The reason we healers DPS

[PondHollow]

People are overreacting to the DPS loss for 5.0. It won't be that big, and people will still expect you to DPS as a healer. If you don't want to do both, then you might to play anything other than healer.

Pre-release complaints about Stormblood turned out to be very accurate, and what you're missing is that more than half the time we will likely be pressing one button. Think of it like this: running Sastasha as a Scholar is boring because it almost entirely consists of casting Ruin. Everything from level 1 to 70 is going to be like that, and it's unlikely Shadowbringers will be any different without making it unclearable for a lot of less skilled people or new healers.

[Urthdigger]

I guess if you really have to use that lily heal enough you get... something back... but... I dunno it seems rather meh to me. Not sure if I'm missing something or what. Everyone seems convinced it is the most epic ability ever.

I notice a lot of people are under the false impression that because it doesn't cost MP it's an oGCD ability and not a GCD spell. Unfortunately, it does cost a GCD which really hampers its usability. That said... if they DID make it an oGCD, that'd be one of the best healing abilities ever. Between that and Divine Benison I imagine WHM would have no problem keeping parties up on oGCDs alone, and would have Misery on top of that.

[Brightamethyst]

I think you're missing the point of the complaints. Healers don't care how much they dps. Or what their dps numbers are (other than relative to each other). What healers do care about is that healing downtime is about ~70% of their time for ultimate and closer to 90% for the rest of the encounters. That's a lot of time to be spamming one or two buttons, and subsequently a lot of time not having fun.
Healers like WHM have been asking for a bit more variety and options for their downtime. Instead they're still in the exact same situation but SCH was brought down to their level. Healers aren't even asking for a full dps rotation or anything, just by the twelve give us more than 2 buttons to press.

Exactly. Healers don't want more DPS options for sake of big numbers. They want them because the alternative is pressing one button over and over for 80% of any given dungeon or trial. Healing is so strong and damage is so predictable that there's literally no need for healing most of the time. For the vast majority of any dungeon the only options are DPS, or stand around doing literally nothing.

Is there a bit of a knee-jerk reaction? Sure. But keep in mind SE has a history of making what I can only refer to as "mind boggling" healer changes over the past few years. Things like Lilies that every healer in the forum only had to take a glance at to figure out would be useless, and the first iteration of PI? youch. Etc. etc. These aren't just simple mess-ups. They're "I don't really play healer much" levels of screw ups. We've been rightfully concerned.

Again, this.

Are we being unfair by prejudging things we haven't personally tried? Maybe a little, but considering how badly SE has screwed up healers in the past (and how reluctant they are to fix even obviously broken things) we have every right to be concerned by these changes. I can only assume that no one on the dev team has ever actually played a healer before, because I can't imagine any other scenario that leads to these changes.

I hope we're all wrong. I really do. Unfortunately, there's a very good chance that a few weeks for now the expansion will go live and prove all the pissed off healers right (at which point nothing will change for months, or even years, because SE.)

[Misutoraru]

Personally I don't enjoy having to dps as a healer, and very much prefer spending most of my time just healing, with dps being optional. That's just more fun for me.

That said I recognize that that has never been the style of healing in this game, which is why I almost never play healers in FF. So I totally get why so many healers are upset, but I can't say I am. I might actually give AST and SCH another shot actually...

I would prefer intense healing over large down time to dps. If I want do more dps I play a dps.
The dps skill reduction isn’t much an issue for me as I play AST way more than other 2 and SCH being my least play. My issue is more about AST cars change due to the DPS obsession and with the simplicity of new dps skill in healing role, the healing part isn’t clear if it will be more intensed

[Nedkel]

And this is what coming in the 5.0 changes encounters will be more challenging and you will have to heal more, at least in dungeons.

[Misutoraru]

And this is what coming in the 5.0 changes encounters will be more challenging and you will have to heal more, at least in dungeons.

What I am worrying is the generous item sync, like now many of us running in full gear of il400 or even il405, The Ghimlyt Dark suppose to be the hardest dungeon we have in SB, if it drop il375, dev can at least lower the item sync to near the drop of each dungeon so it feel less brain dead. I can just drop a regen and forget even just running with il370 AST, I can’t do it when the vault and bardam mettle in their first release

[CorbinDallas]

What I am worrying is the generous item sync, like now many of us running in full gear of il400 or even il405, The Ghimlyt Dark suppose to be the hardest dungeon we have in SB, if it drop il375, dev can at least lower the item sync to near the drop of each dungeon so it feel less brain dead. I can just drop a regen and forget even just running with il370 AST, I can’t do it when the vault and bardam mettle in their first release

They do that and anything higher ilvl is literally pointless

[Reiryuu]

And this is what coming in the 5.0 changes encounters will be more challenging and you will have to heal more, at least in dungeons.

