Healers Exist for DPS fun only?

[Lyth]

While I'm also frustrated and would be the first to criticize the relative lack of two-way communication with the development team, it's helpful if we ourselves don't also propagate the spread of misinformation.

SE isn’t good at balancing at all. Remember when Yoshi said back in HW that they tune raids without healer dps in mind? Yeah that’s very obviously a lie as week one clears literally wouldn’t exist without healer dps lmao.

This quote gets paraphrased quite often. The problem is that when you paraphrase what someone else has paraphrased based on what they had seen paraphrased in some reddit post some time back, then you start distorting it and losing more and more context.

This is the original quote, which was taken from the Game Watch interview with Yoshi-p during the EU Media event (05/19/2015) (link to full translation):

Yes. Since all DPS jobs will be increasing up through level 60, it makes sense to have the white mage's DPS extend by a proportional amount as well. For development, such as with Bahamut's Coils, the development team assumes what the item level should be for general equipment on players when they clear a raid. They sum up the basic DPS for four DPS and tanks at that assumed item level and cut that by about 10-15% for the minimum clear DPS. Healer DPS is not taken into account when this is set.

Certainly for people who are at world's first level, their goal is to clear it at as low an item level as possible, lower than the one assumed during development. So if you look at the fight and figure out that if it's not numerically possible to clear with four DPS and tanks, you'll need to make up the gap with DPS from healers. Then when those publish clear videos and other people see the healers DPSing, they might think that healers need to be DPSing even though its a situation that only arose because their clear would have otherwise been impossible. While we could take this into account, and assume a different item level in the next update which would then make it impossible to clear even with the healer DPS, we'd eliminate this type of play for highly skilled players who use communication, items, and a high level of understanding to come up with those last second clears. That would be a tough decision to make, so I still think it should be up to each party's own plans.

This is also one of the reasons we decided to implement both a normal and savage version of Alexander. Once again, healer DPS was not included in the development team's calculation as it was for other jobs, so you should just think of healer DPS as a last way to get your overall party's DPS up to where it needs to be.

So yes, as the quote itself suggests, week one clears wouldn't exist without healer dps.

Historically, when teams did world-progression on raid tier content, it was done below the recommended ilvl. This is because there's a difficulty curve. Take Gordias for example. The ilvl requirement ranges from 190 (A1S) to 205 (A4S). You're entering with an i190 weapon and i180 token gear. And while crafted gear can help offset some of the differential, you'll probably need to get down the first 1-2 fights without it (because the gear itself takes time to make). So when you're playing at an ilvl disadvantage, then you have to put out higher raid damage than the development team predicts in their estimate. Gordias took something like 34 days for EM to get the world first clear because of how it was tuned. You don't want overtuned raid tiers.

And remember that you see a lot more variability in the average team. So let's say that you have a couple of DPS who are below the target. Well, perhaps you make up for that because your healers actually do contribute a sizable amount of damage. Or failing that, you get some more gear upgrades and try again. You generally can't tune content for wide a range of skill levels without having some degree of gear progression over the tier. This is just a back-of-the-envelope way of tuning a dps check. I think it's a very reasonable base assumption for tuning, especially if you're trying to design it such that a wide range of player skill levels and playstyles are able to get through. You want them to underestimate your damage output as a tank or healer when doing their base calculations. You want to be able to cross-compensate for weaker DPS when you're playing tank or healer.

And let's also remember this is also from 2015.

I do think it's valuable to feedback actual problems to the dev team. Tanks and healers need more interesting rotations? Sure. Tanks and healers should be able to contribute a much bigger portion of overall raid dps to cross-compensate for underperforming DPS players? Definitely. Tanks and healers need some genuine mitigation/survival challenges and checks with raid wipe potential? Absolutely. Healers damage output is being deliberately underestimated in a back-of-the-envelope calculation for raid tuning that was being used during internal testing in 2015? Really don't care. If they didn't deliberately underestimate the dps prediction, most groups probably wouldn't clear.