The Healer Double Standard

[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.

[Bahati]

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.



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.

You can play a more active role if you don't find healing engaging. You can do whatever you want with your free time but the healer classes aren't designed around your personal preferance. Sorry about it.

Rather than complain perhaps play a DPS if you need to be actively doing something all the time. Also, if you've read my comments I'm vocalizing people tend to pick up a healing class to heal and there's nothing wrong with that. It's not required they DPS it's not like it's against a rule or a reportable offense. It's perfectly fine to have opposing opinions and debates. It just so happens the "heal happy" type of healer had SE backing and the DPS obsessed are not set up got success currently.

[Reiryuu]

You can play a more active role if you don't find healing engaging. You can do whatever you want with your free time but the healer classes aren't designed around your personal preferance. Sorry about it.

Rather than complain perhaps play a DPS if you need to be actively doing something all the time. Also, if you've read my comments I'm vocalizing people tend to pick up a healing class to heal and there's nothing wrong with that. It's not required they DPS it's not like it's against a rule or a reportable offense. It's perfectly fine to have opposing opinions and debates. It just so happens the "heal happy" type of healer had SE backing and the DPS obsessed are not set up got success currently.

And yet, the trust NPC healers... *gasp* cast damaging spells in dungeons when shown in the live letter with Yoshida. What an odd thing for the developers to program them to do if they weren't designed to do so...

[Yuyuka3]

You can play a more active role if you don't find healing engaging. You can do whatever you want with your free time but the healer classes aren't designed around your personal preferance. Sorry about it.

Rather than complain perhaps play a DPS if you need to be actively doing something all the time. Also, if you've read my comments I'm vocalizing people tend to pick up a healing class to heal and there's nothing wrong with that. It's not required they DPS it's not like it's against a rule or a reportable offense. It's perfectly fine to have opposing opinions and debates. It just so happens the "heal happy" type of healer had SE backing and the DPS obsessed are not set up got success currently.

In other words, your answer is "just stand around with your thumb up your a** and look pretty.
If that is fun to you, great, it sounds boring like hell to me to wait for 30 seconds to cast my next, damn heal, and I honestly cannot see how anyone could find that engaging and fun. It would be different if the game actually demanded you to heal, but it doesn’t, and so here we are. Btw, no, I’ll never main a DPS. I’ve been dependent on other people’s whims far too long; I’ll not go back into that place, especially not in a game I play to try forget the outside world. This is the same reason why I don’t tank all that much, I just don’t feel save when somebody else has my live in their hands.

Your claims also heavily contradict what Conjurers are told in early game play by NPCs, and what the aesop of that entire questline is about. To refresh your mind since you seem to have forgotten, in that questline, not only are we, from level 1 onward, repeatedly told that conjury is far more than only healing, and that our damage skills also play a big part in the job; but the NPC Sylphie is very adamant about not doing anything at all besides healing, and needs to be shown the error of her ways by you. We don't have anything but healing and DPS spells as WHM, so the only thing we can really do outside of healing is, oh! DPS! Btw, diminishing our options won't stop us from DPSing, you better get that idea out of your head real quick. It just makes healing far, FAR more boring. Also, I'll let a friend of mine touch on where your "if you want to be active, play DPS" leads to in the logical conclusion, if people actually follow your "advice".

And jfc, it even contradicts how they programmed their very Trust Companions! Did you watch the liveletter last night? ANYONE who still claims they want healers to just heal when their very own NPC healer companions do engage in DPS for a significant portion of the fights needs to get their heads checked up, since there's clearly something wrong up there. Yes, that includes the devs themselves since they don’t even stick to what they want people to do themselves!

Also, I talked about this to a friend of mine earlier, showed him our conversation. This is what he had to say about all this:

That person setting themselves up on a logical slope where they can say the healer class can be removed from the game.
>healers aren't intended for DPS
>healers progressively lose abilities to bring them in line with that
>healers are bored waiting for someone to get hurt enough to heal
>healers don't want to play a game where they're doing nothing
>players either stop or ditch healers for DPS classes
>few healers remain >SE sees interest going to DPS but drop in healers
>SE acts accordingly, allows DPS to have greater healing ability

Do you see where this person is going? They don't realize it but their awful rhetoric is setting up that slope argument
All because they pretend to know what the devs think and intend
You're arguing with someone basing their arguments on assumptions and lack of knowledge
Yeah, that person needs to understand that what they're talking about leads to FFXIV getting a big overhaul. Now I don't how GW2 works, I've never played, but I know how companies work. SE, at the end of the day, needs to get more and more players online and subscribing. I think at this junction, all the FF fans who would play 14 are already playing it. SE needs to look at making new fans. Inevitably, that means dipping into mass appeal based on what other popular, medieval fantasy themed MMOs are doing, and that's WoW, GW2, and ESO, Elder Scrolls Online. And ESO is still an Elder Scrolls game and the crux of those is living out a power fantasy, you absolutely can solo everything in ESO because that's part of the Elder Scrolls gameplay design since Arena in 1995. That person doesn't understand the rhetorical path their on leads to SE making sweeping changes to FFXIV, all because they didn't want to hear someone else's grievances
By saying "if you don't like how healers are supposed to play, then go DPS", that person is tossing aside a large percentage of the FFXIV player base and telling them to do something else that they don't want to, and it turns out this is important in an RPG, role play as
Sure, you can always go DPS. Lots of people would. Most people would. Because most people don't like sitting around and waiting until someone needs a heal
That's not fun. More DPS means things dying faster too, and now you've opened up a can or worms
How is that getting balanced? Are the healers going to be less useful because things will die faster than they can deal damage? Will a dearth of healers lead to SE changing DPS classes to have greater self healing abilities? Will enemies need to be reworked and buffed to the point where you're just back to where you started?
Or will, going against what this person wants to think, healers be given greater DPS capacity because SE is hearing that no one wants to play a role that they're bored out of their minds with?
I saw a video where an arcanist was doing sastasha and basically playing healer for everyone with physik because the party's healer sucked. Yes, that's a bad healer. However, rightfully balanced, that shouldn't have happened. Yeah, that party should have been screwed. Balance doesn't mean everything works out hunky dory, it means everyone syncs and plays their roles harmoniously. And when you don't do it, you get screwed.
That's literally the point of an MMO. I'll say it to this person again, I almost have half a mind to make an account for this: If you want to play a game where your class can do it all and be it all, then go play Skyrim.

This friend I’m quoting here has played less than a month, yet understands more about game design and balancing and how things should work out than you do.
Oh, I would also like to mention that it's a horrible idea to chase off all the competent healers out there. Try imagine the nightmare of having your average dungeon healer in Savage or Ultimate content just because all the good ones ultimately left due to healers being dead boring to play.