Idea to fix controversy about healer dps.

[RopeDrink]

But I digress, here I am describing how SE could make changes that would likely result in rage-quits by people who want the healer to be an extra DPS

Do those 'people' even exist? In a game where you have umpteen different options for pure damage-dealing, I'll hazard a guess any existing players hoping to convert Healers into pure-damage dealers are near non-existent. If it's some sort of sarky dig at those on the 'do some damage' side of the spectrum, bear in mind that asking for an idle player to contribute isn't the same as asking a class/role to convert into another class/role entirely. I guarantee 95% of those who have a problem with AFK'ers would actually be relatively (if not almost entirely) happy even with sporadic damage - an Aero here, a stone there. Every little helps. If I see someone doing something, however frequently or infrequently - it is infinitely better than doing nothing.

I'm one of the most aggressive in terms of dealing damage as a WHM whenever possible (without any neglect to my primary goal of keeping people alive) - yet that doesn't mean I'd advocate for Healers to become comparable to regular DPS, or actually BECOME a DPS. I simply know, when being healed rather than healing, when said person has freedom to act, yet decides to spend that time gawking. As for the topic in general, FFXIV Healing appealed to me more than usual, simply because I was given Healing & Damage spells and told to go nuts. No caveats, no funky mechanics, no restrictions - just 'here's a tool-set - make the most of it'. Compared to some of the other games (old and new), here's three extreme examples from top, middle and bottom of the Healing/DPS train...

Old-school WoW - with no cross-class or multi-talent function. Levelling a Healer involved signing an invisible contract: you will hit like a wet-noodle and be utterly irrelevant unless there were non-self healthbars floating around in need of extra health. Even if the wet-noodle-damage didn't phase you, you'd learn that it would also be a huge mana-sink despite being akin to battering mobs with a bag of feathers. Actual group content involved light to no damage contribution at all given meagre damage output vs how healing-intensive the game was and how important mana-conservation was, unless you wanted to scream for innervates all day. When someone tries to get involved with this circle-debate on the basis of "Yeah, well, I played WoW - it's different there", that is the point - it's a completely different game, with a whole 50-70 levels worth of time to figure out the differences. I don't entertain people who proclaim the reason they're AFKHealing is because they're 'used to' more healing-intensive play-styles of other games. This is not that game.

Allods Online - probably my first taste of a Healer/DPS mixture that didn't fall into the trap of trying to replicate WoW's success (re. wet-noodle Healers), which is ironic given anyone who hasn't played it properly will call it a literal WoW clone. As a Summoner (pet/DoT centric Healer/DPS capable caster), both healing & damage spells use the same resource (drops of blood), with base blood-generation being awarded through light damage-dealing. 90% of heals and 90% of damage use the resource, so one way or another, you WILL be doing damage whether you like it or not, as the main damage spell is the only non-healing and non-CD based method. It works well given it doesn't force you to be 'optimal' at the damage aspect of things (unless you really want to push yourself) - and isn't as restrictive or as simple as it sounds (just giving the basic concept). These days you can spec as pure damage, healing, or support - but the core is relatively the same.

Riders of Icarus - at about mid-level, the ratio between damage & healing spells on Priest is quite literally 9:1. Between three bars almost full of spells, I can only really remember having access to three healing-capable abilities - the rest are all damage or CC (typically both). Given it's more of an action-MMORPG, it makes sense. Still, I'd like to see pure-healers wading into a game such as that and proclaiming that 'my role is to heal, therefore 90% of my kit magically doesn't exist'.

Here in FFXIV, you are healing/damage capable and charged with judging the best use of the time given to you - that's it, no bells, no whistles. Doing one or the other relies on the MP at your disposal and the freedom allowed to you by your team vs the content in question. If, during any spare time, you choose to stand there gawking while others are actually doing something, then you're the last person I'd want on my team (no matter what role you play as). I might just start tanking again and using overpower/flash once or twice then stand there in idle-animation letting mobs hit me while I bugger off for a smoke - you can bet you won't be happy about it, but so what? If Healers can do it, I want a piece of that lazy pie too.

[Tridus]

Look at how the changes to WHM in SB was initially presented, there was frothing at the mouth from the "dps healers" for improvements that don't fit their meta.

