Idea to fix controversy about healer dps.

[Miste]

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.

Speed running started immediately with the first level 50 dungeons actually.

It started with speed running Wanderer's Palace (normal, since was the only one back then) for Philosophy tomes. Groups would actually exclude SCH healers, in PF at least, since WHM Holy was even more powerful back in 2.0 (its potency was higher than now and before they initiated the diminishing returns on the spell losing potency when hitting more than 1 mob at a time, they also at one point changed Holy to Unaspected damage which caused the old Foe Requiem to no longer buff it).

Even with all those nerfs Holy is still crazy powerful today which is why as a WHM it is silly not to use its power. The Stun on it also offers tons of mitigation while also doing damage. It is win-win for a WHM to use it.

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.

They can actually, but it requires the tank to be skilled at their job and also the healer to be skilled at theirs. Shisui of the Violet Tides for example the double pulls in there aren't super hard hitting. Bardam's and Doma I understand the issue there, but if some tank blindly double pulls and dies due to being undergeared or not being skilled enough then its w/e don't double pull then. I really doubt anyone advocates forcing double pulls when the party proves it is not capable of it. That's just dumb.

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.

Who is telling healers in casual content to DPS at raider level though? All most people I see are asking for is again "cast more than zero of your DPS spells". That isn't raider level DPS...it's just...use some...no matter how much that might be. One Holy and one Aero III per pull even. People are being way generous and understanding here from what I see.

If the tank is squishy and needs constant spam healing...then okay you can't fit room to DPS, but anyone with a brain would see the healer spam healing. They aren't going to ask you to DPS if they see you struggling to keep the tank alive.

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.

There are currently 15 jobs in the game and only 6 of those 15 are healers and tanks. The majority of the jobs are DPS which may attribute to there being less healers and tanks due to there being less options to appeal to more personalities.

You have no proof to this claim that a lot of players avoid tank and healer due to being afraid of being screamed at or kicked for underperforming due to the pressure of having to at least try to do some DPS.

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.

Like I said above. People were speedrunning the first 50 dungeon with WHM for Holy spam. It was definitely meta in 2.0 so I am sorry, but you are incorrect again. In coil which was the savage of 2.0 healers were DPSing to help clear still although back then Cleric Stance was still a thing so sometimes you would do a main heal / off heal style.

Also why does 2.0 matter anymore to the healer DPS discussion though? It isn't 2.0 anymore.

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.

No proof of any of these claims either. You can't just claim the reason why tanks and healers are not played as often. In my experience tank and healer seems to generally be the less played roles in other MMOs too indicating a trend that has nothing to do with "healer and tank DPS".

Healer DPS does matter in all content if you care about helping your group as much as you can. Even if that only means casting a few DPS spells per pull because you are new to it, at least you are putting the effort to try and to learn to play healer at a higher skill and able to contribute more. You won't ever learn unless you practice and try. Which is why it is not a bad thing to encourage healers to practice using their DPS toolkit in content.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

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.

I pulled the two sets of Au Ra adds in Shisui as a level 63 Warrior in full Shire/Alex gear. Handled it no problem. The healer, coincidentally, also managed to DPS. In fact, I was still doing larger pulls in Doma Castle, though I finally had to hold back after the spider adds. You getting a tissue-paper tank doesn't mean tanks cannot handle those pulls in general.

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.

Purchasing a jump potion does not absolve you of criticism. If you cannot be bothered to put your own due diligence and learning how the game works, you have only yourself to blame. I leveled Dragoon through FATE spamming in a single day; 20something levels. What did I do? Pull up Youtube videos and guides so I had a base understanding how the job functioned at level 50, and eventually 60. Why can't miss Jump Potion user do the same? Because they are lazy.

No, this is your baseless assumption. No one, ever, has stated nor insinuated players need to DPS at a raid equivalent level. I have burst for over 6,000 on White Mage yet never expect that same degree from random Rabanastre duty mates. What I do expect, however, is something beyond standing around doing nothing. If you finish Rabastre with 1,000 DPS while I have double? Good for you. At least you tried. Adventurer in Need has more to do with people preferring less responsibility and the abundance of DPS jobs available. Every MMO suffers the same problem. WoW has significantly more DPS than healers despite the latter being expected to primarily heal. LotA pops frequently because it's easy and a large number of players are new. In fact, the last unofficial census cited less than 50% completed the MSQ up to 4.2. Plenty of players only began playing in Stormblood, thus they will be going through the old content.

