It's time to kill the argument that DPS abilities keep healers from healing.

[Deceptus]

Apparently, all Healers are idiots with near ptsd like attention span who can't handle more than 2 apm?

Is this really what the community thinks we are?

No, but sadly that's what the Developers feel so that's our reality.

[Sebazy]

When I do casual content I hardly even get to heal, it's just dps dps dps, because anything else is slowing down the kill. I don't want to play green dps I want to heal. If we didn't have dps, even if it means only pressing a button every 10 seconds, that would be more fun

That's not the fault of us having any DPS kit, that's the fault of there barely being anything to heal in said casual content.

I'm 100% in agreement and I'd rather be healing as well, that's always been my jam. But I don't agree that pressing a button every 10 seconds is even remotely fun for any length of time. SE have simply chosen the path of making casual content as non challenging as possible and genuinely difficult to fail at.

[ASkellington]

Tanks don't have to choose between dealing damage and playing their role. They gain aggro by dealing damage and mitigation can all be used for free (except for DRK but you can choose other tanks, unlike healers). But, if tank players do feel unhappy doing dps they are also free to voice their thoughts. For healers every gcd is a choice between dps and healing. And if you make the wrong choice it can wipe the group. No other role has to make this choice

That's the whole reason why we like the healer role.

As for being forced, a whm can deal almost as much as a dps in dungeon mobs. If you know that, how can you not use it? It would feel incredibly guilty knowing how much you could do and not using it. It would be griefing. That's what I mean by forced, even if one is sitting behind you telling you how to play. When I do casual content I hardly even get to heal, it's just dps dps dps, because anything else is slowing down the kill. I don't want to play green dps I want to heal. If we didn't have dps, even if it means only pressing a button every 10 seconds, that would be more fun

Your problem I feel is one of two things:

The first is possibly the healing role isn't for you. As I said to the first part of your quote, the whole reason why we healer mains are drawn to the role is due to the added difficulty of precision management of our CDs on top of knowing the fight well. Healers have always been a stressful and demanding role in MMOs. There's a reason why DPS are more commonplace -

DPS only have to worry about positioning, what resources they have to manage, and their rotation (I'm sticking uptimes on buffs here btw).
Tanks have the above, plus mitigation, boss positioning (if there is any), and self sustain if they have.
Healers have the above (the dps part for clarity) plus keeping the party alive.

What people fail to realize, is that the more work your role/class puts into doing its job the more likely you're going to be forgiven when you mess up. Where you're seeing the whole "you should be doing this" argument is closer towards endgame when people feel like you should know your class and arguably you should.\

The other problem I feel you may have is you aren't experienced. And that is 100% fine. No one is going to care that you aren't optimizing in casual content. I know this, because I was in your position. For an entire year in the what near 3 years I've been playing this game, I was healing primarily with GCDs and I couldn't balance dps with healing. I learned, got better. Do I still dip into GCDs? Yes. Do I still struggle with dps and healing? Yes. Is that a problem? No. It never has been. There are many factors that can take place where I am healing more than dpsing:

- Tank's in low gear
- I'm in low gear
- Tank's mitigations aren't spread out well
- I'm healing, tired, when I shouldn't be
- Bardum's Mettle Wall to Wall
- Limited kit due to syncing down
- Dps is standing in the Azim Steppe when the rest of the party's in Vylbrand
- Dps/Tank is taking unnecessary damage
- Dps/I am pulling aggro off the tank
- The pull is too big for me/tank/dps to handle
- I'm in an alliance/raid where my cohealer is dead/dc'd
- I'm in an alliance raid where several of the healers are dead and need rezzing

Etc.

Learning how to heal and dps is for people for are more experienced and who are comfortable with their class. This isn't to say all you should be doing is just healing, yes you are encouraged to dps. However, what I am saying, what we've been continously saying is - if you are able to balance between dpsing and healing, if there is nothing for you to heal, don't just stand there and wait for damage, do damage.