No, that had more to do with showing us mechanics that relied on a system that was purely RNG based, on spells that aren't generally used enough to get RNG to work reliably, for an outcome that didn't matter. They addressed that by removing the RNG. They then had to address it again with PI because it was useless. They still haven't addressed lilies themselves, which is why the common advice is to ignore them completely. WHM is fine despite having literally the only completely useless unique job mechanic in the game, but still. Pure healers aren't benefiting from lilies either.

It's clear that SE expects healers to constantly be casting heals, not DPS, otherwise this change would not have had so much screaming over it from the NA players.

... you mean the people who gave us O2N (aka: the fight that Regen can heal) expect people to be constantly casting heals? Seems legit.

The ultimate troll from SE would be for 5.0 to have no additional DPS for healers (eg the dps scale stops at level 70) and instead fold cure/benefic/psysick into a "Cure IV" instant-cast mechanic that changes from Cure/Benefic/Psysick I, II, III, IV the longer you wait for it on cooldown. Then on WHM fold Cure III, Medica and Medica II into the same mechanic, where the range increases the longer you wait for it (hitting it once creates an AOE circle that grows, and hitting it again casts it, nothing else can be cast during this.) Then push Regen/Diurnal Aspected Benefic and the Medica II/Diurnal Aspected Helios into a regen-only effect that overwrites each other and Whispering Dawn, instead of stacking. Then for the shielding side, give Stone-Skin back to WHM-only, make it overwrite Galvanize and Nocturnal aspected Helios/Benefic.

And you watch as nobody can tolerate levelling a healer because you have to kill stuff outdoors to do that, and it would be more boring than Eureka chains.

snip

...

But I digress, here I am describing how SE could make changes that would likely result in rage-quits by people who want the healer to be an extra DPS, instead of a healer, but it would resolve the "lazy healer" issue by making "do nothing, spam heals that aren't needed" not an option.

There's lots of ways to resolve the "lazy healer" thing. One of them is what you describe. Another is nerfing healing so you it takes more of it to get people back to full after large scale damage, leaving less time to be idle/DPS.

[Tridus]

- FFXIV doesn't have a healer role separation. No tank specific healer, or melee, or party specific. The "all content can be done by all healers" attitude means that they have no leverage in creating high sustained HPS output fights without locking out some healers like SCH. In the same way they can't create high mitigation fights without locking out WHM. etc. etc. They probably wouldn't even agree to content with tank busters that REQUIRE mitigation because that would lock out WHM-WHM comps.

They don't tend to worry about double stacking jobs, since you get penalized for that. But yeah. If they add a fourth healer, it either needs shields or you'll have a comp that isn't used at all at the high end (WHM-NewJob) due to lacking shields. If they give it access to shields, you have only one job without them and when they all don't stack, you have a different problem. They need to make some wholesale changes to healing to open up options for a new job, IMO.

Honestly, I don't see any of the above changing. Despite Yoshi wanting healer only healers, they kinda painted themselves into a corner.

Yup. What they claim to want and what they actually create don't line up. Reminds me of the Programmer's Lament:

"The computer does what I tell it to and not what I want."

[EaMett]

[...] If they add a fourth healer, it either needs shields or you'll have a comp that isn't used at all at the high end [...]

I think high end only worries about raid dps to be honest. Since any healer comp can get the party through (as per SE's own rules). Exceptions apply during progression of course but that's usually the rule with meta.
And yeah, no matter how I think about it, another healer would screw someone over (most likely WHM since most different healer play styles revolve around raid utility)

[VanilleFang]

Kisai... sometimes I wonder if you are actually playing the same game as the rest of us. You make wild claims without evidence, and you give advice that is poor to say the least. You are either playing a different game than FFXIV or you are very inexperienced as a healer. I don't understand how you can play this game and come to conclusions that you do, since they are mostly contradictory of how the game actually plays.

It's also bizarre how you continue to misrepresent the position that I and many others hold (this was from a few pages back but still). I just don't understand how you can take "don't be a burden/don't just stand around" and get "you have to maximize your DPS at all times". It's mind blowing.

[KisaiTenshi]

Kisai... sometimes I wonder if you are actually playing the same game as the rest of us. You make wild claims without evidence, and you give advice that is poor to say the least. You are either playing a different game than FFXIV or you are very inexperienced as a healer. I don't understand how you can play this game and come to conclusions that you do, since they are mostly contradictory of how the game actually plays.