I will be blunt. Who cares about 2.x? It's entirely irrelevant nearly six years later. Once upon a time, Warrior was so bad, people actively kicked them from parties. Likewise, early 3.0 saw people prefer a 30 minute penalty than deal with Astro's abysmal healing. Both have since dominated their respective roles at one time or another. It makes precisely zero difference how healing used to be played because it isn't that any longer. You are expected to learn and adapt to the present day adjustments, not linger in the past and lament how difficult things used to be. If that were the case, the raid scene would have never recovered from Gordias.

This myth is perpetuated by you alone. People on the opposing side have simply said healers should DPS. How you correlate that into a false dichotomy, I have no idea. Let's break it down. We'll even use colours!

Healers must maximize their DPS!
Healers should attempt to weave DPS between heals whenever possible (Always Be Casting)
Healers only heal and nothing else!

You see that grey area? That's the expectation most people have.

[Tridus]

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.

Who cares? It's not 2.0 anymore. How things were in another era isn't particularly relevant now.

By perpetuating this myth that healer DPS matters in all content, only pushes people away from wanting to play healers at all.

Killing stuff faster matters in all content. Less time means fewer mechanics which means fewer opportunity for mistakes. There's very few fights in the game that don't get easier if you can do them faster, and the ones that do are weird ARR Ex primals that actually have a "do more than X DPS and you die" mechanic.

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.

[Citation Needed]

People don't play tanks because people don't want to play tanks. Every trinity MMO has had a tank shortage for at least a decade. This is in no way abnormal, and not affected at all by the optimal play style here being "tanks should push DPS"... which is a style SE could obliterate quickly if they wanted to by making emnity generation more difficult and by making tankbusters powerful enough that you need tank stance's extra defense. Instead, enmity generation is so easy that even I (a novice and not terribly skilled tank by my own admission) can do it while spending half a fight doing DPS combos and we can actively ignore the tank defensive stat because we don't need the defense.

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.

The only fix to the queue problem is to double the number of DPS per group, relative to tanks and healers. ie: base group size is 6. That's it. Bumping to 5 would help but not eliminate it, going by the experience of WoW. The reality of the situation is that a certain number of players like the tank and healer roles, and the clear majority want to play DPS. That's true across every trinity MMO and has been for a very long time. The only fix for queue sizes is to accept that and factor it into the game design (which is why some games ditch the trinity entirely). Given the difficulty of changing that at this point in the game's lifecycle, I think it's unlikely to happen, so get used to queue times. They're not going anywhere.

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.

SE could have done that in 4.0, fairly easy. They had the option to turn Cleric Stance into a sect like ability: turn it on and do good DPS, but it can't be turned off during combat. That would have made their design choice very clearly in favor of "you should be healing and not DPSing".

They did the opposite. They made it easier to DPS in group content while healing. the message that sent was pretty clear as well. If they were to nerf healer DPS into the ground, they also need to address the other end of the equation and keep people busy healing. Otherwise you get low level Eureka, where you're ineffective against everything but can heal anyone to full in 2 seconds, so you spend a lot of time doing nothing. That's not fun.

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.

Hey, we finally agree on something!

This wasn't really a problem in games like WoW because healing required so much more of your uptime. Fights that really allowed substantial healer DPS were relatively unusual. Most didn't give you time or resources to do it, and even then you weren't getting relative group DPS percentages that you can see here. The game said "you should be healing, and to remind you of that we're going to kill the group if you don't do it". Here, we have fights that can literally be healed entirely by one healer casting Regen and another having Eos out, leaving all day to do something else. Combined with DPS being made easier and healer DPS being pretty powerful, what exactly do the devs think people are going to do?

It's too late to really fix that in 4.x, but 5.0 should take a rethink to how healing works. Healing needs to be less powerful and MP needs to matter more.

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.

I mean, a lot of debuffs can be healed through or don't matter a whole lot. That goes back to healing being too powerful right now. Players are smart as a group and will optimize for efficiency. If debuffs matter, efficiency should mean removing them. That it doesn't is a problem with the healing and encounter design.