[Sylvain]

Do I really need to bore everyone with a list of those who would have trouble adding dps while healing?

Here goes: young players, new players, lifelong tank or dps players, bad/old/weak hardware users, elderly players, infirm or crippled players, special needs players, especially timid or ultra casual players, etc...
Feeling pressured to dps can and will keep CERTAIN players from healing.

But again, adding or removing DPS skill won't make these player do more or less (maybe a bit less if you remove the DoT)
You could add 4 dps skills to each healer and they'd still do the same, not much.

So why refuse adding new dps skills, which is something that has been going on for years now, to maybe not upset a group of people who in the first place do not care.

but for some people it's just not possible to divide their focus like that. Idk why people just can't accept that like SE has apparently accepted it. This entire forum seems like an attack on anyone unwilling to dps when the correct term might be unable.

Anyone struggling with that is, in the first place, not doing anything that would require them doing dps. Because if spamming 111111 requires too much brain-ram then just executing a basic EX trial strat would be already out of reach to such player. Which isn't an issue, that's why we have dungeon, normal raid, 24-man raid where you can be dead 100% of the encounter.
But why penalise player who want more because some can't?

At this point they should just remove EX, Savage and Ultimate because some can't and it's too stressing for them.

There are DPS doing so low that you don't even understand how it is possible yet no one tell them a thing. They're actually doing less than spamming True Thrust on the boss. yet it dies.
Yet the dps role isn't punished because some are incompetent to the point of being unable to chain a 123 combo, or even just spam 1 endlessly in melee range.
So why should healer who want a more engaging gameplay (or downtime) be penalized?

They will not use these skills anyway and if they do, they'll use them wrong like they do for the entirety of their kit. Because any healer properly healing at somepoint starts dpsing because they get bored. You have to be one of a kind to enjoy standing still and doing nothing for 20min everytime you're doing a dungeon or a raid.

I have NEVER a healer actually doing nothing. I have seen plenty of healer doing useless things, like doing MedicaII > Medica everytime the boss does a raid burster barely dropping us to 90%. I have seen healer spaming Regen on everyone (probably coming from WoW as a resto druid).

Someone above said that healer who don't dps and only focus on healing tend to struggle more to keep their tank alive than a healer actually dps'ing 90% of the time.
This is not a hyperbole, these healers tend to just be plain bad. You could give them spammable benediction with a 5000 potency medicaII hot and they'd still manage to loose the tank or panick. Yet they'd still do something.

So can't they just add those god damn spells that have been requested for 4 years now and let the one who want to have fun with that, have their fun and call it a day?

It won't make healing more stressful to these players, if these spell were to be below lv 80 they'd probably level up to 90 without even noticing new spell have been added.



regarding "there is something wrong with getting mad with healers not adding DPS"
I would argue we could say "there's nothing wrong with a tank only holding the aggro" >> doing 1 aoe every 15-20s or so
there's nothing wrong with a dps doing any kind of dps >> a dragoon spamming True Thrust on a 12 mob pull

i mean sure, they're doing their role, the tank is tanking, the dps is dps'ing and the healer is healing. If everyone is fine with spending 1h in a dungeon then sure why not.

there's definitely something wrong being mad at a struggling healer doing no dps. Yes, because you're being mad at someone already struggling.
But there's a difference between struggling and

[ForteNightshade]

As for being forced, a whm can deal almost as much as a dps in dungeon mobs. If you know that, how can you not use it? It would feel incredibly guilty knowing how much you could do and not using it. It would be griefing. That's what I mean by forced, even if one is sitting behind you telling you how to play. When I do casual content I hardly even get to heal, it's just dps dps dps, because anything else is slowing down the kill. I don't want to play green dps I want to heal. If we didn't have dps, even if it means only pressing a button every 10 seconds, that would be more fun

While I still feel this is bait, I do want to comment because I all but guarantee if SE were to ever remove DPS abilities entirely from Healers, the role would die above the casual level. In fact, I almost want to see it happen if only to watch SE immediately backpedal when those same people constantly insisting healers should only heal will suddenly be screaming at hour long queues.

