Dear Healers who don't DPS

[Penthea]

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 =(

You're acting as if I said I found it hard to dps in HW. I didn't. I never even remotely said that at all. So your explanation to me puzzled me as it was clearly based on something I did not even say.

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

I think most reasonable players do. If I see a sprout who is doing little to no dps, I may suggest that they can do more because mana in this game does allow for it, but I would never go straight into "omfg assist plz" like I have seen a few players do.

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.

Design and clever use of game mechanics always had a funny relationship. A game is designed to do A, and players find B way of tackling it which proves more efficient and sometimes more fun. Just because a game isn't designed to be played in a certain way doesn't mean it shouldn't. In this case a healer weaving in dps is absolutely nothing close to a disaster. Nor is it difficult to do. Furthermore it makes the healer role have more depth and less idle time. Which is great in my books.

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.

O2N has some of the lowest healing requirement I have ever seen in current max lvl content in any game when the group knows what they're doing. That being said I don't find dpsing in it fun because spamming Broil and refreshing dots is hardly compelling. It is still miles better than doing nothing though.

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.

Sadly their approach didn't work well as the community answered with enormous backlash to the point of losing an enormous chunk of subs because the requirements to play well had suddenly drastically changed. I enjoyed it personally as the whack-a-mole healing in Wrath became dull to me but it was too much change at once. If they made every tier demand a bit more than the previous it would have been a very different story.

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.

I'd say it's more the player's response to the same situation. Judging from what SE have said, it seems they intended healer dps to be fairly good so that questing wouldn't take so long to do, not to have something to do with excess mana and downtime in group content. Certainly in Wow for a very long time questing as a healer was very very slow and I think SE wanted to avoid that, but it created a side effect in instances which lead to a playstyle being considered optimal and normal...which lead to this thread.

[Xtrasweettea]

[…]
You cannot tell one side of the argument to "go use PF/FC/Friends and play with them if you have expectations of healer DPS", when your side could also "go use PF/FC/Friends and play with them if you have the expectation that people should automatically accept healers that do 0 DPS" [...]

This is not to pick on you, Miste, or anyone else being addressed in regard to your responses.
You bring up a point that I have thought about, and others have said:

How come those who tell others to use PF for X, are not using PF for anit-X?

For this example:
How come the anit-healer DPS are telling ABCers to use PF, but anti-DPSers always never have to use PF for them to never DPS (or never ABC)?

I had originally written up this big point, but then I realized by TLDR just does a better job…

TLDR;
It is easier to stay on the lower end of the bell curve and claim others that are to the right of you on the curve to be “elitist” than it is to admit one’s own faults and try to change one’s behavior towards a path of improvement.

Suggesting for them to use PF for their own selfish way of playing would go against their play-style choices, and therefore they cannot accept the idea or admit that your augment is sound. They would rather force others in DF to meet their demands rather than meet the demands of the group.

[Ghishlain]

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.

I'm okay with this because I feel it's important for people to learn to use their kits at the optimal level. Not everyone will be able to but at least understanding what boundaries to push is important to player growth.

However, again my beef continues with people who claim that it's absolutely critical for a healer to be DPSing else they are only causing the group to fail.

Again, I continue to ask - why must a healer DPS? Don't tell me why they should - tell me why they must. Most of you will fall flat trying to find a solid argument that cannot be rebutted in this regard because there is no argument for a healer to DPS.

Again, it's a luxury versus a need.

And just for your knowledge, my train of thought is meant to encourage other players to see both sides of the coin and understand that not everyone will be able to play at the levels we would like them to play at. This goes for both sides of the coin, healer-DPS expecting DPS and no-DPS expecting healers to sit still and heal all day. All this does it cause strife within the community that I'm hoping to just raise awareness and change the tone towards topic.

Arguing with me in terms of "Must" and "Expectations" only reinforces an insular community that is rigid and unaccepting of players because, while they can perform their core function, they're not doing it to "my expectations" which again leads back to the "muh sub" tirades.

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.