It's also bizarre how you continue to misrepresent the position that I and many others hold (this was from a few pages back but still). I just don't understand how you can take "don't be a burden/don't just stand around" and get "you have to maximize your DPS at all times". It's mind blowing.

Funny, yet I've played all the party content as healer and don't get screamed at. Now maybe what some of you aren't getting is that Since SB, I only devils advocate for the "pure healer", because I still see people spewing the same lies about DPS being mandatory, because it scares people away from the role. It's not, and has not ever been about Maximum DPS, but the raiders sure want it to be that way. Thus you can get through all party content without DPS. I'm saying this as someone who got through most solo content without using Cleric Stance in 2.x and 3.x content, because the CS stance dance was an annoyingly awful mechanic that lead to more mistakes than not using it at all. The stance dance is gone, people have no excuse to not DPS unless they are bad at MP management, or get stuck with a party that likes to eat mechanics and dirt a lot.

Do those 'people' even exist? In a game where you have umpteen different options for pure damage-dealing, I'll hazard a guess any existing players hoping to convert Healers into pure-damage dealers are near non-existent. If it's some sort of sarky dig at those on the 'do some damage' side of the spectrum, bear in mind that asking for an idle player to contribute isn't the same as asking a class/role to convert into another class/role entirely.

This is a problem stemming from the queue lacking Tanks and Healers, so people who don't know how to play either jump into the queue, and try to play it like a DPS. That is the source of these fights and this argument being a perpetual anger-fit. Some people just do not see how much of an asshole it makes them look like when they are demanding everyone play like it's high end raid progression even in content with no enrage mechanics. SE knows that if there were enrage mechanics on all bosses, even less people would play healers due to the toxic entitled attitude NA players have.

The game I played the most before switching to FFXIV was Mabinogi. It's a game that originally had no classes, and no useful healing skills, everyone spammed pots in that game. When Nexon decided to shoehorn classes into that game, both the Korean AND the North America players had a protest in-game over the changes, so they scaled back the changes to only offering a bonus, no nerfs. But the damage was done to that game, and everyone zergs all content. There's no tanks, there's no healers. Every dungeon is basically PoTD but with manual looting. If you can't do a dungeon in 90 secs, why are you even playing.

Now when I came to this game, did I see any point to that healer/dps/tank role? No. But I knew it was there and started as Archer/Bard but only switched to healer because the 30min+ queues for content was hindering progression of any kind, and I managed to level up CNJ/WHM entirely on "comeback and play for free" time between the original 2.0 scenario completion at release, and when Sycrus tower was new (Patch 2.3 2014/07/07).

Some of you in this thread, especially the ones that are most vocal about believing players are being lazy, have not played this game in it's 2.0 state. You have no idea how players were back at 2.0, with players refusing to to do the Amdapor Keep unless you had a full Darklight gearset (which is what the tomes gear was at the time.) Thus spamming Praetorium, and berating newbies to skip the cutscenes was how you got the tomes to overgear AK/WP. The Demon Wall would not let you pass unless you could hit a DPS threshold, and there were no minimum ilevels at the time (which is now 45.) I said forget that nonsense (I did actually do both of those dungeons, but the PUG parties were entirely BAD) and decided to go level WHM. At 2.x if you did not have the BiS gear, you did not get to play, period. The duty roulette was introduced in 2.1, but minimum ilevel was not, and AK was nerfed in 2.1. I actually did "The Minstrel's Ballad: Ultima's Bane" with a PUG party when it was new, and who knows what gear people had on. But by that point everyone's habits of screaming for BiS gear had been entrenched.

Since the game now enforces a minimum ilevel, the argument moved from BiS gear to MinMax DPS, which is not a healthy argument to have, because you're twisting the arms of the 95% of the players who don't play the extreme content to play like the 5% who do.

If SE decides to break the minmax glass cannon DPS meta by penalizing healer DPS, or making healers DPS against all targets except fettered players be trivial, then SE will manage to fix the problem. But I don't see that happening. Japanese software development does not work that way. Japanese customers don't like that. Japanese software develoeprs change as little as possible to avoid pissing off their loyal fanbase with drastic changes, unlike Korean game devs who throw out the entire game mechanics and narrative with every new producer they bring on.

