Healer DPS - enjoyable or a chore?

[IsbellDL]

As AST, yeah, DPS is boring. There just aren't enough offensive skills. At least you can play cards to pass the time. WHM is a little bit better. At least you have 2 dots to keep track of. DPS as SCH is actually a bit more fun. It's still simple enough that I wouldn't want to only DPS as a SCH, but there's enough going on that a slightly extended DPS phase isn't dull. It's still the balance of healing & DPSing that makes makes the overall role fun, but SCH can lean more heavily to the DPS side without losing my interest.

[Sebazy]

Because at the heart of it, I feel pressing cure II is different from pressing stone IV; that's what I was trying to get at with the design talk. They are really only the same on the surface level of being an action.

Honestly I just don't get how specifically getting HP bars up is more interesting than making different hp bars go down. It boggles my mind that people feel this way but I do appreciate the attempts at explaining it. You humored me and that's cool.

Before I get stuck in, this is an opinion formed from my experience primarily healing in mmos over the last ~20 years. As such, a good portion of it is kind of out dated compared to current trends in the likes of FFXIV so please keep that in mind =( Also, I'm typing this in a mid raid break, so apologies if it's a bit rough, I'll tidy it up later if I spot anything glaring.

TLDR: Gratitification and Engagement

First off, Gratification is in my eyes the biggest factor even if many won't admit to it. This can be both self gratification as well as in the eyes of others, this works on many different levels in FFXIV and runs surprisingly deep, thus why many struggle to quite put their finger on it. At the most basic level, Healers are the most impactful role in this game in near enough any content where you take some amount of damage. We make bars move further and faster than any other role in any relevant content. This in itself is simply more satisfying for many.

Then there's the additional aspect of putting yourself on the stage with your plays. A great example of this would be a few days ago. I was farming Tsukuyomi with some friends in discord, meteors were messed up and I was the only person to survive. We had 2 and a half bars of LB and I survived solo for a good 20/30 seconds or so whilst building LB to get that LB3 off. We honestly made far more noise in that discord than I've seen in most world/server first clears over the rest of the run. Some quick thinking, rapid fingers and a dash of luck and I pulled a game changing play out of the bag. Meanwhile, a similarly slick performance would have resulted in an inevitable wipe anyway on any other role, if the run had have been clean, it would have gone under the radar with the only real gratification and limelight coming entirely external to the game via fflogs.

This is something that the likes of League and Overwatch do a good job of addressing, both by keeping a very firm eye on the strength of supports and instead doing everything they can to thrust the DPS into the limelight instead.

The second big factor is engagement.

Saying that casting a cure isn't that different to throwing a rock is overlooking one fairly significant difference between the two.

Healer DPS boils down to mashing a very simple rotation or sequence of abilities when there's nothing else to do (aka most of the time sadly). The thought process here is limited to 'are dots ticking? Time to throw rocks'.

Healing is more reactive and engaging. Even when you're pre-empting mechanics and damage, you're still effectively reacting to a larger sequence of events and stimulus around you with a significantly bigger toolset at your disposal, there's a little more thought involved no matter how simplistic it might be.

Breaks over, I'll likely expand a bit later. hope that helps <3

[lulunami]

Healing has always been more fun than DPS on healer for me. When you time double HoT Regen per cooldown of Largesse on the tank is so satisfying. Then when you time each heal cadence at the proper time as WHM, while still being able to retain damage GCDs while slide-casting makes you feel pro.

As a SCH, constantly managing the fairy while using oGCDs to make your healer co-partner's life a lot easier, while keeping your DoTs and Broils on point, that feels good. Properly using Deployment Tactics and shielding the party at the critical time also feels good. Critical Hit Adloquium and feeling like you turned on hacks is good.

As much as I like spamming Holy, that is not as fun as healing to me. Healer DPS mechanics are too simple for me to enjoy in a vacuum.

[Kalayel]

Healer DPS isn't really enjoyable. Not entirely boring as well, but not enjoyable. I'll speak mainly about the WHM here, since it's my main. I've done AST and SCH as well, but I really prefer WHM for its ability to heal like a nuclear bomb. What bothers me is that the main focus of the game is clearly DPS. Healers are asked to DPS as much as possible and even class quests ask you "Hey, healer, forget healing, DPS that dude/lady/kinda blob thingy/Nicholas Cage as hard and fast as possible." while they don't give healers (mainly WHM) the tools to make DPS enjoyable. And even though the game itself asks us to DPS, the devs took DPS from the WHM (why take the dmg out of Fluid Aura, seriously?). What would be real nice is this: if everyone wants us to dps, make dps more than two DoTs and a stone.