Just to reiterate my response to Taika above, the goal in my posts is to try to get more players to consider all facets of a player and their skill and knowledge. Not saying you do this specifically, but claiming a healer is terrible because they don't DPS without understand the circumstances (they may be new, they be getting used to new content, they may have had a sudden emergency phone call they had to attend to, etc.) just reinforces a negative community that, to be honest I'd like to curb stomp out.

I'm being an idealistic crusader right now and I will openly admit that. It won't stop me from trying (at least for now, lol)

I will say if you're looking at absolute equality in terms of activity, output, and responsibility, you're never going to find that. Tanks and Healer's have an inherently higher responsibility threshold due to the nature of their roles compared to DPS. If you look at DPS just spamming 1-2-3 combos, some DPS will have a higher output than others. Players accept these inequalities. Yet for some reason we cannot seem to accept a healer that doesn't DPS and healers have been kicked and bad mouthed for doing no DPS. Doesn't that seem wrong? This is just my food for thought question.

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.

A healer's primary responsibility is still the health of their party because you can't clear if everyone is dead. Anything they offer is icing onto the healer cake at that point. I'm not going to to tell you to not DPS if the opportunity presents itself, but I'm also not going to tell you to DPS when the windows are their either.

The goal is to clear the content, it just so happens every role's goal post is at a different yard marker. Anything that role kicks beyond that yard marker is a nice bonus.

Everyone has differing opinions on acceptable even though all those definitions of acceptable is correct. I'm just trying to show while there is one best solution to the encounter problem, there are definitely multiple solutions below that will still allow the groups to clear their content. This is the point I'm trying to drive home right now - don't ostracize a player because they don't play at your level whether higher or lower than your own. Learn to accept that not everyone can meet your own expectations but we can still clear this content together regardless of that and I feel that's the point the developers are attempting to drive home too with their continual insistence that healer DPS isn't calculated or required.

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.

I got a feeling if they did this we'd have equal number of discussions on the semantics of "support" vs "healers" but I think I'd prefer that over the healer DPS debate we currently have, lol. At least that discussion wouldn't revolve around the extremely broad range of skill in the healer community.

====

I will admit it's been pretty enlightening playing the devil's advocate on this particular topic. If anything it's improved my critical thinking skills and elevated my patience some. I know I'm on a losing side of the debate looking at the post likes but I won't really stop either as I like to advocate acceptance and understanding of all levels of play skill and comfort.

[Taika]

However, again my beef continues with people who claim that it's absolutely critical for a healer to be DPSing else they are only causing the group to fail.

Who is saying a healers who don't DPS are causing their groups to fail (outside of Savage context where it may be true)?

I won't really stop either as I like to advocate acceptance and understanding of all levels of play skill and comfort.

I too am advocating acceptance and understanding of all levels of play skill and comfort, for all jobs. The only thing I have an issue with is when people (again, on any job) are flat out refusing to be helpful for their group - when they would be able to do so (when they are comfortable with the content, skilled and experienced, no one is in any danger and so on). What is asked from healers here, and what is asked from everyone else, is to try to be helpful to put in some effort for the party. This has been repeated in these discussions again, and again, and again:

As for the rest of these posts, the point is that people want to see EFFORT. Nobody's expecting big dicl numbers, especially out of DF of all things. However, you're generally supposed to ASK for a sherpa instead of being lazy and trying to get a free carry.

There's also a thing called context. If you're brand new to an instance, nobody's gonna be mad at you for trying to feel it out. Even if you end up the worst at your role, most will forgive if it looks like you tried. I think that's all anyone's asking

That's the only thing reasonable people are asking, if during an entire fight you need to heal then no problem you don't have the time to do damage but if you only need to heal during 50% of the fight you should do something (not nothing) during the other 50%.

We are not expecting you to contribute the most damage output, nor ask you to abandon your primary role. When there is a wide time-frame in which no healing is needed, instead of reading about Toenail Fungus, or watching the latest episode of Log Horizon, or etc., why not throw in a few skills. . . at least some dots to help things along?

