding to come up with those last second clears. That would be a tough decision to make, so I still think it should be up to each party's own plans.

This is also one of the reasons we decided to implement both a normal and savage version of Alexander. Once again, healer DPS was not included in the development team's calculation as it was for other jobs, so you should just think of healer DPS as a last way to get your overall party's DPS up to where it needs to be.

[Dregenfox]

All that really says is that Yoshi doesn't want to make healer DPS a requirement to clear raids. The dev team doesn't expect healers to DPS because they know it would upset a ton of players. So they basically made it so groups could decide for themselves whether they wanted their healers to DPS.

I think the mess we're in now is because SE wanted to cater to both the hardcore "DPS min-max" crowd and the casual/pacifist "heal-only" crowd.

[Sebazy]

Yet Yoshi actively talks against dpsing.

whereas the devs have stated multiple times that they don't want healers to be dpsing a majority of the time

I think you're misunderstanding the quote as a whole? /shrug

However we know a lot of the cutting edge players enjoy this aspect about the job and that those progressing in the raids early on use it help clear the fights. We decided to make it so that the idea was more approachable and less punishing so that if a player wants to try it

While we could take this into account, and assume a different item level in the next update which would then make it impossible to clear even with the healer DPS, we'd eliminate this type of play for highly skilled players who use communication, items, and a high level of understanding to come up with those last second clears. That would be a tough decision to make, so I still think it should be up to each party's own plans.

We didn’t like seeing healers doing entire dungeons in Cleric Stance, especially if they forget to switch back and heal!

The bolded sections emphasise where Yoshida acknowledges healer DPS and suggests that it should be a choice between the party and the healers themselves. I really can't stress this point enough.

He isn't actively talking against healers DPSing and I strongly suspect the comment about healers spending an entire dungeon in cleric stance was a reference to how SCHs quite literally could spend 80-90% of an expert roulette in cleric stance. I highly doubt that's got any relevance to 8 man content at all due to the 'entire dungeons' bit and it's definitely something that was clearly addressed in SB dungeons with both a heavy handed SCH nerf and an overall increase in incoming damage throughout SB's dungeons particularly on large pulls. I also suspect his disdain for cleric stance and any discussion about it was down to the fact that it was a bodge by a team that didn't really know how to handle healer DPS and he knew it.

This all tallies up pretty nicely with what we have right now no? O1S and O2S are both readily dooable right now with 0 healer DPS, O3S is on the cusp with a months worth of upgrades and I imagine a lucky group with 4 solid DPS and maybe a few dots from the healers should be able to get the job done in time. O4S isn't happening just yet tho, I've been pugging and helping other groups over the last couple of weeks, ~24k raid wide DPS is still a tall order for most and in my eyes the healers need to be contributing at least 1k each to get a clear at the moment. That's not a particularly hard number to hit so meh. Once this tier's 24 man raid rolls around and people are approaching iLvl 340, I suspect NeoEx's DPS check will be reasonably forgiving in the same way that A12S was opening the entire tier up to more casual groups that perhaps don't have the same level of healer DPS and optimisation on tap. Again I ask, where is the problem with this situation?

I do agree with the view that that the class team seems to be in a bit of a mess over the direction and design of healers currently. But the content itself is pretty impeccable considering what they've got to work with.