It is not possible to play without doing dps as healer? every day i find someone...

[Semirhage]

Its more of a relic of oldschool mmos, where healing was ressource intensive and your job was basically to preserve your mana/mp over the full duration of a fight while keeping everyone healed. Like, back in the Day in WoW you had to intentionally use lower ranks of your spells to preserve mana and regularily afk during downtimes to let mana regen kick in. Tanks where also much, much more squishy compared to modern FF14 and Retail WoW tanks. So pure healing was a thing during a time when limited ressources and constant chip damage wouldn't allow you to dps, especially since healer dps spells were usually also pretty weak, often due to equipment having seperate stats for offensive and healing spells.

These are now relics of the past and MMOs are generally much more fast paced and action oriented nowadays with little enforced downtime, healers offensive capabilities also have been massively buffed in modern MMOs to allow solo-leveling at a convenient pace and with aggro becoming less and less of a game mechanic with the big mainstream mmos, the focus was shifted more towards mitigation for Tanks, which also meant that their defensive capabilities became much stronger than during earlier times. All of that lead us to where we are now, were healer dps became organically a thing because it was understood as the best way to utilize the naturally decreasing healing uptime during optimization.

I played MMOs back in ~2006, old(er) school Korean grinders. I remember that healers were "supposed to heal" and /sit when not healing. I just popped mana potions and started blasting out damage at least half the time anyway. My damage spells in my MMO of choice did about half the damage of a black mage-equivalent's spams, plus I had defense debuffs, stuns, and binds that were worth their weight in upkeep. I encountered people who said I was "healing wrong". Oddly, it was never people in the parties I was keeping alive while simultaneously throwing out damage.

The healing and sitting dynamic has always either been a purposeful design choice (which...yikes, why on earth would sitting around doing nothing just for mana on a regular basis be *fun*?), or something unskilled healers did. I've never, ever played a single player RPG where my "pure healer" didn't spend upwards of 80% of their time debuffing, dealing damage, etc. HeALeRs ShoULd HeAL ONLy in my experience has always been a line from people who are bad at healing.

[T-Owl]

I played MMOs back in ~2006, old(er) school Korean grinders. I remember that healers were "supposed to heal" and /sit when not healing. I just popped mana potions and started blasting out damage at least half the time anyway. My damage spells in my MMO of choice did about half the damage of a black mage-equivalent's spams, plus I had defense debuffs, stuns, and binds that were worth their weight in upkeep. I encountered people who said I was "healing wrong". Oddly, it was never people in the parties I was keeping alive while simultaneously throwing out damage.

The healing and sitting dynamic has always either been a purposeful design choice (which...yikes, why on earth would sitting around doing nothing just for mana on a regular basis be *fun*?), or something unskilled healers did. I've never, ever played a single player RPG where my "pure healer" didn't spend upwards of 80% of their time debuffing, dealing damage, etc. HeALeRs ShoULd HeAL ONLy in my experience has always been a line from people who are bad at healing.

Haven't played that one tbh, so I can only talk about my experiences with World of Warcraft, but I can say that even nowadays, most healer classes do even less than half the damage of a dps. Combined with the ressource starvation it basically encouraged the pure healer mentality because healer dps was just not that good and pretty expensive. Like, back in the day you barely could even level solo as a healer spec, you were oom pretty much immediately and would basically just auto attack with a wand, which wasn't feasible in raids though because mana-regen would only kick in if you are inactive for a few seconds. And yeah, it was pretty much purposeful design choice back in the day, because early devs probably considered it more tactical when you had to manage stuff like threat and mana, which are basically just encouraging passivity. But I think you also bring something else up which played into it:

Compared to todays average players, oldschool MMO-Players where just plain bad at the game, the skill floor increased by a crazy amount over the years, through ressources and information becoming more readily available and people generally becoming more skilled at video games. Again, WoW is a great example because we have the comparison of back in the day and nowadays through classic: There was this meme going around for years, that classic had been pretty much the pinnacle of hardcore raiding and that retail has become casual compared to it, due to how few players back in the day actually could beat the raids. Classic hits around and it turns out, the game is piss-easy. People would pull off dps numbers and speed kills which would have been considered mathematically impossible back during the day, simply because theorycrafting, understanding of the game and personal skill have increased so much over the years.