[RopeDrink]

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.

And again, I must refer to an earlier point:

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.

In addition to the above point, a request for contribution is (also) not a demand for optimized play. See below:

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.

The majority of those who passionately involve themselves in topics like this are the many who've encountered Healers who, on seeing nobody needs heals at all, just stand there. You paint people pointing this out in a specific light (ie. bullying for optimized play across the board), much like how you believe those pointing it out paint said inactive players in a certain light (ie. lazy). The reality is that when no healing is required at all, there is little to no defence anyone can place on someone deciding to remain unmoving/do nothing - especially considering that if they actually decided to contribute damage, they are making their OWN job easier, not just everyone else's. There's no logical reason not to do it when you have the freedom and resources. If I see an overhealer or a 'stand and watch Healer', my heart sinks every time, mostly because I'm a complete opposite who knows when and where that person had the time and freedom to do something other than funnel MP into over-healing and/or admire the view that they're bound to see hundreds upon hundreds of times down the road.

The main defence tends to boil down into variations of 'it's not end-game' // 'they paid their own sub' // 'we shouldn't make demands' - and yes, they all apply in principle, yet it still boils down to common sense, not a judgement between them and top-end Healers. Even if all I see is a WHM applying Aero I to individual targets before entering heal-bot mode, that is much more than nothing at all and typically enough to stave my ire.

It's not about squeezing optimized DPS-Healing from a stone, or treating casual content like a GC-PF Savage group on comms looking for progression/top-end clears - it's about encouragement, specifically for those who play as if a quarter of their skill-bar is missing when their role is making no demands of them. Again, nobody is asking people to 'convert from Healer into full-on DPS', or to sacrifice their primary purpose (keeping people alive) for the sake of 'moar damagez'. Having said that, I can't speak for everyone. As said in my earlier quote, most would be happy even with minor contribution - doing something is infinitely better than doing nothing, for ALL involved (Healer included).

As far as I'm concerned (as a Healer main who, on doing content, will typically always deviate towards WHM), I would be doing MYSELF a huge disservice if I just applied Regen/Medica II to an over-geared tank and watched as 3.2 people do the rest, stepping in only to throw out a cure or two if absolutely required. Those who play in a similar vein are the people I refer to when I partake in topics like this -- not the Healer who is at least trying, not the Healer who has no other option but to heal, not the Healer who isn't being '100% optimal'... The ones who do nothing when health-bars are full and/or barely moving. It's akin to the idea of a tank generating enough enmity to hold enemy attention and then immediately entering an idle-animation for as long as enmity is held -- 'I fulfilled my role, the rest is irrelevant'.

[Kabooa]

The only controversy is these threads where everyone sees every scenario as a blanket all-or-nothing.

[RopeDrink]

The only controversy is these threads where everyone sees every scenario as a blanket all-or-nothing.

Comments like this admit to ignoring a large part of all those threads. You know, the bits where everyone confirms that there are obviously variables involved - that it isn't all black & white. Again, the majority of complaints are aimed at a very specific scenarios - mostly the one involving little/no healing requirement and a healer, in that position, not making any attempt at all to capitalize. If you translate such a situation to 'all-or-nothing', you're missing the point. It is irrefutable common sense that everyone benefits when all roles contribute beyond their specialization if/when possible, provided it comes at no detriment to their actual role (holding attention / keeping people alive / getting targets dead ASAP). Any and all defence against this simple principle tends to boil down to the same tirade of points: paid my sub / not end-game / my way or high-way.

[KisaiTenshi]

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.

2.0 Holy was far more powerful. You can use Holy+Assize (which has a wider range) to destroy all the bombs in Brayflox Longstop Hard or can use it to blow away the bombs in the same dungeon, and in The Keeper of the Lake . Despite that only WHM has stun attached to that AOE. There is no stun in the SCH kit, and AST's stun is not attached to Gravity, and not available till level 60. Hence the content is not required to use stun because not everyone has it. There is a right tool for each thing, and if you're just blowing Holy on single targets because you can, that is not a strategy, as it has no DoT. As a WHM on the field, you can use holy or fluid aura, or repose to make a battle easier, but Fluid Aura/Repose doesn't actually have any utility at all in 4 player content other than Brayflox (and I seem to recall tanks getting more pissed off about fluid aura spreading out the mobs,) at least not with the present zerg rush attitude of players.

