Quote Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi View Post
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.