It only takes one patch of imbalanced game mechanics to destroy the game for the majority of the players. Let's not pretend that players don't seek the minmax solution out of some sense of teamwork, they seek it because that's what achieves their own goals, with the mistaken belief that it's everyone's goal. That's why the DPS-healers exist, because that queue is fastest. That is why "non-DPS" healers get screamed at, because it's going slower, or harming some third-party leaderboard ranking that nobody gives a care about. "You don't pay my sub" is the right answer to people making selfish demands. Some of you can't tell the difference between offering advice, and trolling people/screaming at people, and that is rather sad.

If someone does not ask for advice, you are under no obligation to give any. Yet repeatedly on the general forum, you will see people offer unsolicited advice, right or wrong, in response to people griping about other players, or SE specifically. These people do not want advice, they want other players, to stop ruining their game experience. On THIS forum, advice should be expected, right or wrong, otherwise you don't get people to actually consider what is right or wrong, or that maybe there is no right answer.

"Should I DPS while healing" the answer is "If you can", not Yes/No.

[Ghishlain]

Funny, yet I've played all the party content as healer and don't get screamed at. Now maybe what some of you aren't getting is that Since SB, I only devils advocate for the "pure healer", because I still see people spewing the same lies about DPS being mandatory, because it scares people away from the role. It's not, and has not ever been about Maximum DPS, but the raiders sure want it to be that way. Thus you can get through all party content without DPS. I'm saying this as someone who got through most solo content without using Cleric Stance in 2.x and 3.x content, because the CS stance dance was an annoyingly awful mechanic that lead to more mistakes than not using it at all. The stance dance is gone, people have no excuse to not DPS unless they are bad at MP management, or get stuck with a party that likes to eat mechanics and dirt a lot.

If this is the crux of your argument, then you need to both present it better and show a higher level of understanding towards how high tier healing is handled in this game.

I am in agreement that a healer shouldn't be forced to DPS if they don't want to but it's also important to realize that the best healers in this game are those who know how to optimize their DPS while ensuring the party doesn't die to unavoidable mechanics and fix things when people do make those inevitable oopsies. The skill gap is a chasm that dwarfs the Grand Canyon when you compare the skill floor versus the skill ceiling of the healer class and I feel your arguments would be more receptive if you could accept that.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Funny, yet I've played all the party content as healer and don't get screamed at. Now maybe what some of you aren't getting is that Since SB, I only devils advocate for the "pure healer", because I still see people spewing the same lies about DPS being mandatory, because it scares people away from the role. It's not, and has not ever been about Maximum DPS, but the raiders sure want it to be that way. Thus you can get through all party content without DPS. I'm saying this as someone who got through most solo content without using Cleric Stance in 2.x and 3.x content, because the CS stance dance was an annoyingly awful mechanic that lead to more mistakes than not using it at all. The stance dance is gone, people have no excuse to not DPS unless they are bad at MP management, or get stuck with a party that likes to eat mechanics and dirt a lot.

Ironically, it's your method which will make the transition all the more difficult. Many a good raiders will advocate focusing on healing for new players, then begin by weaving in some DPS. In fact, that was standard advice back when Cleric existed. Come to think of it, I do not recall a single person arguing against you who ever claimed healers should always maximize DPS at a top tier raider level or that newer healers should prioritize DPS above all else. Those are strawmen you've erected. Regardless, there comes a point when the training wheels need to be taken off. A level 70 WHM in i320 gear should know how to balance some degree of DPS and healing. By playing devil's advocate for them, you provide an excuse they can be lazy.

Put simply, no one is talking about new players. We're talking about the higher ilvl ones who still refuse to DPS or do so sparingly because they simply don't want to.

If SE decides to break the minmax glass cannon DPS meta by penalizing healer DPS, or making healers DPS against all targets except fettered players be trivial, then SE will manage to fix the problem.

