Healer dps in difficult raids and trials.

[Mirch]

Your damage per second points on those contents have to be equal or higher than your heals per second points. If it is not, change role.

[Belgianbeer]

Never!!!!!!!

[Wice]

Your damage per second points on those contents have to be equal or higher than your heals per second points. If it is not, change role.

Ideally, yes this is true. But ideally everyone in the party always does all mechanics correctly and never ever get caught out by AOE's and thus you rarely find yourself in a situation where you have to cast heals on them and they never need you to raise them.

Lets not forget that one of the big caps on Healer DPS is how good everyone else in the party is today.

[Ghishlain]

There's enough grey areas and caveats in healing dynamics in FFXIV that there is no black or white answer to the relationships between healers, healer DPS, and healer performance.

Best healing practices are to ABCs (Always Be Casting) while doing mechanics properly. You don't necessarily have to be ABC'ing with only DPS spells though as sometimes a party is so inept you have no choice but to babysit every single party member, thus reducing the number of GCDs you can dedicate to DPS. With that being said, even in high healing situations where it consumes a lot MP, you still have access to Break for MP free damage during healing downtime

To go back answer your opening question - no healer DPS isn't mandatory. It never has been, it never will be. Your primary role in the party is to keep your party alive. Caveat (yes, there will always be a caveat) - Under min ilvl progression is an exception. Also, healer DPS could be the difference between a wipe and clear in an under performing PuG setting. I would consider this a "healer DPS is mandatory" scenario, but these are scenarios that players put themselves in to and not because of designer intent.

In my mind, what separates the healers who perform at a baseline level versus those who perform well are those who understand how to keep the party HP safe while maximizing GCD utilization. Again, this doesn't mean you need to be DPSing like a God of Destruction - it just means you're spending enough GCDs and oGCDs to keep the party alive through the content and mechanical mistakes while filling the gaps with DPS. I appreciate healers who take the time to fix player mistakes more than those who tunnel DPS. No one's perfect and people make mistakes - healers just need to rectify those mistakes.

...yes even those annoying players who don't seem to learn from their mistakes after the tenth time. But that's another topic of discussion! (please don't be one of those players, lol)

[Belgianbeer]

...yes even those annoying players who don't seem to learn from their mistakes after the tenth time. But that's another topic of discussion! (please don't be one of those players, lol)

The funny thing is, I take a party of noobs over a party of overgeared veterans anytime. People messing up is the only unexpected thing that can happen to you as a healer and a bit of chaos and ameliorating player mistakes is what fulfills that healer fantasy the most for me.

[Jonnycbad]

Honestly, there's very little excuse to not deal DPS as a healer during content. Pre-Stormblood, I would have said DPS at your own peril because you needed to worry, as a healer, things like Cleric Stance dancing (used to be a toggled oGCD that switched your MND/INT stats, so while in Cleric Stance, your heals were dramatically weaker while your DPS spells were as strong as they are now), Accuracy (you needed a huge amount of this to "hit" with your spells in hard content. Now, they changed the stats for DPS spells to use Mind, and removed the accuracy stat. Now, a healer can DPS without using Cleric Stance or worrying about their spells missing. There's literally no excuse to not DPS. If everyone is >80% HP and has regens on them and there's no AoE attack incoming for a while, why not cast damage spells to help the boss die faster or to end a phase sooner?

[Erakir]

The funny thing is, I take a party of noobs over a party of overgeared veterans anytime. People messing up is the only unexpected thing that can happen to you as a healer and a bit of chaos and ameliorating player mistakes is what fulfills that healer fantasy the most for me.

I mean, it's the same thing that gets me going - carrying groups that should have wiped 4 minutes ago and pulling through to a clear is one of the biggest things I enjoy about healing in general - despite that in XIV when that happens usually the group thinks you're a terrible healer because people were dying and they have no idea that 6 people all had 4 stacks of vulnerability. I can't do anything more than top you off and maybe Benison you before a tankbuster, tank. The rest is up to you.