[Zeromon]

I like to DPS as a healer, but DPSing itself isn't very enjoyable. It's true that spamming Holy like a God is satisfying, but I always feel much more satisfying doing AOE spam as a DPS instead of a healer. DPS with healers is just too simple and boring. There's just not a lot of stuff to press to get the theoretical max DPS. As a poster above said already, being an excellent healer healing to save the run feels so much better than an excellent healer that's second in damage (while this is enjoyable, the former I feel is more so). Saving a run when 4 die (including your co-healer), with an incoming tank buster, along with raid wide damage coming soon feels so much more satisfying than spamming stones forever or holy spam. But scenarios like the above should be few, since most players are competent enough to not require incessant healing. DPS is needed to fill the gap between heals, and I hope SE recognizes that and makes DPSing more interesting, even at the cost of potencies.

[Maeka]

One of the coolest things ever, is to be one of 2-3 people still standing and pop that LB3 to say "NOPE!"

No amount of DPS can come close to the thrill of saving a battle with an LB3 that rezzes 5+ people lol.

[gumas]

healer dps is... just there i think? its not really boring but not exactly exciting either, pretty much "it get the job done" i guess?

but personally for my AST i found dpsing is far more enjoyable now with faster malefic cast time and no more penalty for lightspeed

[Sylvain]

Honestly, if fight would simply require much more heal I'd enjoy dpsing as a healer even more.


Let say the healing requirement would be drastically superior. (it doesn't necessarly mean "boss does twice as many AoE so you cast twice as many AoE heal", there's tons of way to increase the overall raid damage, such as increasing boss AA by 100-200%, making random spike hit players etc)
Whenever you, your coheal and the raid would play so well that finally you have a few sec of free time to throw in some DoTs, then it would feel like you've been rewarded for your skill from both you and your mates with time to dps.
Assuming this would be the case, having healer doing much more dps would even be fine since they wouldn't really have time to do so (but at least they wouldn't struggle while levling / doing solo content)

Right now the logic is just reversed, we don't even need to play good to dps. Dpsing is your default gameplay and when the boss happens to do something else than tickling the tank, usually one big explosion dropping the raid to 20% that both healer will patch up with 1 cast.
The fact that people dps doesn't mean the system is engaging or good. I did a few tsukuyomi run and I could littearlly spent 85% of my time spamming dps. This number would even go higher if I didn't play safe by overhealing a little after the fan when she spams us (i rather be safe than sorry) or by always casting cureII before the tank burster just to be sure the tank would survive (it was always a wasted heal everytime they would have survived with enough hp to survive the next big AoE).

It's funny because yesterday I've shown a tsukuyomi kill from a heal PoV to a friend that might want to start the game, even he asked at the end "why does the healer always cast stone?"

I don't feel like a healer, I feel like a dps with healing support. Basically a RDM with more healing skills.

On the other hand when I did OS5 last week and the healer littearlly crashed on pull, solo healing that fight was amazing. It was fun, i had to plan so much more than usual. And this time, when I finally had the time to weave dps skills it felt good.
Is that it? Do I have to team up with utterly bad healer or virtually d/c'd one to spend more than 10% of the fight healing?

As a healer I don't think that wishing to spend more time healing than dpsing is an irrational request.

If healing doesn't change in 6.0 I really think I'll just stop being a healer. Not because I hate healing, in fact I love healing, but that's the thing, I wanna heal, I don't wanna do subpar dps and "support" my group with one medicaII / assize once a minute

[Reinha]

It's boring but it passes the time. Ast at least gets cards which is why I like it the most out of healers. I'd prefer to have to heal more often and have more conditional effects between healing spells.

[Risvertasashi]

I think it's best we agree to disagree here. We're both repeating the same things so perhaps neither of us is fully, properly expressing our points. No need to further this conversation if it isn't going anywhere. I disagree that healing intrinsically holds more value than dpsing and I think the value of your spells is determined not by their function in a vacuum but in their function towards completing the content in which they're casit.

Although I know this wasn't to me... perhaps I can offer a different perspective, that might or might not be similar to mutemutt's feelings.

Healing is highly situational, at least in high end content. There's no set rotation because players aren't perfect, have different levels of gear and survivability, and use or don't use mitigation, potions, and so on. Squeezing in a rez or blowing a CD on an emergency recovery might require changing routine timings. As such, while you can plan for certain mechanics, you must nonetheless be ready and able to react to a changing situation.

DPS is not situational. It doesn't matter if your rotation is 3 buttons or 27 buttons. There is an optimal pattern to always follow. You never need to adjust to the needs of the party, you simply do as much as possible.

So personally...This is why I don't like DPS. Even if SE adds more buttons for healer DPS, it's going to be the same boring crap. If I wanted that I'd play a DPS class, but I find them boring and I doubt SE will ever implement one that doesn't have a set rotation (or at best, priority system a la brd/mch), because that's the nature of the combat system in FFXIV.