Like imagine a mechanic where you have to sleep a target that will otherwise one-hit-kill the party (or one hit kill a friendly NPC.) Too bad you brought a Scholar.

SE could delete the DPS from the healer toolkits, and none of the content would change. Instead Trials like Titan and Shiva, Susano, and dungeons like Amdapor Keep (Hard) have fetter mechanics that you can not get yourself out of, and if the rest of the party is fettered or knocked out, that leaves the healer to do it. If they don't have the DPS available, than that is a WIPE to a RNG element. You can't res a DPS in that time.

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.

Because ignoring the debuffs gives the healer something to do that otherwise results in the healer doing nothing.

Also why does 2.0 matter anymore to the healer DPS discussion though? It isn't 2.0 anymore.

Because everything apparently matters when we are having a discussion about game design and why previous things were changed. 2.x and 3.x had Cleric Stance, therefor "non-DPS" healers were a direct result of that mechanic being error prone. With 4.0 there is really no reason not to DPS, but you still see people traumatized by that meta and won't.

Purchasing a jump potion does not absolve you of criticism. If you cannot be bothered to put your own due diligence and learning how the game works, you have only yourself to blame. I leveled Dragoon through FATE spamming in a single day; 20something levels. What did I do? Pull up Youtube videos and guides so I had a base understanding how the job functioned at level 50, and eventually 60. Why can't miss Jump Potion user do the same? Because they are lazy.

There's your entitlement showing again. While I think Jump Potion users are Lazy, they are the same boat as the people playing Satasha the first time, and if their only experience with MMORPG's is other zerg-style dungeon games like Mabinogi then they are not going to learn how to do anything unless they fail.

The only fix to the queue problem is to double the number of DPS per group, relative to tanks and healers. ie: base group size is 6. That's it. Bumping to 5 would help but not eliminate it, going by the experience of WoW. The reality of the situation is that a certain number of players like the tank and healer roles, and the clear majority want to play DPS. That's true across every trinity MMO and has been for a very long time. The only fix for queue sizes is to accept that and factor it into the game design (which is why some games ditch the trinity entirely). Given the difficulty of changing that at this point in the game's lifecycle, I think it's unlikely to happen, so get used to queue times. They're not going anywhere.

They would not do this because it would necessitate re-balancing all of the content, and the more DPS there are, the easier the game becomes unless everyone's maximum-potential DPS gets nerfed by the same amount.

Hey, we finally agree on something!

This wasn't really a problem in games like WoW because healing required so much more of your uptime. Fights that really allowed substantial healer DPS were relatively unusual. Most didn't give you time or resources to do it, and even then you weren't getting relative group DPS percentages that you can see here. The game said "you should be healing, and to remind you of that we're going to kill the group if you don't do it". Here, we have fights that can literally be healed entirely by one healer casting Regen and another having Eos out, leaving all day to do something else. Combined with DPS being made easier and healer DPS being pretty powerful, what exactly do the devs think people are going to do?

It's too late to really fix that in 4.x, but 5.0 should take a rethink to how healing works. Healing needs to be less powerful and MP needs to matter more.


I mean, a lot of debuffs can be healed through or don't matter a whole lot. That goes back to healing being too powerful right now. Players are smart as a group and will optimize for efficiency. If debuffs matter, efficiency should mean removing them. That it doesn't is a problem with the healing and encounter design.

Like just to push this idea again. Remember Aurum Vale? Now take that "Burr Burrow" mechanic, remove the timer, and make the single stack of it do greater damage than the amount of HP regen and auto-heal would do. That takes care of the "lazy healing by regen mechanics", because regen tops out at 150. So the healer has a choice of either trying to heal through it, or remove it from each player one-by-one. If the player chooses to heal through it, then the boss will throw another stack on top of it, now you can't heal through it, thus necessitating removal.

