What the term "healer" means to me

[Deathroes]

The thing about being a healer and the responsibility of keeping the team alive is ultimately that it's a pass-or-fail responsibility. Either your team survived and cleared or they didn't. This doesn't necessarily mean that when you fail, it's all your fault. That's something that's more about mechanics, but it is your fault when your team fails because you couldn't heal the tank in time, or some similar example.

What it does mean is that there's no real way to really separate the bad healers from the good healers from the great healers on healing alone. Heal parsing isn't a thing because there's a hard limit to how much you can heal.

So what does actually establish which healers are bad, which are good, and which are great is definite largely but what else they can do on top of keeping the team alive. Basically, it means being a good healer by doing nothing but keeping the team alive is the bare minimum of what you are expected to do. It's a lot like a job in the real world.

If you're hired as a cashier in a cafe, your responsibility is to manage the cash register at whatever store and assist customers with their purchases. If you do that and only that, you're doing your job. But if there's no one currently purchasing something, what's stopping you from wiping down a table, sweeping a floor, cleaning the bathroom, or wiping some windows? Sure, you weren't hired as the janitor, but that doesn't mean you're incapable of optimizing your time. This doesn't mean go wipe the windows while people are waiting in line to order of course. Your responsibility is first and foremost running that cash register after all. But there's a big difference between Susan who sits at the cash register on her phone when no one's in line, and Bethany who's on her knees cleaning the wall tiles with a scrubber. If you were a business owner, wouldn't you prefer to hire Bethany?

Same is true for Bethany who mains White Mage and finds every opportunity to weave in Glares and Dias where Susan stands there, vacant for 5 seconds before the next raid wide AoE.

This doesn't mean that Susan is necessarily a bad healer if she can keep the team alive, but she's not a great healer--i.e. she's not optimizing her time the best that she can. When it's Susan being lazy, and not doing it even though she can be, then we just don't like Susan and kick her from our static. If Susan is just overwhelmed because she's new to healing, her ilvl is low, or she's learning the fight, then we can understand her plight and work with her as she gets better to hopefully evolve into Bethany.

The comparison with only doing the bare minimum in a real life job is spot on. It fits the discussion so well.

[Deathroes]

Try clearing E4s without healers doing DPS, unless your dps and tanks are God tier levels, you will hit enraged every single time. Healer dps matters, not to say that's justification for harassment or for kicking people still learning the fight.

Wait, sorry I am still new to FF14, is not anything above a normal raid(like savage) progression raiding? I had thought it was. But yeah like I have said in my post, if the encounter is passed then nothing else matters...unless it was explicitly stated that it had to be done in so and so time. If it wasn't then that is just someone moving the goalpost.

If the healer not doing dps causes a group to fall to enrage then yes, it is a problem. Or it could be the dps doing a lackluster job, who knows. I am under the impression a healer SHOULD be doing "ABC" but would not hound someone who does not subscribe to that ideology...until we start failing encounters.

[Deathroes]

Do you also think that people have no right to complain about tanks and DDs who only use one ability per minute - as long as the content is cleared - or do you only apply this standard to healers?


As long as there are fights which are literally unbeatable even with perfectly optimised DDs and tanks with zero DPS healers, it doesn't matter what Yoshi P says when it's clearly not how the game works.

Well hold on, lets not get too hasty here. Of course I am not advocating for acceptance for people who, through their lack of even trying to do their role optimally, makes the encounter last 100% or 300% longer. Of course not dude, let's not go to extremes(not the difficulty lol) here please? If the dungeons or raids or what have you takes a bit longer to complete because of someone not playing optimally, then does it really matter all that much? This is the internet after all, you can't expect everyone to be MLG pro with their gaming skills. It is the nature of the beast.

As for Yoshi P.'s statement, I'll take your word for it. As of now I have no personal experience with endgame design, but from what I read on these forums what you say is true. We are talking about normal difficulty right?

[Sebazy]

If the healer not doing dps causes a group to fall to enrage then yes, it is a problem. Or it could be the dps doing a lackluster job, who knows. I am under the impression a healer SHOULD be doing "ABC" but would not hound someone who does not subscribe to that ideology...until we start failing encounters.

Look at it this way.

Watch any current Titan Savage clear video on youtube. If you're a DPS with a week 1 E4S clear, you're not going to be lacklustre. It's a safe assumption that the healers are doing somewhere around 10-15% of the groups total combined DPS right now in these clears, this is verifiable with a quick browse through various logs.

If we use DRG as a reference point, the middle ground is about 12.5k, whereas the current record is 13.7k. As the tier progresses, people gear up and more groups get clears, this gap will widen but even so. That's still a pretty small gain from putting a ton of pressure on one of your DPS.

Do you know what else gains ~1.2k dps? Simply asking a non DPSing healer to maintain their dot on the boss. Without throwing a single Glare/Stone/Whatever, a healer can generate as much extra damage for the group with a single button press as it'd take that DRG going from top tier to literal world class.

Think about that for a moment next time you wade in blaming it all on the DPS.

As for Yoshi P.'s statement, I'll take your word for it. As of now I have no personal experience with endgame design, but from what I read on these forums what you say is true. We are talking about normal difficulty right?