All this accomplishes is fundamentally destroying healers. In a game where healing potencies are massive, reducing their DPS to a negligible amount would kill the role for a significant number of players. And no, not because they only care about DPS as you fancy insisting. It dies because they would be bored. Standing around idle while waiting for the tank's HP to dip ever so slightly is mind numbingly boring. Even at the Savage level, you would spend upwards of 50-60% literally doing nothing. If SE ever wants encourage more healing, they need to tune down healing potencies so you cannot take a tank from 1HP to 70,000 in five seconds or less. When an Astro can set up a 12,000HP regen which ticks every three seconds. It kind of trivializes things. Hence why the actual challenge for healers in XIV is learning how to balance healing and DPS, not simply healing.

[KisaiTenshi]

If this is the crux of your argument, then you need to both present it better and show a higher level of understanding towards how high tier healing is handled in this game.

I am in agreement that a healer shouldn't be forced to DPS if they don't want to but it's also important to realize that the best healers in this game are those who know how to optimize their DPS while ensuring the party doesn't die to unavoidable mechanics and fix things when people do make those inevitable oopsies. The skill gap is a chasm that dwarfs the Grand Canyon when you compare the skill floor versus the skill ceiling of the healer class and I feel your arguments would be more receptive if you could accept that.

I'll tell you this much, unsolicited advice, given during the game duties, always comes off as condescending if players are not dying. That's why you can not have the DPS argument during a duty, it wastes time. The only thing that should be said during a duty about healing is "Big pull OK (?/!)" by either the Tank or Healer. When tanks started doing this back in 2.x (I believe the first time I encountered speedrunning big pulls it was "The Lost City of Amdapor" in patch 2.2, but became a problem with Brayflox Longstop (hard)) initially I had no idea how to keep them alive as I was having to use Cure II on them to the point of MP exhaustion even after exhausting tetra and benediction. But no speed runners? No issue.

Fast forward along to current level 61+ content, players still wearing level 60 poetics gear, no materia, during the entirety of 4.0 SB, all the way through to level 70 because they don't want to play each dungeon until they get a full set of gear, rather they are point-blank given TWO entire sets of HQ gear throughout the storyline, and if you plan ahead you can level both a caster and a melee/tank role. A tank can not get away with this and still use their pre-SB meta of big pulls, and I've seen more tissue-paper tanks die to the first pull than to party wipes in the 4-player content.

By playing devil's advocate for them, you provide an excuse they can be lazy.

Put simply, no one is talking about new players. We're talking about the higher ilvl ones who still refuse to DPS or do so sparingly because they simply don't want to.

You're making an assumption that players wearing 3xx gear and level 70, have actually played any of the game content before 3.0, and didn't simply buy a Job pot/MSQ skip pot.

New players are the ones being damaged by being told they need to DPS at a raider level, by high-end raiders in non-raiding content when that requirement does not exist, and never existed. There is a problem of most roulettes having "needs tank" or "needs healer", that can not be fullfilled at a high level because players are scared of being screamed at, or kicked for underperforming, and thus not even a carrot will get them to play it. See the comments about players intentionally making it so they do not get Rabanastre, they have cleared it, they, just don't want to do it again. A good 75% of the queue pops for Alliance raids is nothing more than LotA, which players are overpowered to the point you don't need to heal any of it if players are aware of the instant-kill mechanics. In Sycrus tower, people just ignore all of Glasya Labolas mechanics, and then they get surprised by Amon later when they die to Curtain call and Xande's Ancient Quaga.

Like this forum alone, you can get a general idea of what content "was hard" to someone, by looking at the join date (which is only indicative of when they created a forum profile.) Your's says Sep 2015, Myself and Ghishlain all have 2013 launch dates. We played 2.0, and I know Miste said they played 1.0 as well (and they have a 2011 date.) I played 1.0 but I didn't play 1.0 up to the point where you got the Chocobo because the game was too taxing on PC I had (it ran at 10-15fps at the time) and it was just not very fun, laggy, and I my friends wanted to play other freemium games and they had much worse machines than I.

Sep/Oct 2013 = 2.0
Sep 2014 = 2.35
Sep 2015 = 3.07

I'll restate again, if you have not played 2.0, then you have no idea that the meta was never healer DPS, it was BiS-or-kicked. Players tagged and used sleep/bind on targets. Content has been nerfed even as of 2.1. It may be a faceroll now, but that doesn't mean that it always was.

By perpetuating this myth that healer DPS matters in all content, only pushes people away from wanting to play healers at all. A consequence of that is that people don't play tanks either because they're so worried about DPS, that they are worried about getting a tunnel-vision dps healer.