Fettered/Paralysis/Bind is another debuff that goes completely ignored. Players don't bother removing it, except on themselves. It affects casters and melee differently. Casters can still throw magic while Binded, but Paralysis interrupts most casts randomly. Where as Melee's skills are instant, thus Paralysis only breaks combos, but Bind prevents them from using them if the enemy is out of range.

As for Death/Doom, this mechanic shows up in The Sunken Temple of Qarn and The Wanderer's Palace (Hard), and shows up more often in raids. Yet there are no less than 5 different versions of it. Qarn is "instant death" with the bees which have to be interrupted, or killed. Qarn also has the first boss which is "doom unless you hit the plate", a mechanic that later shows up in WoD's Angra Mainyu, but in WoD you can also just turn around. The Wanderer's Palace (Hard) has it as "you have to heal the player to max hp". Dun Scaith has Deathgaze Hollow, which you can just use Esuna to remove it. The Weeping City of Mhach's Summoned Haagenti has the same mechanic . Then there is Deltascape V4.0.

Like https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/w...ecessity_Guide , the fact that Esuna is useless for the majority of Trials, tells you a design oversight, where it's only required on ONE of them.

With the 8-player content and 24-player content, you have more healers, there should always be something the healers should be doing, and unlike the 4-player content, there is always the possibility of one healer doing everything. That needs to be solved so that you can't "solo heal" any 8-player content. Debuffs is only one way of keeping the healer busy. The problem is that there is a huge gap between 2 WHM's with regen and medica stacked, versus two SCH's who's shields do not stack at all.

I'd go so far as to state that the entire way ACN/SMN/SCH has been designed (eg it should have focused on the pet for 100% of raw damage/ raw healing, with the players directing the pet for what kind, eg AOE, Single target) just makes it it seem like SCH is a DPS with a bonus healer kit, rather than the opposite. Like a WHM "doing nothing" at least can claim they are a role playing. A Scholar started a DPS, and thus still has a DPS kit, and the faerie only gives them even less to do if they aren't. Like SE clearly had no idea what they wanted with Scholar, and it shows. It's still fun to play, but it's holding back the entire "healer" part of the role since content can't be made that the Scholar can't heal through but the WHM can.

I don't know, I'd rather the game's design nerf the healer DPS to 50% below that of the weakest DPS, and change healing so that 90% of the time, even on easy content, you are casting something useful, be that heal, shield, or debuff cleanse, or the party wipes. But there's no way of making content be this way without making gear irrelevant, or creating debuffs and monster AI that adapts to the gear strength in real time. Debuffs can change an imbalance in the play style of there being nothing to do, but they're still pretty boring.

Some monsters in duties are defeated so quickly that as a scholar, you don't even have time to throw all the debuffs on a single target. Your DPS doesn't matter because it doesn't speed up the fight. As AST or WHM, when the monsters are defeated before you can cast anything that is not an instant cast, your DPS doesn't matter here either. That leaves healer DPS to maybe shaving a few seconds off a boss, and that's about it.

In addition to the above point, a request for contribution is (also) not a demand for optimized play.

No, if you are demanding a healer to DPS, that leads into the parser war argument that I want to leave out of this discussion.

There would be no demand for healers to DPS if some portion of players were not measuring it and using it to bully others. It's one thing to "see" players doing nothing because they are mocking the players who are (eg dancing, emoting, jumping around), it's another to get kicked at the final boss because they are under the mistaken belief that your non-contribution to DPS will cause a wipe.

The majority of those who passionately involve themselves in topics like this are the many who've encountered Healers who, on seeing nobody needs heals at all, just stand there. You paint people pointing this out in a specific light (ie. bullying for optimized play across the board), much like how you believe those pointing it out paint said inactive players in a certain light (ie. lazy).

I'll summarize the problem for you:
A) Some portion of the player base are bullies, and they know it. Thus they come to the forum to shame players for not playing to some standard that only 5% of the playerbase even hits, and an even smaller portion cares about.
B) A different portion of the player base realize this is NOT A JOB, they are not training to be an e-sports athlete, they just want to play something with their friends and other non-hardcore players, and the people from A are chasing away people they can play with by bullying them. Thus anytime someone makes a demand during a duty is rebuffed with "you don't pay my sub" or similar flipping the bird actions, and thus now everyone is pissed off.
C) Very very few actually care if you DPS or not as a healer or tank, it's just a strawman argument to push for actual changes to the game with the goal of making it harder to do nothing at all.

