I thought Yoshi wants healer to focus on healing only..

[CrimsonGunner]

Early clears require healer dps though.

Do you really think a group of highly motivated players who have mastered their respective classes almost to perfection would really want to have a lazy healer who can't be bothered to push a single button in their party?

this is an issue regarding those specific members not a job problem.
the party members can always kick those people if they believe their party members aren't helping or trying to improve but again healer dps shouldn't be mandatory to clear cause the dps who specialize in damage are there,again healer dps is in order to take pressure off the requirement from the others and help speed things up but its not a requirement for clearing.
as to why take such a healer,some of those groups are static who might know the healer,maybe they want to help him while knowing he wont dps much ,if its fine with the members there no real issue there.

*as a side note-from reading the posts and others comment, most of the healer community want more skills for during downtime to help further in parties and understand that dps during their healing downtimes will helps take the load off the other roles.
not to mention ,most of them will drop dps to keep up with the tanks and to keep them alive when they are in danger.
those players who only heal or only do dps are just those few who probably really bad at their jobs and probably became healer just to get a fast queue.

[JowyAtreides]

I mean... yes... healers should focus on healing.

That doesn't mean they shouldn't dps when there is no need to heal.

Unless of course, you just want to do nothing but heal, I'm sure that is dead engaging and will really enthrall all the healers.

In my mind, having anything more than 60% healing uptime requirements is setting a dangerous precedent. Even a death to a DPS would start causing wipes more often due to the healer needing to raise at times they're required to heal.

It would be interesting if there was someone who could analyse the number of button presses for each of their skills within an instance, followed by total cast time, followed by total time not casting. Apologies if this exists somewhere, I'm a ps4 player and not savvy to 3rd party programs that feed on game data

[FoxyAreku]

I'll never understand the people who think "healer" and "pacifist" are the same thing.

[ForteNightshade]

I mean... yes... healers should focus on healing.

That doesn't mean they shouldn't dps when there is no need to heal.

Unless of course, you just want to do nothing but heal, I'm sure that is dead engaging and will really enthrall all the healers.

In my mind, having anything more than 60% healing uptime requirements is setting a dangerous precedent. Even a death to a DPS would start causing wipes more often due to the healer needing to raise at times they're required to heal.

It would be interesting if there was someone who could analyse the number of button presses for each of their skills within an instance, followed by total cast time, followed by total time not casting. Apologies if this exists somewhere, I'm a ps4 player and not savvy to 3rd party programs that feed on game data

First and foremost, increasing healing requirements to 60-70% wouldn't have any impact on their ability to raise since there would still be downtime. Not to mention, most healers wait on Swift anyway. As for analysis and whatnot. FFlogs does this. The healers in my static spend roughly 30% of their tool casts on healing. Only accounting for GCD heals, they use less than half that. In fact, our SCH this week spent only 8% of their casts on a GCD heal.

The means far more than half their casts were used on damaging abilities, which kind of defeats the point of this supposed emphasise on healing. Keep in mind, this is at a Savage level. At any level below that, the healing is so easy, you don't even need a second healer at all.

Now that isn't to say healers shouldn't DPS. Far from it. But given how the devs keep reducing their DPS kits to essentially nothing. It's hardly a surprise how frustrated a lot of healers are when the healing aspects weren't made more intense or interesting. It's essentially Stormblood.

[RadicalPesto]

Honestly the only real problem with healing in this game, in my opinion at least, is that off-gcd healing is so powerful and easily available that gcd heal skills are only used as a last resort, leading to healer gameplay actually becoming more boring as you master a fight, since the better you become, the more you'll have spaces where you do nothing but your 2-1-1-1 dps rotation

[Hatstand]

Honestly the only real problem with healing in this game, in my opinion at least, is that off-gcd healing is so powerful and easily available that gcd heal skills are only used as a last resort, leading to healer gameplay actually becoming more boring as you master a fight, since the better you become, the more you'll have spaces where you do nothing but your 2-1-1-1 dps rotation

A bit of column a a bit of column b. Healing in ffxiv was better in 2.0 and 3.0 when ogcd heals were pretty sparse, and you had to spend more time healing. Still, even if we go back to that (which I'd like) it doesn't change the fact that as you get better at predicting and mitigating damage, and at not overhealing, positioning yourself to use aoe heals effectively, etc, and as your party gets better at avoiding damage, and as everyone gets better gear, the healer will spend less and less time healing. The reward for good gameplay should never be more 1 button spam. We don't need dps level offensive kits, but I think something like HW SCH should be the gold standard.

[JowyAtreides]

First and foremost, increasing healing requirements to 60-70% wouldn't have any impact on their ability to raise since there would still be downtime. Not to mention, most healers wait on Swift anyway. As for analysis and whatnot. FFlogs does this. The healers in my static spend roughly 30% of their tool casts on healing. Only accounting for GCD heals, they use less than half that. In fact, our SCH this week spent only 8% of their casts on a GCD heal.

The means far more than half their casts were used on damaging abilities, which kind of defeats the point of this supposed emphasise on healing. Keep in mind, this is at a Savage level. At any level below that, the healing is so easy, you don't even need a second healer at all.

Now that isn't to say healers shouldn't DPS. Far from it. But given how the devs keep reducing their DPS kits to essentially nothing. It's hardly a surprise how frustrated a lot of healers are when the healing aspects weren't made more intense or interesting. It's essentially Stormblood.

aha, good to see there is possibility of such analysis on these sites, as I said I wasn't sure.

I didn't think that there would be much more than 30% used on GCD heals as each healer has quite a few oGCD heals now, hence why I wondered how many times each get pressed. I think WHM got given a good deal in having their high damaging skill locked behind healing. AST gets their downtime used with card management (or at least the shambles it's been left with), SCH I feel has been slaughtered and has nothing good about it anymore with exception of Chain Stratagem. For me, they need to consider another rework to the cards and give SCH some of their old toys back.

