The Healer Double Standard

[Kabooa]

Kabooa doesn’t really have anything constructive to add to this thread. I’d recommend just ignoring them.

Have you read this thread?

Almost none of it is constructive.

[ty_taurus]

How about:

Healing has been and always will be 100% optional in Final Fantasy XIV. Naturally, Raid content also always has and always will provide moments of reprieve, allowing players who are newer to content or are less skilled overall to catch their breath and regain control of the battle while simultaneously providing more skilled and experienced players opportunities to contribute personal damage in an effort to go above and beyond what's expected of them.

That being said, a party leader is completely allowed to set their expectations of their party members, whether they require healers in their party DPS or that casters must be SMN/RDM to carry raise spells. Do you find that unreasonable? That's your right, and you have the freedom to find a leader who will have less rigid restrictions, or create a new party with the rules that you see fit.

This is a fair environment where people are allowed to chose what's right for them.

What isn't fair is neutering healer DPS to simply the role when said DPS was never a requirement in the first place. Players should be rewarded when the push themselves to do more than the bare minimum with a small-but-engaging handful of healer DPS tools rather than be discouraged from even trying by consciously making healer DPS as mind-numbingly boring as possible. It does nothing to change the perspective of Healers who don't want to DPS, or are still new and uncomfortable with doing so, while punishing the players who enjoyed dancing between healing and damaging.

[Deceptus]

From recent Dengeki Interview regarding dungeons:

Instanced dungeons

With regards to Instanced dungeons, they have shifted from "how should they strategize" to "How can we make it enjoyable for the players".

So this new damage model is supposed to be fun folks. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...w_with_yoship/

[Yuyuka3]

From recent Dengeki Interview regarding dungeons:



So this new damage model is supposed to be fun folks. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...w_with_yoship/

Know what also has me concerned in that interview?

The difficulty of the Eden raid will be close to that of the creator (Alexander floors 9~12). They expect players to not be used to the lv 80 jobs, so the required DPS will be lower than usual. Instead, the mechanics will be fancy and might make up for the lowered DPS checks to bring it back up to the usual difficulty.

Yeah. Better hope those mechanics really are making up for it, though I got my doubts...

[Bahati]

There's no point in debating healers who like to push DPS vs healers who prefer to focus on healing. It's evenly split in this regard.

The bottom line is we are playing FFXIV and the healer role is intended by the team who makes this game to focus on healing with some scant DPS skills tossed in. As we can see from the upcoming expansion and decisions made for healing classes, that is still the case.

If anyone is playing the role wrong, it's healers who think pushing their minut DPS is a priority. RDM might be a better fit for this type of player rather than complaining about a role designed in a way they don't like. It is what it is.

[Ilenya]

If anyone is playing the role wrong, it's healers who think pushing their minut DPS is a priority. RDM might be a better fit for this type of player rather than complaining about a role designed in a way they don't like. It is what it is.

There are people who have no issues healing, but prefer not to be sitting around on our hands waiting for enough damage to be taken to justify a heal. The fact that SE seems incapable of making healing exciting (The closest we have to a healer combo is the Cure procs, and are those even in anymore?) and unwilling to make healer DPS exciting (See - Everything that has been mentioned). The fact that WHM actually has a DPS skill that builds off heals seems like a step in the right direction, but it came at the cost of the other two healers losing so much and not really getting a lot back of value for it in regards to interesting options for downtime.

[Atlantasia]

There's no point in debating healers who like to push DPS vs healers who prefer to focus on healing. It's evenly split in this regard.

The bottom line is we are playing FFXIV and the healer role is intended by the team who makes this game to focus on healing with some scant DPS skills tossed in. As we can see from the upcoming expansion and decisions made for healing classes, that is still the case.

If anyone is playing the role wrong, it's healers who think pushing their minut DPS is a priority. RDM might be a better fit for this type of player rather than complaining about a role designed in a way they don't like. It is what it is.

It's not the DPS that is why people are not happy with the changes. It's the lack of engaging downtime in a game that gives healers more downtime than they know what to do with. That's not going to change in Shadowbringers much if at all is the problem. People want engaging classes and if that means healing constantly in a way that's interesting, then most of this "DPS camp" that you've divided people into would be fine healing more. The bottom line is that they will likely never make the healing aspect more challenging or time consuming in a significant way.

So then it becomes a question of how is that downtime going to be spent? Well, in a game that prioritizes DPS and the more DPS you have the less healing is needed and the quicker you clear, then DPS is going to end up the focus of that downtime more than anything else either through pDPS or rDPS. When you neuter what few abilities healers already had to take up this time, it reduces the enjoyment of these classes for anyone who wants to optimize their play style, which efficient use of downtime in a fight is optimizing play.

