Yeah, people seem to think there's nothing in the middle of "Eos can heal this" and "only the top 1% can clear it."
Experts are a joke right now. If you single pull them for some reason, you literally don't need a healer. Why do you think the wall to wall pull style exists? Because that's what we're really capable of. It's kinda sad when Auran Vale is the hardest dungeon in the game to this day. (Although based on how many people wipe in Keeper of the Lake, that could also be a contender.)
I can do 2k on WHM in there, and I'm hardly elite. Can't quite on SCH, but still over 1500 reliably. It's really about not overhealing. On something like the single Ultima Upsurges in the first half of o8n, I can use Whispering Dawn to heal it. If I just let that tick, it requires no GCD healing at all, and I'm 100% DPS uptime. Not being willing to wait for the HoTs to do their job leads to using more GCD healing and lowering DPS. WHM can let Medica II do its thing although the initial cast requires a GCD.As for 80% DPSing: I have been in S5 - S7 yesterday, and frankly, I am at a loss as to how people manage to do 2K DPS in there. I was so busy trying to keep everyone alive that I barely managed to squeeze in around 800ish.
Yeah sure, the ELITE can DPS like crazy b/c everyone has the content on farm and knows exactly what they are doing. But if you enter in there with a normal group that still struggles with mechanics, any healer is plenty busy saving butts and not busy throwing stones. If they leave that content as is and castrate the healers, savage will feel like a nightmare.
That is group dependent. A group that is constantly taking avoidable damage isn't going to let you do that, and you'll have to top them up and shield them or they'll keep dying. Healer DPS is extremely group dependent because if you have to do enough healing to need GCD heals, you're trading between DPS and HPS. 7 tends to be bad for this because people eat missles or stand in the airborne cannon fire or get the paralyze DoT or all kinds of other stuff that you just have to deal with. The less of that you get, the better your DPS looks.
You need to factor that in when looking at your DPS and comparing. The goal is to push what DPS you can given the time you have, so don't feel bad if you can't push high numbers in that situation. Your goal is simply to improve your own efficiency.(It's the same for tanks going in there the first time. The goals are to hold the boss, use CDs effectively, and not eat mechanics. DPS is what you worry about after you get those things down.)