I call BS.

1) Challenging does not immediately equate to "more healing" and "more healing" does not equate to "challenging." Many of the Stormblood encounters have some stupid mechanic that drops your HP to 1 forces you to heal up and may even throw in a doom effect if you don't top people off fast enough. That is NOT challenging. It's not even much fun Spam 2-3 AoE heals and you and your partner got it down. Heck a WHM can do all the healing by themselves if needed.

2) Time limits. You will still have time limits on trials and boss fights in raids. More healing = less damage = taking more time to complete. If there is so much healing going on, you're going to see a lot more people having trouble getting past the time limit which means they are going to be even more picky about what DPS contribution they can bring to the table. Sure, maybe tank and DPS damage is going up. But why can't healers contribute something even if it's just a buff why do we get 1 DoT and 1 Direct Damage spell in our whole kit and enough heals to smother us?

3) Speaking of dungeons and time... I'm willing to bet there's going to be a HUGE stink once people get to end of content and are farming tomestones only to find that it takes significantly longer to go through a dungeon because the healers have to heal so much and can't DPS like they used to. Tanks not being able to pull wall to wall? I can hear the screams of the speed runners now. DPS queue times going up not because there are not tanks or healers but simply because it's tanking longer to complete each dungeon. Personally, I wouldn't mind that. But I know several people on some of the other servers I have been on that would just agonize over taking even 1-2 minutes more. HELL wasn't that one of the reasons people complained about Stoneskin? F-that I don't wanna wait 3 seconds for stoneskin. Hell they're even saying that about Protect.

4) Why can't healers have more engaging mechanics to heal with? DPS and tanks have their combos. RDM has an awesome system of their black and white mana... healers have... well... yeah... AST cards were a lot of fun. Make AST heals HoTs or time-release heals to let them have the time to manage their cards while the healing is taking effect, and you've got something far more engaging than the hogwash they spat out in 5.0. I'll be honest that I'm not sure what they could do to scholar and the fairy-- I was never fond of the pet for healing so I can't think of any nice ways it could be used... but maybe something like they did with the summoners? The whm lilies being automatic now are just... meh^3. They were always meh and always will be meh. WHM needs a fun and engaging mechanic and they need to stop feeding it skills they took away because they can't be bothered to come up with unique skills and abilities for it. There were a crapload of suggestions in the Ye Olde Thread of Salty White Mages(R)(TM) back in 4.0 and in 5.0 we ended up getting 3 different themed games of an electric Simon Says game.

[Connor]

I feel like everyone in this thread is maybe forgetting the most consistent part of the dev team: if people complain, it will disappear (or reappear lol). Cast times on Bard, adding Miasma II, when they added Stoneskin II (just to remove it lol), Excogitation, Lillies, are all examples I can think from the top of my head where the devs changed things purely in response to people’s reception and feedback on found etc, even when the devs themselves probably didn’t see issues.

Healers are not dead, DPS healing is not dead, purely for the reason that so many people don’t want DPS healing to die.

I cannot think of a single issue where the developers have maintained their stance purely because of their ‘vision’ for the game. Ever. (Obviously I might be wholly wrong, I don’t exactly have evidence to back up my hyperbole lol). But I genuinely do not believe that the developers will make healers just heal because that’s what they’re supposed to.

The developers will make healers do whatever the community wants them to do, and clearly (unfortunately) that means high DPS capabilities, no GCD healing, making minimisation of all healing a necessity, and let’s not forget infinite MP.

Anyway, my point is that I feel like we’re kinda starting to make a fuss and argue over just nothing now lol. Once Shadowbringers releases and it’s revealed they’ve added back all the removed healer DPS abilities, everyone will wonder what the big deal was in the first place

[sauc]

They just need to design bosses so there's a constant flow of damage going out at all times wether its people getting randomly targetted by hard hitting long duration dots or bosses dealing heavy damage from their autoswings or instant attacks/ aoes that happen with no cast time or yellow ground targets. Mp regen might need to get adjusted for that but right now healers (and tanks) are just dps lite. high end fcs judge healers by how much dps they put out instead of how well they keep people alive and how efficiently they do it and that seems wrong.

Right now everything happens predictably exactly at X seconds or a long cast bar like akhmorn or tank busters, it's conmpletely normal to leave people low hp and just keep dpsing since you know with certainty nothing is going to happen anytime soon.

I think it would be more fun constantly juggling hp than spamming weak malefics 90% of the time but that's just me.