Dear Healers who don't DPS

[Tridus]

I got my first Susano Ex kill last night. I know, I know, noob. Anyway, looking at the difference between the kill and all my numerous prior failures made me think of this thread. Why was that?

In most of the groups I've done it with, the problems are largely late in the fight, when you get clouds in bad locations, or the ground circles and churn and then the knockback thing (I forget the names). They're the combinations of mechanics happening at once where someone making a mistake can easily chain into a total mess. That either wipes it, or puts you far enough behind that you see the enrage (which I did, many times).

The difference in my kill group, which one shot it, was that he died so fast we saw far fewer of those things happen. There was fewer of those nasty combinations of mechanics, thus fewer opportunities for mistakes. Some of the stuff I'd seen people wipe on late in the fight didn't happen at all because we didn't get that late into the fight.

In an ideal world, people could keep going indefinitely without that being an issue, because they're all dodgeable. But we're playing with humans, and humans make mistakes. Fewer times you have to dodge all the bad means fewer chances of a mistake happening, which means greater odds of success. And while healer DPS alone isn't solely responsible for that, it does play a part. It all adds up over a several minute fight. I doubt my DPS on this kill was terribly good because I was really focused on not messing up, but I did make an effort to toss out what I could without it causing a mistake. And based on the feedback I got afterward, that was all anyone in that group really wanted out of me.

I realize that won't end 37 pages of debate. But it put things into perspective for me, while I had this huge grin on my face from finally getting that kill (and frankly those folks made it look easy, they were awesome).

[Taika]

I got my first Susano Ex kill last night.

Sounds like a great run and group, congratulations on the first win!

[Ghishlain]

-snip-

There are so many arguments for expected healer DPS here that have never recieved any kind of rebuttal (likely because there isn't one to make) and yet in 35 pages I haven't seen a single person on the side of the "pure" healers be able to make a point that holds water.

-snip-

I just don't understand. There are all these compelling reasons to DPS and no counter arguments but "my sub" and yet you people still beat this dead horse. Why? Why do you want to do something so boring? I just don't get it.

-snip-

As you mentioned, there are a lot of compelling reasons to DPS which I do not disagree with.

My beef with some of the healer-DPS crowd is that you must DPS and you are expected to DPS.

Everyone plays at varying levels of skills and comfort and yes, some of these non-DPS players are lazy because they know they can get away with being lazy like that. But I absolutely dislike generalized branding like that, which applies both ways IE all non-DPS healers are lazy and terrible and all DPS-healers are elitist scum.

I guess I'll rebuttal your argument with a question - why must a healer DPS?

I'll reiterate for both of us - there are compelling reasons to DPS including mobs dying faster thus needing less healing (though more MP is generally spent overall), faster and more efficient runs (and generally safer runs, depending on the content), and being able to clear content under their intended item level.

But again, why must a healer DPS? This is my beef is when extreme players make the outlandish claim that any healer who doesn't DPS with the appropriate windows of opportunity to do so are consider terrible and beneath the scum of the earth. That's my beef. Call me a care bear but if you want healers to actually want to play a healer, you don't cultivate a community with antagonistic comments indicating how poor they're doing because they don't fully understand the nuances of healing just yet. Not everyone does this, yes, but when it does hit, it becomes a sticking point in the discussion.

Again, why must a healer DPS? There are compelling reasons on why they should DPS but when the dev's come out and say, repeatedly, that there is no intention to include healer DPS in raid clear calculations at appropriate ilvls, why does the community need to force healers to DPS then?

It just reminds me of people saying "I need to have a luxury car!" and not "I would like to have a luxury car". The connotations are different and people respond differently to said connotations.

Oh, and before the tank-enmity argument comes out again - do note that the producer has gone on record that they do tune for a predicted level of DPS from both the tanks and DPS. A tank who's just spamming Flash / Overpower / Unleash is most likely not hitting that predicted level of DPS.

[Taika]

Again, why must a healer DPS? There are compelling reasons on why they should DPS

You're really answering to your own question here. They should DPS because, if, and when they can. If you can be helpful to your party, you should, and it's fair for others to expect that from you. If you can be helpful to your party, there's no sensible reason or justification for choosing not to.

[Penthea]

If you're properly pushing it, chain pulls in most HW dungeons weren't a problem at all (The earlier levelling dungeons are a big exception here ofc). At the level cap there's no excuse tho!

Okay I don't know why you're telling me this. I was confused about another person's post (which turns out wasn't talking to me) and I was clarifying something that they maybe thought I had said. They mentioned a language barrier a while back so I figured maybe they misunderstood something.

And I suppose I'll clarify further.