The fix to the queue problems has to be by making those roles not have the "minmax DPS" stigma attached to it, so SE either needs to make healer DPS completely rubbish inside duties, or they need to make healing always pinned to minimum ilevel, even when overgeared. Not changes that encourage more DPS in duties. Some of you don't see how field and duties are balanced differently.

Like to go back to the first post in this thread:

Well some say so, some say otherwise. Its propabily save to say its intended but not necessary for a healer to use his/her damage spells.

So why not make it so damage spells actually give buffs to healing spells?

Here is an example on WHM: If you have Aero-3 up on an enemy you gain a 2% healing buff if you have aero 3 and aero up you get an 5 % healing buff. Also stone, hitng and enemy with a stone spell reduced the MP cost of you next healing spell by 1% and this can stack up to 10 times and 10%.

Would that not be a good way to incentive players to use all their tools and helping to fix the issue?

That doesn't fix the problem, it in fact makes it worse. A healer should have X many tools for healing relative to the content's expected mechanics, and any DPS by the healer should not outstrip the worst actual DPS that is minimally geared for the content.

Like just look at the healer toolbox and what they counter:
Small heal - Counter small damage
Large heal - Counter large damage
Party heal - Counter party damage
Single HoT - Counter non-removable DoT
Party HoT - Counter non-removable party DoT
Shield - Counter tank buster
Single target DPS with cast time - Counter players fetered, knockback bombs
Single target DPS with no cast time (DoT) - Counter small adds , knockback bombs
AOE DPS with cast time - Knockback bombs
AOE DPS without cast time (but long CD) - Knockback bombs
Sleep - Stop one ranged enemy or group of enemies while you take out others, also used to interrupt mechanics
Bind - Stop one Melee enemy, while you take out others.

But in field you encounter almost none of this. The point of the DPS in the healer kit is so that you're not forced to level a DPS, or form a party to do levequests, fates, and so forth. If SE wanted to take a page from some other MMO and strip healers of their DPS during duties, that would put an end to the "should healers DPS?" and instead replace it with "Healers are boring, give us more things to do" which if all of you have been paying attention, is why some of of these healers are doing nothing.

Healer DPS is just masking the real problem of there not being enough things that the healer is responsible for during a duty other than being a bloodbag for the tank. Having all healers deploy shields is one way of adding a mechanic that needs attention, but another way is by making "Esuna" not a "clean everything" solution to debuffs. Rather they could break Esuna into three pieces, one that cleans DoT's, one that counters fetter/paralyze/leaden (as a buff), and one that is specifically to counter curses like Doom/Zombie/Enthralled that you have 5 seconds to counter or the curse takes effect. But that just puts more unneeded things on the hotbar. So many players just heal through debuffs, that many of the debuffs don't even matter anymore once you outgear the content.

[MoroMurasaki]

Like just look at the healer toolbox and what they counter:
Small heal - Counter small damage
Large heal - Counter large damage
Party heal - Counter party damage
Single HoT - Counter non-removable DoT
Party HoT - Counter non-removable party DoT
Shield - Counter tank buster
Single target DPS with cast time - Counter players fetered, knockback bombs
Single target DPS with no cast time (DoT) - Counter small adds , knockback bombs
AOE DPS with cast time - Knockback bombs
AOE DPS without cast time (but long CD) - Knockback bombs
Sleep - Stop one ranged enemy or group of enemies while you take out others, also used to interrupt mechanics
Bind - Stop one Melee enemy, while you take out others.

If this is honestly how you play or advocate others playing I don't know if there is any point in talking to you.

If healer dps is meant to "break feters" and "knockback bombs" why are there dots on SCH AoE and diminishing returns on Holy/Gravity? Why does Holy have a stun? You can't stun fetters or bombs.

You seem to contradict yourself from pages ago also - you stated back there that tanks dying super fast was a legitimate reason to not dps, now you're saying that healers are dpsing because there isn't enough healing to do... so will you admit that you're wrong then? I mean, you were wrong and that was made clear, I'm just wondering if you'll admit it.

As to your button bloat suggestions surrounding debuffs - how would this help anything? Even if debuffs were made more threatening so that they needed to be cleansed you're trading one filler (dps) for another (cleansing debuffs) and I don't see how it's any better.