Dear Healers who don't DPS

[Miste]

Then... why did you go out of your way to announce that it 'has' something to do with you personally earlier, by specifically pinpointing the exact tangent by which it has something to do with you personally (female healer main)? >_> Come on, you're contradicting yourself now.

Well.........

Pretty sure she was using the point that she is a female player who has played healers to say that what you are saying is just a stereotype...and stereotypes are generally useless so why even highlight them. She didn't say that you offended her personally.

She just had an opinion about what you said. I mean...just because someone has an opinion against yours or against something you say doesn't mean they are personally offended by you or the message. They just might not agree with it.

As a female player who mains healer I also don't see the point in what you wrote. I don't play healer for fairies and sparkles or to nurture either. I just like being a healer because I like how they can contribute to a group in multiple ways. There unfortunately isn't technically a "support" role in this game, so healer (AST specifically) really is my main choice.

Also if someone didn't want to "kill things" then playing any MMO is probably a waste of time. You'd never even be able to progress the story let alone go very far from the starting town.

[Taika]

I'm just going to reply shortly here, but I edited answers to individual points to my previous post. What I said was: I'm disgusted by sexism. I'm also disgusted by racism, homophobia and other forms of discriminatory attitudes and actions. As a consequence, I find it disgusting when these things are brought up without critical context, because it normalises and reinforces them. I try to point out when I see this happening, because I believe that to be a way of preventing them from being normalised and reinforced - especially by people who I don't believe are meaning to do that (like the person I was replying to). That doesn't mean I would be personally offended or angry or in any other way reacting strongly (I wish I would live in a world where things like that would be so rare I would feel strongly about them and react to them accordingly). I also don't think expressing distaste for discriminating attitudes and behaviours is in any way radical and should not be read or reacted to as such. Perhaps this is enough of off topic for me too now.

[Kabooa]

Real men roll healers.

[Miste]

Real men roll healers.

Considering my boyfriend mains healer alongside me I can agree with this! xD

[Almagnus1]

Or perhaps its time for the "majority" (I doubt that claim) to stop expecting others do all the work. Don't like being called an average to below average healer? Learn how to use your full toolkit, not ignore a third of it.

This what I find hilarious about this thread.

If a healer dares to suggest that maybe the roulettes aren't the place to mentor people, and that perhaps we should just leave healers in the roulettes alone, they get called below average and treated as such.

It's as if you're just virtue signaling...

[Miste]

This what I find hilarious about this thread.

If a healer dares to suggest that maybe the roulettes aren't the place to mentor people, and that perhaps we should just leave healers in the roulettes alone, they get called below average and treated as such.

Uh...no? It is just a fact based on game design that ignoring parts of your toolkit puts you into the average to below average category. It isn't meant to be a put down, it is just a fact about how the game works.

Like if I was a MNK who only used one of my combo sets and not the other, didn't do positionals properly, and didn't know how to use AoE for big pulls...then if I don't like the fact that I am playing below average based on game design then I have the power to fix it by learning to use the things I am currently not using properly or the things I am not using at all that boost my contribution and in turn make me a better MNK.

Suggest it if you want, but you don't exactly have the right to tell others "you aren't allowed to give advice in DF because I say so" or "you have to leave them alone because I say so" so the suggestion kind of doesn't go anywhere.

Oh and before someone latches onto this to flip it around.....no one in here has ever said "you have to DPS on healer because I said so". So don't even bother. All we have been doing is talking about the facts about healer gameplay and why it should be encouraged for healers to contribute DPS and that refusing to do it for really bad excuses like "I am a healer I only have to heal" or "it's my sub I play how I want" might not be accepted by some of the groups you may get in DF.

Also...you cannot expect to be "left alone" in a MMO where you are joining a group that has to complete content together in a cooperative style. In general if you never want anyone to possibly say something about how you are playing, ever, then playing a MMO seems counter productive...either that or you might as well just turn your chat box off during DF. You might end up kicked sometimes though if you completely ignore your party.

[Cynfael]

This what I find hilarious about this thread.

If a healer dares to suggest that maybe the roulettes aren't the place to mentor people, and that perhaps we should just leave healers in the roulettes alone, they get called below average and treated as such.

It's as if you're just virtue signaling...

Again, most of us seem to be discussing gameplay, not suggesting that anyone go out of their way to inflict unwanted advice on people in DF.

Choosing to leave out useful parts of a Job's kit is not optimal, period. What, if anything, people want to do about it is another matter.

[Tridus]

This what I find hilarious about this thread.

If a healer dares to suggest that maybe the roulettes aren't the place to mentor people, and that perhaps we should just leave healers in the roulettes alone, they get called below average and treated as such.