Which I'm all for SE making changes to the game that either enforce the roles as described, or against changes that encourage more zerg behavior (like PotD, thus making having a tank and healer pointless.) Because the more the game creeps into zerg behavior, the more the game becomes mindless race to complete content by brute force instead of strategy. Forget using anything but the biggest boom in your toolbox.

If it's one thing SE/Yoshi-P hasn't done, is justify a reason as to why the Trinity is needed at all. A tank should not be able to clear a boss, as soon as the healer is down, they should have no more than 5 seconds before they are down as well, gear, pots and self-healing be damned. A healer should not be able to survive 5 seconds without the tank taking enmity. Yet even in bosses like Shinryu the healer can just keep healing themselves when they have enmity instead of being dead in 2 hits. The DPS should be flat out dead the second the healer is down regardless of the difficulty of the content. If we are going to keep this trinity into 5.0, it's only going to get worse.

Here's another suggestion that I don't expect anyone to take serious, but it would enforce Trinity roles. Give the player a ranking (eg S/A/B/C) that changes over the course of the dungeon. Let's call "S" for "Solo" and "C" for "Carried. You get an S rating if you do 100%+ of your role. At the end of the dungeon with the commendation screen, it will give a final score and show you what everyone else was rated, but not the calculation based on healing/overhealing/enmity/dps/avoidable damage-taken. For Healers, not healing damage, not removing debuffs, or useless overhealing would lower their score. For tanks, losing enmity, not using damage-reduction CD's, and not interrupting interruptable casts would lower their score. For DPS, their score is a based on their share of the landed damage minus the healers and tanks. So a DPS in a 4-player party that does much less than half the DPS of the party is "carried". An 8-player party requires 25%+ for an S rating. Any DPS done by the healer or tank doesn't count for the healer or tank, but reduces the amount of damage the DPS can be scored down on. Stepping in avoidable mechanics (other than the tank) results in a score penalty, where as the Tank is only penalized for eating the damage without mitigation, or if the AOE also damages another player.

Like I think something like that is needed, because otherwise we are sliding towards "everyone DPS, eat the damage" zerg behavior, and that style of gameplay is only fun for those with the fastest machines and fastest connections.

[Dualgunner]

2.0 Holy was far more powerful. You can use Holy+Assize (which has a wider range) to destroy all the bombs in Brayflox Longstop Hard or can use it to blow away the bombs in the same dungeon, and in The Keeper of the Lake

Okay, I had to stop here mostly because...

In what world is Assize an available spell to use in a lv50 roulette? :P

[KisaiTenshi]

Okay, I had to stop here mostly because...

In what world is Assize an available spell to use in a lv50 roulette? :P

It's not. That was an example of the mechanic (bombs). Baelsar's Wall has the same mechanic. If you do Brayflox Longstop hard, solo unsynced you can destroy all the bombs period. I recall someone else bragging that they could use assize in Baelsar's Wall to do the same thing.

More to the point, some of you need to stop having tunnel vision in posts. I described the mechanic, because I was describing what it would be used on. You can just as easily cast holy twice with swiftcast, but you only get one use of it.

[Ghishlain]

Because everything apparently matters when we are having a discussion about game design and why previous things were changed. 2.x and 3.x had Cleric Stance, therefor "non-DPS" healers were a direct result of that mechanic being error prone. With 4.0 there is really no reason not to DPS, but you still see people traumatized by that meta and won't.

A player who's been playing longer may be able to provide more insight on game design but I don't feel that's a good reason to invalidate their opinion if they can present a logical and correct argument against current game meta and tactics.

I'd go so far as to state that the entire way ACN/SMN/SCH has been designed (eg it should have focused on the pet for 100% of raw damage/ raw healing, with the players directing the pet for what kind, eg AOE, Single target) just makes it it seem like SCH is a DPS with a bonus healer kit, rather than the opposite. Like a WHM "doing nothing" at least can claim they are a role playing. A Scholar started a DPS, and thus still has a DPS kit, and the faerie only gives them even less to do if they aren't. Like SE clearly had no idea what they wanted with Scholar, and it shows. It's still fun to play, but it's holding back the entire "healer" part of the role since content can't be made that the Scholar can't heal through but the WHM can.