But what people say is just generally true. ABC, always be casting. The damage structure vs the strength of our heals and our general MP economy means that once you're in a group with people used to the content - not veterans/raiders, just used to the content - you're going to find yourself with lots of downtime outside of healing and FFXIV has decided against giving us filler utility spells.

Even ASTs have been changed such that their time spent managing cards doesn't interfere as much with their normal GCD so they can just keep churning out those casts - which translates to damage since we've got nothing else to do unless things are going wrong.

It's not my preferred healing system but it's what we got, so if you have any desire to optimize or play 'well' you'll find yourself DPSing more and more. There's a few fights in normal content that have a higher healing requirement so common little screwups mean you are doing more of that triage non-stop healing, but I'd call them the exception and not the norm.

[Ghishlain]

The funny thing is, I take a party of noobs over a party of overgeared veterans anytime. People messing up is the only unexpected thing that can happen to you as a healer and a bit of chaos and ameliorating player mistakes is what fulfills that healer fantasy the most for me.

Oh, I agree and I enjoy it too. It's fun to carry had and it's why I play healers - it's the lynch pin for the entire group and I know when push comes to shove, I can carry that group.

It just gets really annoying when you're on the third attempt at O12N and the same 2-3 people die to the opening Program Alpha (not even the stack part, just the resultant AoE after the initial targeted AoE drop).

[Jonnycbad]

I mean, in previous FF games when your characters are full on HP and buffed, what do your healers do? You either cast a Holy spell, tried to melee (lol)....skipped their turn. In FFXIV you can either over-cure (waste of MP), throw out damage to end the fight sooner, or stand there and wait for someone's HP to drop below 80%.

[MoroMurasaki]

Healer DPS is entirely mandatory and non-negotiable in all content, unfortunately. Once you get more experience, though, you’ll realise not only that ‘healing’ isn’t really a thing in XIV, but that healers are all specifically designed with the intention of maximising their DPS.


The entirety of your healing can and should come from oGCD healing. You can pretty safely remove Cure / Physick / Benefic from your hotbar if you really wanted. Which means that you have a ton of time where you’re not using your GCD (and thus not doing anything).
And because support spells are too hard to implement or whatever excuse they have, literally the only option you have is DPS or nothing.

You will never be considered a ‘good healer’ unless you do high DPS. Most people would rather have a high DPS low heal healer than one with good healing but low DPS; they’d also agree that healers are better to let DPS die than interrupt their own rotation. The main reason I don’t main a Scholar is because spamming Broil II and DoTs is mind-melting levels of boring.

In my honest opinion it’s an awful system that’s perverts if what healers actually are; you either heal too much and do too little DPS or you aren’t healing enough to satisfy your party members.. But in future, if you really want to do well you pretty much have to accept that you are not a true healer. You’r3 a DPS with healing spells, or a support that deals damage while providing some healing, whatever you want to think. But you’re not a ‘healer’ in the traditional sense of the word. If you tried to play as a true healer and didn’t focus on DPS, there’s a good chance, you’ll be considered a pretty bad healer by many people’s standards.

Personally, I don’t care about a healer’s DPS unless the party has take no/negligible damage for an extended period. Even if they’re just using Cure or whatever to keep the tank topped off, I’d rather have a healer that heals too much than one that just does DPS. Some won’t be as forgiving, however.

A lot of it really is to do with how you want others to perceive you. Do you want to be seen as a good’ healer by XIV standards? Maybe you’re happy as long as is everyone is healed and aren’t bothered by how high your damage is as a healer. My advice is that I personally don’t think it’s a problem if a healer focuses too much on healing. As long as they aren’t using it as an excuse to go afk

I was 99% sure this was a really long, funny joke until I skimmed the rest of this thread.

Don't worry OP, this is like nearly all meme even if it wasn't intended this way. You'll find time to do more dps as you get more comfortable with your abilities and gear up.

Your damage per second points on those contents have to be equal or higher than your heals per second points. If it is not, change role.

I assume you've never healed Savage?