It's as if you're just virtue signaling...

Which is pretty much what happens. This almost never comes up in roulettes.

It does come up on a forum for game discussion, because, you know, discussion. And yeah, someone advocating that they should be able to spend 80% of the instance being carried instead of contributing to the success of the group is... what exactly?

"Below average" seems a reasonable term for that attitude.

[HyoMinPark]

This what I find hilarious about this thread.

If a healer dares to suggest that maybe the roulettes aren't the place to mentor people, and that perhaps we should just leave healers in the roulettes alone, they get called below average and treated as such.

It's as if you're just virtue signaling...

People hardly ever say anything about lazy players (tanks, healers, or DPS) in roulettes. But that doesn't necessarily make them being lazy okay. I dislike tanks that refuse to use cooldowns on big pulls. I dislike DPS that refuse to AOE. And I get annoyed and dislike healers that think they are allowed to stand idle for 80% of a dungeon because they have a green icon. It would be one thing if the outgoing damage in this game was such that healers did have 80-90% healing uptime. But that's not the case. Outgoing damage is scripted, and outside of the hardest content, it barely tickles unless the party members are severely undergeared.

If others aren't allowed a free pass (and yes, I do see tanks called out for lack of cooldown usage, poor gear; and I do see DPS called out for lack of AOE and/or lazy play), why are healers allowed one because of their green icon? Again, most roulettes people just grin and bear with it. But on discussion forums, there are voices of discontent when it comes to idle healers who ignore half of their toolkit.

No one in this thread has advocated that healers DPS first, heal second. They advocate that if you aren't healing, at least throw some DoTs or rocks at the mobs; don't just stand there. Outside of baby healers that are just now learning how to get comfortable in the role (I'm talking sub-30 play), most idle healers I encounter not only don't DPS, they also barely heal. Healer DPS is not something to scoff at--20% of the total damage of an entire dungeon is not something to scoff at. And, contrary to what anti-healer DPS people claim, a dungeon takes far longer than just 5 extra minutes if a healer is not DPSing.

If these idle healers want people to "leave them alone" in an MMO that requires active party participation and coordination even in the most casual of content, then the MMO genre is not for them. And the pro-healer DPS crowd being called the "toxic" ones/"elitists"/"entitled" ones in this argument? I answer again, the question of which one sounds more "entitled": a healer that refuses to cooperate with the 3 or 7 other people in their party because "I want to play the way I want to play, and I don't care what the party thinks" comes off as far more "toxic" and "entitled" than a group that says "when you aren't healing, do you mind at least DPSing a little rather than just standing around?"

And to answer your "mentoring in roulettes" statement: if you (general "you" here) don't want people mentoring in roulettes, then why even have chat systems in place? Why even have the entire Mentor System in place? If someone said that to me in-game, it would be among one of the most ridiculous statements I've ever heard, and I have heard several.

[Almagnus1]

We kinda need to get to the root of the issue here, as there's three main reasons why someone is "bad":

1. Gear
For someone who is undergeared at the role, there is nothing that can be done about this in an instance beyond pointing out general stuff like "the higher the ilvl for your weapon, the better you are at a role", "keeping everything at about the same ilvl helps make you better", and "the higher the ilvl, the easier your role becomes, and the more you can contribute".

2. Skill
This one's the harder one to diagnose because you most likely need a parser, and someone who knows the class well enough to diagnose the issue, and offer advice on how they can improve.

3. Motivation
If the player is truly a lazy player, there's not a whole lot you can do to help them improve. They will never improve if they don't want to, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Trying to do something is only going to cause you more stress with this type of person.

The problem with attempting to "fix" a "bad" player in an instance is if you don't encourage them to do better and help coach them to do better, you can often make the situation worse because you're actively discouraging them, and generally making them feel bad. The biggest issue I see here are a bunch of backseat drivers trying to fix the skill issue without actually having actually played a class, which renders a lot of the "help" as meh to generally bad as they don't have the experience. In other words, if you haven't played the class to 70, then don't try to fix skill issues because you do not know enough about how that class plays to actually diagnose and fix the issue.

Finally, with the players that don't care - there are always going to be those players in MMOs, and the only way you can do anything about them is kick them from your group.

The real reason why I am suggesting we write off the DF is because we don't know the players involved well enough to know which issue is actually causing the player to be "bad" - and there's a high probability that whatever you're trying to do can be construed as harassment, especially if it can be reasonably assumed that there's a parser involved. So it really boils down to whether or not it's worth the stress or the risk of getting banned in order to attempt to fix an issue where the person you're working with may not care enough to change.