SCH is actually quite well design in my mind and fills the mythos it was intended for. A tactician that uses foresight to get their party through content. By being a heavily resource based healer via Aetherflow and personal and pet cooldowns and not being constrained by MP like WHM or AST, they have to understand the fight mechanics completely and use their healing resources at appropriate times in either anticipation or at the instant damage goes out.

Because of kit design, it just happens to also have many opportunities to DPS because their healing toolkit components are oGCD based versus the GCD heal kits that AST and WHM have. I like the intricacies and respect any healer that can optimize SCH to the absolute fullest extent because that requires a lot of concentration, consistency, and logical foresight to perform at that level.

I don't know, I'd rather the game's design nerf the healer DPS to 50% below that of the weakest DPS, and change healing so that 90% of the time, even on easy content, you are casting something useful, be that heal, shield, or debuff cleanse, or the party wipes. But there's no way of making content be this way without making gear irrelevant, or creating debuffs and monster AI that adapts to the gear strength in real time. Debuffs can change an imbalance in the play style of there being nothing to do, but they're still pretty boring.

Healer DPS being 50% below the weakest DPS is already a thing.

BTW casting DPS spells is still "useful" to your group. It's not healing but we're in group content, you should be doing your best to contribute to the group whether it via healing, DPSing, or supporting via other means (ie doing mechanics for the DPS while they do DPS things).

Some monsters in duties are defeated so quickly that as a scholar, you don't even have time to throw all the debuffs on a single target. Your DPS doesn't matter because it doesn't speed up the fight. As AST or WHM, when the monsters are defeated before you can cast anything that is not an instant cast, your DPS doesn't matter here either. That leaves healer DPS to maybe shaving a few seconds off a boss, and that's about it.

Healer's can contribute 8-15% damage to boss monsters which means it dies 8-15% faster. In a five minute fight with zero healer DPS that means it dies 24s to 45s faster. That's 60 to 108 GCDs combined the two tanks and four DPS in the 8-man raid doesn't need to do to kill the boss.

I don't find that to be a "doesn't matter" value.

A) Some portion of the player base are bullies, and they know it. Thus they come to the forum to shame players for not playing to some standard that only 5% of the playerbase even hits, and an even smaller portion cares about.

Most people advocating for healer's to use more than just their healing GCDs in appropriate scenarios aren't asking for a 95th percentile DPS rating. And they certainly aren't shaming them for not hitting that value - they're shaming them for doing nothing 80-90% of the time.

If it's one thing SE/Yoshi-P hasn't done, is justify a reason as to why the Trinity is needed at all. A tank should not be able to clear a boss, as soon as the healer is down, they should have no more than 5 seconds before they are down as well, gear, pots and self-healing be damned. A healer should not be able to survive 5 seconds without the tank taking enmity. Yet even in bosses like Shinryu the healer can just keep healing themselves when they have enmity instead of being dead in 2 hits. The DPS should be flat out dead the second the healer is down regardless of the difficulty of the content. If we are going to keep this trinity into 5.0, it's only going to get worse.

If you did this no one would want to play healer because the stress level is way too high for the average gamer. You talk about not wanting to make it an e-sport but having this level of required healing would force the healer to have 200% all the time to ensure their tank doesn't die. You're essentially saying a tank takes 50% of their HP in damage every GCD with a number like that. If a non-tank dies in seconds that's 50K damage going across the table instantly.

Using current mechanics that means you'd need to be hitting that Cure II / Benefic II / Adlo button constantly. There isn't room for error or any other choice either as any other GCD use would basically mean you can't heal the tank before the next auto splatters them across the floor.

More to the point, some of you need to stop having tunnel vision in posts. I described the mechanic, because I was describing what it would be used on. You can just as easily cast holy twice with swiftcast, but you only get one use of it.

I get the overall impression they are tunneling on that particular aspect because they heavily disagree with what "DPS spells are meant to counter" and I am in total agreement with that. If you feel the DPS spells are meant only to be used to counter fetters or knockback bombs, it shows a lack of appreciation for the tools you have in your toolkit as a healer.