It's really not about DPS versus Heals, it's about downtime and making that engaging because there's so much downtime in these fights. And with the level 73 dungeon, and the Titania fight, so far nothing has really shown that the current levels of healing required is changing much if at all in Shadowbringers.

I love healers, I've played them in every MMO I've ever played, and I've played ones where they were mostly pure healer with the occasional damage spell or support spell. I like healing in engaging content, this game's healing is not engaging, because once people are healed, there's nothing to do but contribute in some way to the party DPS or you're just being lazy by sitting around doing nothing. Use of downtime and balancing DPS juxtaposed to Healing has become the way people have made healing more engaging. Which is why people are upset.

[Gaethan_Tessula]

The bottom line is we are playing FFXIV and the healer role is intended by the team who makes this game to focus on healing with some scant DPS skills tossed in. As we can see from the upcoming expansion and decisions made for healing classes, that is still the case.

If that's their intent, I sure wish they designed fights to actually fulfill that intent. The hardest content in this game has healing uptime less than 50% of the time. All other content has even less. That means short of durdling around doing nothing at all, we're throwing rocks more often than we heal in every fight ever made for FF14. If it's going to be that way, it's not too much to ask that throwing those rocks be made interesting.

If anyone is playing the role wrong, it's healers who think pushing their minute DPS is a priority. RDM might be a better fit for this type of player rather than complaining about a role designed in a way they don't like. It is what it is.

Both healers DPS'ing just about equals an additional DPS in most fights. That's not "minute." In AoE situations the impact of healer DPS is even larger.

As someone who plays RDM and has been utterly disappointed by its lack of healing and support options, how it's essentially BLM lite with a raise, I can guarentee you RDM is not going to do it for people who want to switch hit healing and damage dealing.

And that's you making a big assumption about what people actually want. A lot of us would be happy if the game actually required more and more complicated healer playlines. But because it doesn't, and Square Enix doesn't even seem to realize that it doesn't and therefore doesn't change it, we're asking for the job to remain engaging even if that need be through DPS or support abilities.

A DoT, a rock, and nothing to actually heal makes Gaethan a dull boy.

[Yuyuka3]

There's no point in debating healers who like to push DPS vs healers who prefer to focus on healing. It's evenly split in this regard.

The bottom line is we are playing FFXIV and the healer role is intended by the team who makes this game to focus on healing with some scant DPS skills tossed in. As we can see from the upcoming expansion and decisions made for healing classes, that is still the case.

If anyone is playing the role wrong, it's healers who think pushing their minut DPS is a priority. RDM might be a better fit for this type of player rather than complaining about a role designed in a way they don't like. It is what it is.

lol.
Are you serious? First of, what am I supposed to do when nobody needs heeling, standing around with my thumb up my ass? Watching Netflix? Sorry, I'll rather quit playing and do something more interesting with my time, thank you very much. And it's not like I love DPSing so much; I would gladly spam heals exclusively if the situation afforded it. Sadly, unless goes horribly, horribly wrong, that's never the case. So, without any other way to support my party, what, in your eyes, am I supposed to with my time?

Also, anyone thinking healer DPS contribution is so little it doesn't matter must be drunk or high. Last time I healed Savage, my co-healer and I combined dealt more damage than the weakest DPS (who was, granted, new to the fight and undergeared; still 14% damage contribution is nothing to scoff at and we would still have dealt DPS-level damage together had he been level with everyone else). Any healer duo worth their money can pull that off, so saying healer DPS doesn't matter is laughably short-sighted and implies a pretty deep lack of understanding of how the game works.

There are people who have no issues healing, but prefer not to be sitting around on our hands waiting for enough damage to be taken to justify a heal. The fact that SE seems incapable of making healing exciting (The closest we have to a healer combo is the Cure procs, and are those even in anymore?) and unwilling to make healer DPS exciting (See - Everything that has been mentioned). The fact that WHM actually has a DPS skill that builds off heals seems like a step in the right direction, but it came at the cost of the other two healers losing so much and not really getting a lot back of value for it in regards to interesting options for downtime.

Cure procs still, nominally, exist... but what WHM with a shred of self-esteem ever sees one? Maybe one who had to raise so many people he ran OOM, and could cast nothing but Cure I... and even then, I personally prefer to DPS.

[Kuurei]

If you're not healing, cure dots.

If there's no dots to be cured, check if people need healing.

If there's still no healing needed, press the dps buttons you have.

White mage has literally not changed from this in any regard. Nor have the other two healers. Yes, we lost some support abilities. Yes, we lost a few field control techniques.

No, we are not completely useless if not healing. We're just most likely not capable of pulling 20% ahead of the second or third best dps in a party anymore, either.