There was a lot of talk about schs in HW staying in cleric basically 100% of the time in HW and letting their fairies and/or co-healer do all the healing. I wasn't one of these players. I was in cleric a lot but I wasn't a dps with a healer symbol next to their name. That's all I was saying. Simple as that. And for further clarification I did not raid as life circumstances wouldn't permit it.

But like if you want to take a snippet of what I say and feel the need to explain things to me at length given you seem to have the impression that I don't know what I'm doing, go right ahead. Use your time how you wish.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

But again, why must a healer DPS? This is my beef is when extreme players make the outlandish claim that any healer who doesn't DPS with the appropriate windows of opportunity to do so are consider terrible and beneath the scum of the earth. That's my beef.

Why should I use Shadow Wall or Sheltron? Because it makes your job easier and the run more efficient. That same logic applies to healers. If you expect DPS to maneuver around aoes and tanks to mitigate when neither will kill them, why shouldn't they expect you to contribute equally? If we're going to argue playstyle, I frequently drop tank stance whenever I get pure healers regardless of my pull sizes, so long as I'll survive. The abrupt spike of incoming damage may stress some players yet your argument posits they aren't allowed to complain. I'm still doing by job, I've simply made yours more of a hassle. If you were to complain, it's inherently hypocritical because now you're asking I do something different to make things smoother for you but aren't willing to reciprocate through DPS.

Basically, this whole thread can be summed up with, everyone should contribute evenly when the opportunity arises, be it through damage, utility or healing. Use your full toolkit and make the run smooth for everyone.

[Tridus]

I guess I'll rebuttal your argument with a question - why must a healer DPS?

You must try to help the team clear the content, to the best of your ability. If you are too busy (or to OOM) keeping people alive to do DPS, then so be it. If you're standing around doing nothing? You can help kill it faster.

That is the same expectation on every single player in the game when doing group content.

[Penthea]

You must try to help the team clear the content, to the best of your ability. If you are too busy (or to OOM) keeping people alive to do DPS, then so be it. If you're standing around doing nothing? You can help kill it faster.

That is the same expectation on every single player in the game when doing group content.

Maybe part of the issue is that the role is called "healer" and not "support". Mmorpgs are hardly a new genre and in many of the older ones the healer's job was to literally stand around unless healing needed to be done because mana was in such short supply.

So some people likely see "healer" and think "oh, I know this, done this before in another game" and probably some of them get quite a shock when they find out being a healer in XIV means doing more than just healing. And I guess some are allergic to change.

[Tridus]

Maybe part of the issue is that the role is called "healer" and not "support". Mmorpgs are hardly a new genre and in many of the older ones the healer's job was to literally stand around unless healing needed to be done because mana was in such short supply.

So some people likely see "healer" and think "oh, I know this, done this before in another game" and probably some of them get quite a shock when they find out being a healer in XIV means doing more than just healing. And I guess some are allergic to change.

Absolutely true. That's why I always give people new to healing in this game a pass. People new to healing entirely are paranoid about losing someone so they have a laser focus on healing, and people new to healing in XIV often bring habits from other games where healers don't have the capacity to do significant DPS without it negatively affecting their healing. That's stuff people learn over time as they play, no big deal.


There's a whole other discussion on should healers be expected to DPS in the game design? You can argue that no, they should be expected to heal, and the game design should back that up.


The game we have right now has many encounters where that simply isn't the case, and you have significant amounts of idle time. O2N being the most extreme example in current content. A healer who is "just healing" on that is spending 80% of the fight doing absolutely nothing based on the DF groups I've been in.

FFXIV right now reminds me of WoW in the Wrath days, where healers had enough burst healing to bring people from 1HP to full in a few seconds. Wrath responded to that by pumping out massive quantities of incoming damage constantly, or having tank busters that would kill a tank in two seconds if a heal didn't land, so you had to constantly heal. Cataclysm then addressed how frantic that got by nerfing HPS and drastically increasing HP pools, so it took a lot more effort to get someone to full.

XIV's approach to the same situation is "fill in the gap with DPS". I don't consider that ideal game design at all, since my DPS abilities are so limited and lame compared to my healing ones (and WHM is better than most in that regard), but it's the game we've got right now. Hopefully next expansion they look at addressing it.

[Sebazy]

But like if you want to take a snippet of what I say and feel the need to explain things to me at length given you seem to have the impression that I don't know what I'm doing, go right ahead. Use your time how you wish.

You stated you couldn't full time DPS in HW dungeons because of a reason, one that's frequently cited in this thread. I personally feel that it's a point that's overplayed and overused, thus addressed it as such.

Discussion pls =(

I'm definitely in agreement with you on the role name thing tho. Huge swathes of these threads revolve around little more than semantics and it's pretty hard to break that circle for more than a page or two at the best of times.