[vetch]

It's a concept for how support roles play that's at loggerheads with how actual gameplay works in nearly every RPG ever written. It's how bad healers proudly proclaim support roles play, because they insist on spamming the part of their kit that doesn't actually contribute toward ending encounters. It's the most narrow way of viewing healers. It's also the way the FF14 devs very clearly view healers, and we've all seen the stupid and boring design that's come of viewing healers as Cure spamming gasping waifus.

DPS-minded people always say boring, practical things like this and it simply has no bearing on what I find fun. I'm not on a healer to 'end encounters'; that's simply a byproduct of the structure of the game. I'm on a healer to yank people back from the brink of death screaming. I'm on a healer to buff people so they can chase their idea of fun better. Nuking monsters is something I'm absolutely ambivalent about and do only when there's nothing more fun to do with my kit which, unfortunately, is about 95% of the time in FF14 no matter what content you do.

People who actually know how to play support jobs well know that's total BS: you heal as LITTLE as possible while maximizing time spent doing things that are actually useful. But the other camp decries this as "bad healing", because you're spending less time on your "primary role". It's at odds with reality.

Videogames are an escape from reality.

[Tlamila]

The saddest thing is that this thread was made by someone with genuine difficulty cause of arm problems, but hijacked by someone who's just too lazy to dps. That's kinda insulting towards the OP even, tbh.

[ty_taurus]

Choosing to only heal as a healer and ignore your DPS kit is exactly the same as a BLM choosing only to use blizzard spells and ignore their fire spells. Both are examples of trying to roleplay as a playstyle that does not exist in FFXIV. It is incredibly rude and disrespectful to waste other players' time because you want to pretend you're playing a different game. That is not how FFXIV works. If you do not like that, either find an RP party or play a different game.

That said, there's nothing wrong with not performing optimally as long as you are genuinely trying your best. No one begins as a savage tier player and it's okay to not be perfect. Additionally, if you have certain physical or mental limitations that make it harder to play the game, it's important to find a group of players who are willing to help you get through different aspects of content. Unfortunately, an MMO just isn't the prime example of a game genre known for accessibility, but as long as you communicate with people and create a network of friends who will help you, you can still enjoy a lot of what FFXIV can offer you.

[glamazon]

Dps by the healer is only “necessary” in savage high level content. You literally could only heal and be fine in everything else.

[Supersnow845]

Dps by the healer is only “necessary” in savage high level content. You literally could only heal and be fine in everything else.

The DPS doing anything besides auto attacking is only “necessary” in savage high level content. You literally could only autoattack and be fine in everything else

[animeking]

The saddest thing is that this thread was made by someone with genuine difficulty cause of arm problems, but hijacked by someone who's just too lazy to dps. That's kinda insulting towards the OP even, tbh.

I know these people are lazy.
If they actually take the time to read the OG post and the posts to follow they will see I was agreeing that what she was doing is fine.

[animeking]

All of you keep repeating the same thing and not reading anything I posted before so let me give you cliff notes.
Do I heal?
Yes
Do I dps?
Yes
Do I prioritize healing over dps?
Yes
Do I dps when the tank is fine?
Yes
Is this thread about end game content healers?
No

[Semirhage]

DPS-minded people always say boring, practical things like this and it simply has no bearing on what I find fun. I'm not on a healer to 'end encounters'; that's simply a byproduct of the structure of the game. I'm on a healer to yank people back from the brink of death screaming. I'm on a healer to buff people so they can chase their idea of fun better. Nuking monsters is something I'm absolutely ambivalent about and do only when there's nothing more fun to do with my kit which, unfortunately, is about 95% of the time in FF14 no matter what content you do.



Videogames are an escape from reality.

I like feeling powerful and skilled. Yanking people back from death is *part* of that. Helplessly standing around and spamming useless spells makes me feel the opposite of that.

Doing damage as a healer is fun for me. Because it means, in a well-designed combat system, that I'm skilled enough to do it. I don't heal in FF14 anymore because dealing damage as a healer requires neither skill to perform, nor skill to reach.

Spamming healing spells is the boring part of healing. The rush from pulling people back from the brink dulls considerably if it gets reduced down to Medica Medica Medica Medica Medica.