[Deceptus]

While I still feel this is bait, I do want to comment because I all but guarantee if SE were to ever remove DPS abilities entirely from Healers, the role would die above the casual level. In fact, I almost want to see it happen if only to watch SE immediately backpedal when those same people constantly insisting healers should only heal will suddenly be screaming at hour long queues.

If SE were to remove DPS abilities entirely the role would die the next day.

There has to be a way for Healers to progress in the MSQ and you can't heal mobs to death.

[baklava151]

If SE were to remove DPS abilities entirely the role would die the next day.

There has to be a way for Healers to progress in the MSQ and you can't heal mobs to death.

Autoattacks should be enough

[Jonathan_Clover]

If SE were to remove DPS abilities entirely the role would die the next day.

There has to be a way for Healers to progress in the MSQ and you can't heal mobs to death.

So while this isn't going to be a complete 1-to-1 comparison, I would like to share this anyway.

I played TERA for about 6 or 7 months once it came to PS4, and the healers in that game had sort of a similar case.
While the healer I played(Mystic) had a decent array of damaging abilities, they were so useless to use in content(other than a DoT that reduced defense) because while DPS classes were doing hundreds of thousands(sometimes millions) of damage per hit, you'd only be doing ten thousand damage per hit anyway. It was so bad that healers died out pretty quick in the overworld scene.

I guess a good comparison to 14 would be playing a Healer, but your Chocobo does all the damage for you. It's awful and painfully slow and tedious, and if they ever did remove DPS abilities, I'd go right back to MCH.

[Brandedblade]

Does anyone else ever notice that the entire forum seems to argue with just one person at a time? It's clear the majority opinion here, but people seem to think otherwise.

What can I say? These subforums are a festering pit at this point and the people who are ok with this aren't sitting here crying about it. Misery loves company after all. Personally I tend to mostly only see the same 5-6 faces here talking about the same three topics over and over again.

[IDontPetLalas]

Allow me to extend an olive branch:

Honestly I get it.

There is the expectation that healers should balance dealing damage and keeping their party members alive. No other job has to juggle targets around this much- You switch from Enemy to Ally constantly, AST being probably the worst offender. On controller, AST target switching to throw cards is almost painful. So in order to make this process accessible, the Devs decided to make the juggling of the two very simple.

Each further change of this juggling only serves to make it more accessible:

-Removal of actions while maximizing potencies. You press less variety of buttons, meaning you have to keep track of less things to contribute the same.

-Shorter cast times to ensure ease of weaving without punishing the healer damage. Devs want you to DPS, they made it easier now to both cast your Nuke while weaving in healing.

-Giving Tanks more self sustain tools to make sure they don't die to auto-attacks, giving healers more time to adjust their juggling. It also eases the pressure to keep an eye on your tank's HP.


But the thing is, not all healers are AST.

WHM and SCH primarily have so many automatic heals and mitigations that they can easily spend their time focused on Damage. Why, then do they have basically the same DPS kit as AST? Why does Sage, the new "technical" healer for "advanced" players that "focuses" on DPS have essentially the same buttons as WHM and SCH?

AST complaints revolve around the card system being simplified or losing its flavour.

If a healer is switching from their allies to a target "constantly", something is very wrong. Typically, I scan the party list but I rarely need to actually switch targets. If I frequently need to switch, then things are going south.

I can't speak to controller issues as I don't use one however I have seen various ways to make it easier,. I don't have issues target switching and using cards, and I definitely want at least one additional DPS skill to weave, by the way I main AST, and there are so many OGCDs that a few extra DPS buttons, even with cards, isn't an issue.

Don't forget, damage is predictable- it's one thing if someone doesn't know a fight, but once a fight is known, there's no harm in having extra DPS buttons, provided there are no serious issues with the rest of the party, and its much more interesting than 122222222222222222222122222222222222222222222222221222222222