General rule of thumb: you don't have to be a pro MLG high DPS healer for people to be happy with your performance, so long as you have some awareness of when your party is taking damage and when you have downtime. You should learn your toolkit and find the skills which give you downtime (regen, aspects benefic, rouse), and at least weave in some sort of DPS just so you aren't idling, because it's the idling that people notice, not your damage numbers

When we are talking about dps on healer, we're not expecting everyone to do 1000 dps.
If every healer just use dots, the very least, it would be enough to stop yelling at those who "don't want to dps because blabla".

What people are asking for:

- Heal when healing is necessary. If your party is taking too much damage it is okay to not DPS.
- If you find yourself standing around, throw some dots on, cast a few damage skills.
- Use your time wisely. If you aren't comfortable with the dungeon no one is going to get on you, but if you can contribute please do.

You may feel like you're being enlightened and having a good time playing the devil's advocate, but to me it looks like you're just blindly swinging a sword against a strawman you have built yourself.

[Sebazy]

You're acting as if I said I found it hard to dps in HW. I didn't. I never even remotely said that at all. So your explanation to me puzzled me as it was clearly based on something I did not even say.

Is this a language barrier thing?

I didn't get to stay in cleric stance for overly lengthy periods in HW 4-mans as one of the tanks I frequently play with chain pulled all the time in HW.

The above sentence is you stating that your tank limited the amount of time that you could stay in cleric stance due to their pulling habits. Yes/no?

If you're properly pushing it, chain pulls in most HW dungeons weren't a problem at all

The above sentence is me stating that tanks chain pulling shouldn't have a huge impact on your cleric stance uptime. Yes/No? The rest was just evidence to back up my claims.

You made a statement in your post, I rebutted it. I'm not calling you out on your skill (Although I did find your comments to Crien highly amusing in that other thread) or any other such thing. I'm merely disagreeing with a point you made.

This is how discussion works.

[Elamys]

This is a discussion forum...so if people are discussing things it seems like it is working as intended?

Nobody is forcing you to read this thread :/

To be fair if any of your comment is aimed at me personally (since I've been posting)...I was trying to clarify my stance because I was being labelled things that are not even close to correct.

I was posting in this thread earlier and have been following it for a while. It just leads to nastiness on all sides and it seems impossible to really have a balanced discussion on it for long.

I'm not saying people aren't allowd to discuss it, but it fractures the community and it would be nice if people would just stop using it as some sort of moral highground battle. Would also be nice if SE would finally do what it is they say they want to do and change the game so that healers don't have so much time to DPS.

[Cynfael]

Would also be nice if SE would finally do what it is they say they want to do and change the game so that healers don't have so much time to DPS.

Outside of the implementation of gimmicky mechanics, this is probably not a reasonable expectation because of how the game is built almost entirely around a 2.5s GCD and how encounters are designed to allow players to succeed through repetition and learning rather than sheer twitch skill. This is very much not a whack-a-mole healing system because of deliberately predictable damage spikes and reliable aggro management. Your reward for healing optimally is less time spent executing healing actions, so what do you do with that time?

If they want to provide a non-DPS option that makes good use of the healer's time, they could always go deeper into the direction of buff/debuff gameplay. Powerful, short-lived buffs and curses on the GCD could give players something to do to support their parties aside from healing if they were balanced in such a way as to be a competitive alternative to simply nuking things.

I'm all for variety of gameplay, but I don't see SE being able to significantly ramp up healing requirements under the current system in such a way that is actually engaging and doesn't further alienate their more "casual" customer, who thinks healing is at least somewhat stressful as it is and who is sitting on their GCDs because they're worried that they'll let someone die and get blamed.

[Penthea]

Is this a language barrier thing?

No, this is a you reading things that weren't said thing.

The above sentence is you stating that your tank limited the amount of time that you could stay in cleric stance due to their pulling habits. Yes/no?

Wasn't this true for any healer? Much of this thread is people agreeing that having loads to heal is a valid reason to do little to no dps. This can happen with chainpulling and again most of this thread agrees it can happen there and that healers can't completely control how much damage tanks take. And the same debate went on in HW too in other threads with basically the same back and forth between players, though now we don't see anything about cleric locking you out of healing for obvious reasons.