Most discussions relating to this stuff will be referring to Savage. Normal modes and dungeons rarely have any form of enrage so yes, it really doesn't matter beyond the annoyance of wasting people's time.

I will note though, don't underestimate how much time a non DPSing healer can actually cost a group in casual content.

As an example. In a 14:33 run in the Twinning dungeon I still managed to contribute around 20% the groups overall damage as healer without taking liberties or playing it particularly risky. Had I not DPSed at all, that would have added a little shy of 3 minutes to the total run length. That's alongside people with multiple world firsts to their name. Throw in more typical DF DPS and it gets a whole lot worse.

[Deathroes]

Look at it this way.

Watch any current Titan Savage clear video on youtube. If you're a DPS with a week 1 E4S clear, you're not going to be lacklustre. It's a safe assumption that the healers are doing somewhere around 10-15% of the groups total combined DPS right now in these clears, this is verifiable with a quick browse through various logs.

If we use DRG as a reference point, the middle ground is about 12.5k, whereas the current record is 13.7k. As the tier progresses, people gear up and more groups get clears, this gap will widen but even so. That's still a pretty small gain from putting a ton of pressure on one of your DPS.

Do you know what else gains ~1.2k dps? Simply asking a non DPSing healer to maintain their dot on the boss. Without throwing a single Glare/Stone/Whatever, a healer can generate as much extra damage for the group with a single button press as it'd take that DRG going from top tier to literal world class.

Think about that for a moment next time you wade in blaming it all on the DPS.

Hence my "who knows" at the end of that sentence lmao. I didnt claim it was defintely the fault of the dps that a boss enraged and caused a wipe, merely it was a possibilty. I am not omniscient, I don't know what goes on in every single raid encounter that ever happened, and neither do you. At the end of the day, everyone is different in terms of skills.

I am mostly basing my assumptions on Yoshi P. saying that healer dps is not taken into account when designing an encounter. But hey, if his teams' choices do not corroborate his statement, then yeah healers need to dps.

Also let me just make my stance clear. I think healers should always be dpsing if everyone is healthy, not overhealing, not standing around, not just being a waste of a party slot. Yes, a healer that dpses is the easiest way to make up for any damage discrepancies between a top tier dps and a world class one, I agree. I am just trying to be in the middle of the "healer dpsing debate", but I stray waaaaaaay over to the dps side.

[Sebazy]

I am mostly basing my assumptions on Yoshi P. saying that healer dps is not taken into account when designing an encounter. But hey, if his teams' choices do not corroborate his statement, then yeah healers need to dps.

The biggest problem with going from Yoshi statements (tm) is that they are usually taken in far to literal a manner. The context and sidenotes get buried and people quickly view it as a black and white, right or wrong argument. The reality isn't anything like that and even Yoshida himself acknowledges this in some of his interviews. It's just that when people use that statement to try and back their views on this topic. They typically don't show that part of the quote

The actual reality is much more nuanced than these forums would often like to admit.

[Deathroes]

The biggest problem with going from Yoshi statements (tm) is that they are usually taken in far to literal a manner. The context and sidenotes get buried and people quickly view it as a black and white, right or wrong argument. The reality isn't anything like that and even Yoshida himself acknowledges this in some of his interviews. It's just that when people use that statement to try and back their views on this topic. They typically don't show that part of the quote

The actual reality is much more nuanced than these forums would often like to admit.

Ahh, I see, good to know! I have not personslly experienced the endgame since I just recently moved from WoW, so my perspectives mostly come from forum posts and early game gameplay hehe.

[miraidensetsu]

Some people will say "healers should use their whole kit to protect their team", while some people will say "bu- but don't forget to prioritize the healing aspect of your toolkit guys ! A dead dps is a dps loss for the team ^^".

It's like a giant echo chamber of obviousness.

Well, unfortunately I saw too many healers who refuses themselves to heal or just count their single-target heals just to DPS more that I feel that this is worth a recall. I lost the count of how many times I ended up solo healing some fight because of that mindset. And that's why I said that I would prefer a RDM than a co-healer with that mentality.

It's obvious, but not everyone can see that obviousness. Specially when they extend the "You should DPS until you need to heal" to "You should DPS until you had no other option but heal". Yes, those healers who complains about having to heal, the exact oposite of those 0 DPS healer. I call them the 0 HPS healer, that tries to do the least amount of HPS possible, not by optimizing his heals to widen the DPS windows, but simply not pressing the heal buttons when needed, forcing his co-healer to solo heal the fight (or just wipe due to lack of heals).

[Sebazy]

Well, unfortunately I saw too many healers who refuses themselves to heal or just count their single-target heals just to DPS more that I feel that this is worth a recall. I lost the count of how many times I ended up solo healing some fight because of that mindset. And that's why I said that I would prefer a RDM than a co-healer with that mentality.

Out of curiosity, how do you gauge if your co healer is not helping you heal?

[Billythepancake]

Out of curiosity, how do you gauge if your co healer is not helping you heal?

It's pretty easy to tell, tbh. I've had ASTs that use their star, the best AoE heal in the game, purely for the damage. Essentially if you're not seeing hp go up after you use your heal, and you don't see a cast happening, it means they're not using their oGCD or GCD heals.