I take your point on the ability to raise being a bit of a non-issue with increased heal uptime, moreso in the Savage scene as deaths are few and far between once people know what to do. But in the casual to semi-dedicated scene, I can see this being a problem if healers were expected to spend 2/3rd's of their time in just keeping a tank alive.

I guess it's not the easiest thing in the world to balance healer so that mid-high end content isn't an impassable challenge to the casual but still engaging to the hardcore. Seems to me like the solution can be found in the thickness of a piece of paper. This, on top of trying to not make classes too "samey"

[EaMett]

this is an issue regarding those specific members not a job problem.
the party members can always kick those people if they believe their party members aren't helping or trying to improve but again healer dps shouldn't be mandatory to clear cause the dps who specialize in damage are there,again healer dps is in order to take pressure off the requirement from the others and help speed things up but its not a requirement for clearing.
as to why take such a healer,some of those groups are static who might know the healer,maybe they want to help him while knowing he wont dps much ,if its fine with the members there no real issue there.

*as a side note-from reading the posts and others comment, most of the healer community want more skills for during downtime to help further in parties and understand that dps during their healing downtimes will helps take the load off the other roles.
not to mention ,most of them will drop dps to keep up with the tanks and to keep them alive when they are in danger.
those players who only heal or only do dps are just those few who probably really bad at their jobs and probably became healer just to get a fast queue.

This argument comes around time and time again even though it is a misrepresentation of what was actually said and reality in general.

To be clear, the original statement saying healer dps wasn’t required also mentioned that it was for an appropriate ilvl for the encounter iirc. It was vague phrasing but we know for a fact it isn’t the min ilvl.
When the content launched it was outright impossible to clear the savage tier without healer dps. Even if you took all the best players in the world and they all did the best run of their life at the same time they were still short.

Even today with all the extra gear, if you take runs composed of all purple and orange parsers they can probably only afford to have one healer not dpsing for fights like titan. There are probably only a very limited amount of groups that can get away with no healer dps and a good chunk of them are probably people interested in speed running which automatically eliminates them willing to take on healers that don’t dps.

In addition to all this, if your healers don’t dps and someone makes a mistake and dies you have nothing to fallback on and odds are you will be wiping. The reality is that any healer that doesn’t dps is getting carried. Some groups might be ok with that but it’s not a good excuse.

All in all, if your group is super optimized they will want you to dps, if they aren’t they will need you to dps. Doesn’t leave much room for healers that don’t dps.

[Saefinn]

I like what somebody said in another thread. We should rename “healers” to support as it seems the mentality is that all they should do is heal, but they don’t just heal.

However, I feel there still needs to be some tolerance for those who don’t DPS, to the extent people are new to the role, lack confidence, are more casual or are learning new content. For a lot of content, it’s not awful to be without healer DPS, as much of it is already a face roll. But I think a good healer who is more experienced would be better to DPS, especially on content where DPS is tight. Especially as healer downtime is a big thing.

Now, I am all for healer downtime being padded out with more support abilities, really all I want is to stuff to do in my downtime as a healer.

Healers are unique in that the better you are at it, the less you have to do. Having a varied DPS helped alleviate that problem. Spamming 1 DPS move over and over is simply boring. If I can weave more support abilities that benefit the group, great, if I can have a more varied DPS, great. Just make the downtime interesting. And for savage if in the ‘more support’ mentality, then the support would need to boost the DPS of the party, like AST kinda does (though issues with that system ATM, hence ‘kinda’) so that DPS checks can be met.

[JunseiKei]

Or is Eden Savage an exception?

Yoshida has gone on to say that the closer to the minimum iLvl the content is, the likelihood of healers and tanks needing to do more is needed. It was a statement toward all content, not just savage.

Early savage clearing = tank and healers absolutely need to optimize to push for clears.
Mid to late savage clearing = the importance of tanks and healers needing to optimize becomes diluted.

What Yoshi thinks and what his Encounter and Class design teams are actually putting out are two different things entirely.

I disagree. The content is designed with gear gating in mind. However, the team also does not strictly enforce a gear gate. Gordias had a strict gear gate; no amount of crafted gear with penta-melds, food and pots and a couple of pieces of savage gear allowed them to down the final boss for over a month.

They've been inconsistent at best in their comments. In one interview Yoshi will say "Of course I want healers to still DPS when they don't need to heal." and in others he'll say "We feel healers trying to optimize DPS is bad." Perhaps they don't realize that the only real benefit of optimizing healing is increasing healing downtime... which means optimizing DPS. The two go hand in hand.

Without context to these statements, it could mean radically different things.

Optimizing healers as in looking at their kits and purposely designing healer DPS to meet a certain standard, like how DPS roles are balanced
-or simply-
'Healers being forced to DPS is not what we designed.'

Considering the statements of the past and healers' current kits and how they evolved to that state, they give healers the ability to DPS while their kits, updated skills, etc will remain focused on the healing aspect of the class. That's why I don't lament the loss of DPS spells on heals because it's not the focus (IE: SCH and WHM having 3 DoTs to keep up versus their current 1 DoT - that's just button bloat and false difficulty).

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My two cents are mainly if you want to see how FFXIV would have been in a heal-only design, take a standard composition party into The Binding Coil of Bahamut Turn 5 on minimum iLvl. You're not going to be DPSing as a healer; not with a tank buster happening every 30s~35s. Maybe you can add a DoT here and there, but for the most part, you'll actually be mitigating and healing. I can't say that constant, high stress is fun, even as I'm someone that enjoys when encounters go awry and wonder if you can recover to keep going.