...so why are you scrutinising me for something that is widely agreed upon?

This is how discussion works.

At this point I think you're trying to find reasons to preach about healing to me with your very unnecessary digging into my very short and undetailed statement about my use of cleric stance in HW. If we were still in HW your posts may be vaguely constructive.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Just to reiterate my response to Taika above, the goal in my posts is to try to get more players to consider all facets of a player and their skill and knowledge. Not saying you do this specifically, but claiming a healer is terrible because they don't DPS without understand the circumstances (they may be new, they be getting used to new content, they may have had a sudden emergency phone call they had to attend to, etc.) just reinforces a negative community that, to be honest I'd like to curb stomp out.

I'm being an idealistic crusader right now and I will openly admit that. It won't stop me from trying (at least for now, lol)

I will say if you're looking at absolute equality in terms of activity, output, and responsibility, you're never going to find that. Tanks and Healer's have an inherently higher responsibility threshold due to the nature of their roles compared to DPS. If you look at DPS just spamming 1-2-3 combos, some DPS will have a higher output than others. Players accept these inequalities. Yet for some reason we cannot seem to accept a healer that doesn't DPS and healers have been kicked and bad mouthed for doing no DPS. Doesn't that seem wrong? This is just my food for thought question.

You are conflating two different arguments. No one here is mandating healers DPS indifferent to what happens around them. Someone saying, "Sorry! Someone came to the door" is far different than someone standing around doing nothing. If you aren't communicating, I have no way of knowing your extenuating circumstances nor do I care. You haven't given me a reason to. All I see is your lack of contribution. Likewise, I have more patience with low level players or those new to content than I would someone with multiple 70s and/or 320+ gear. If you're stepping into Ala Mhigo, you should have a good understanding healers DPS in FFXIV. That is hardly a lot to ask of someone at max level. Once I again, I direct you to my post, which you didn't address in your response to Taika.

why must a healer DPS?
why must a tanks use cooldowns/maintain tank stance?
why must DPS avoid unnecessary damage when it won't kill them?

You cannot defend one without simultaneously acknowledging the others. If there is no argument for healer DPS; there isn't one for proper tank mitigation. I can take Halicarnassus' Critical Hit with just Awareness, but doing so puts a massive strain on the healers. I make your job easier yet you won't reciprocate with DPS when possible, which may allow us to push passed mechanics. In the case of casual content, healer DPS contribution allows for a faster run.

Equality relative to the respective roles. I certainly wouldn't care if a healer has less casts overall than a Samurai, but it is annoying if they spend all those casts on pointless Cure Is when I have 90% HP and am in no danger of dying. These healers are bad because they are refusing to improve and accept FFXIV is not WoW. You have considerably more downtime and easier time healing. No one is asking for you to top the FFlog charts, we're asking you throw out a Holy, Gravity or some dots. If you cannot be bothered to do that at level 70, you aren't a good healer in FFXIV. At best, you're decent at half the job. Will I kick them from casual content? Rarely. I'll just pull more and/or drop stance to make up some of the damage. When it comes to savage, I won't join statics where healers aren't DPSing. This is assuming, of course, everyone knows the fight already. Conservative play during prog is perfectly understandable.

[Sebazy]

...so why are you scrutinising me for something that is widely agreed upon?

Stand up, take a deep breath, maybe go for a little stroll about the block. I'm not scrutinising your ability or any such thing. I'm simply raising disagreement with a point you made that still bares relevance to dungeon gameplay today.

The whole 'My tanks take too much damage' is still very much a go to reason behind not DPSing. Whilst cleric stance is out of the picture, people still use the same thinking rather than looking at how they could optimise their play and strive to achieve more per GCD. Everyone does it irrespective of if they appreciate or even realise it. I know I'm absolutely guilty of doing just that, and as such, that's a big part of why I push so hard when I'm in dungeons even if it's technically just wasted effort.

If you really can't handle that then well.... I'm sorry for trying to engage in intelligent discussion and debate with you <3