Where are all the healers?

[miraidensetsu]

In the end it's all very simple. Ask yourself: can I be helpful to my party by using this skill, and do I have the opportunity to do it in this situation? If the answer is yes, use it. There's really no sensible reason not to.

You sound like is just a matter of DPS doing some damage to help the group. It's not.

Healers have now a minimum DPS quota to meet. If each White Mage don't do at least 2,200 DPS on Omega, he is crap and therefore is kicked from the party. And if enrage kicks in, its the healer's fault. I saw some healers being kicked from groups like that because of this.

And that while some DPS doesn't give a damn to the equips or rotations, stands on the crap and blames healer when he dies. Later they ask where are the healers!?

[Taika]

Healers have now a minimum DPS quota to meet. If each White Mage don't do at least 2,200 DPS on Omega, he is crap and therefore is kicked from the party. And if enrage kicks in, its the healer's fault. I saw some healers being kicked from groups like that because of this.And that while some DPS doesn't give a damn to the equips or rotations, stands on the crap and blames healer when he dies. Later they ask where are the healers!?

I have to say I've never experienced either of these scenarios, from the time I've raided as healer myself (from 1.0 dungeons and primals to AS12) or now as a DD in Omega (currently on OS4). But then again I don't do raids with pickups. I have done extremes with pickups, as a healer and a DD, in SB, and have never even seen anyone mention healer DPS.

But I do know some party finder groups tend to set unrealistic expectations to their members ("no mistakes allowed! 5k dps or kick!"), and seeing those is fairly common. I have also heard that pickup groups can get really nasty, although again I've never experienced that myself. For difficult content, it is understandable to set certain DPS expectations for all party members - since the instances have enrage timers and everyone has to pull their weight. But placing those expectations ridiculously high or placing the burden on only certain members of the party is of course just silly.

In short, to me, and in my experience, it really is about expecting healer players, like all the others, to simply try to be useful and not categorically refuse from using a part of their toolkit out of some silly principle. For difficult content, the expectations are naturally higher because of what the content itself requires from the party. There are always players who will expect even more than that from their party members, but we are all free to either choose to or choose not to play with them.

Edit: Sorry but I have to call BS on your WHM DPS expectations. That would make them rank 97% in OS1 and OS2, 98% in OS3, and 99% in OS4. xD It's definitely not a "standard" to expect your WHM to be in the top 1% in the world for DPS.

[miraidensetsu]

-snip-

But often happens with some friends of mine (that's also healers) that have the courage to do savage content via PUGs. The value is often less, but always significant.

And I took healer class because I want to help. I like to be useful. But I don't want to receive hate just because I done below top X% damage while I was actually keeping my teammates alive.

Mind that I'm not advocating for the right of doing nothing on downtime. I'm advocating the right to do something but DPS on downtime. But if the healer have nothing to do for the next, say, 15 seconds, and doing that won't hurt his resources so bad that he can't heal when needed, then why not DPS?

For a healer, healing always comes first, then support the party (buff, mitigate, etc), manage resources (MP, cards, stacks, etc) and, for the least, DPS. And that is why I said that healer DPS is a bonus. And is on that point that I feel that I'm being misunderstood by you and Sebazy.

[miraidensetsu]

Completing (because sometimes only 1,000 chars is simply too few):

And I am also from those that thinks that a caster class must be always casting. But it appears that for the community that healers must DPS before everything, even healing.

And is from that misconception that they think that shame healers that don't meet a minimum DPS number is a good idea. And when healers begins to obey that numbers (to not being shamed), that comes another cargo of crap because they aren't healing anymore while the first problem is just worsening, adding more pressure into newer healers that's yet far from even doing savages. And all the crap generated by this misconception is what is scaring off the healers.

If we want more healers, as community, we must make healers feel welcome. That's how we can attract more people to healer jobs (and drop the queue time for DPS jobs).

[Tridus]

Completing (because sometimes only 1,000 chars is simply too few)

As an FYI, the character limit only applies to the original post. If you immediately edit, you can go as long as you want. That's how you see some very long posts here.

[HoodRat]

And I am also from those that thinks that a caster class must be always casting. But it appears that for the community that healers must DPS before everything, even healing.

I've said this multiple times in these threads in the past week but...no one is saying healers should dps when healing is needed. If you need to heal, then by all means heal. If you don't need to heal, then please do something useful.

The big beef is with healer entitlement and lazy players, not that healers should DPS while healing is appropriate.

This is the issue people are having. Just as an example, I ran leveling roulette with 2 friends the other day and we got Brayflox with a random ast. The ast would begin pulls by spamming benefic on the tank, regardless of what the tank's hp was at, and when most of the mobs were dead the ast would stand idle. One of my friends politely explained that this isn't WoW so he doesn't need to keep everyone at full hp the entire time and can dps some, and the ast's response was that he was the healer so he could do whatever he wanted and that he didn't care about the other people in his party.