Dear Healers who don't DPS

[Ghishlain]

So if I'm understanding this correctly, you are arguing that the base standard for healer play should be set significantly lower than for DDs and tanks, and that asking healer players to contribute at similar (skill / activity) level than others is being unreasonable? That doesn't make any sense to me and also reads as more than a little condescending towards the players who are choosing this particular role.

You said it yourself in your HW video - healers have something like 17% active uptime while purely healing. Which means they only need 17% activity to be successful at a baseline level. I never set the base standard that low, the developers did.

By stating that you feel healers should play at the same base activity level as everyone else, you're effectively also stating everyone playing below that level is playing at an unacceptable level despite how contrary that runs with developer design.

Is it wrong for the bar to be set that low? Perhaps so. I would never play at that low caliber of skill, but I can also accept not everyone plays at an equal skill level as well.

Put bluntly, I am basically condemning people who believe that, despite being in a party that would successfully clear content, would also openly state that a player is "bad" and "terrible" because they don't play at level acceptable to themselves.

Stop thinking of my argument as a means of belittling the higher skilled players - start thinking of my argument as me giving a universal condemnation to players who openly belittle other players for not playing at their level. This is a two way street and applies to both no-DPS healers who antagonize healers who DPS and healer-DPS who openly provide condescending remarks towards their lower skilled peers. Both are equally as terrible in my mind.

I understand your point and the people who agree with you clearly and I disagree with it on the premise that if you're bringing forth expectations that run contrary to the developer's design, you're effectively showing a lack of acceptance and understanding towards players who don't play like you.

This just leads back to my original train of thought a long time ago - encourage sprout healers to grow and play better, don't force your expectations upon them and expect them to be happy with the situation you're putting them under.

If anything, I'd say the percentile requirements for mainstream content are actually the opposite way round. DPS only really get held to account once you hit Savage. I've never seen enrage on Lakshmi (granted I also very rarely bother pugging it) and I've maybe seen enrage on Susano once? As I noted in another thread here, you almost need to be trolling to cause a genuine issue in a dungeon as a DPS now.

By comparison, a fresh 60 healing SB's current expert dungeon needs to have a pretty good idea of how their oGCDs and cooldowns work if they want to keep up with a tank intending to pull more than a pack at a time.

Whilst my sample size is too small to draw any real conclusion from, if I look back over my logs, the standard of DPS seems to be going backwards again, whilst most pug healers I get have actually been pretty decent.

I'm not too surprised about your observation, to be honest. We're probably seeing less of the good DPS run EX since they're either running with friends / FCs or have everything they would like at this point in the patch cycle and have no desire to run as a DPS anymore and potentially running as a tank and healer instead. This leaves those who might be leveling DPS as a secondary role or those playing catch up and still trying to learn the kit left which would mean an overall decrease in average skill level for DPS.

I do feel the stress a healer feels is more exponential during mass pulls versus their DPS and tank counterparts but if they focus on purely healing, they'll be able to get through it too with not so many issues with the caveat being the tank is capped in gear.