Latest Official Developer Statements About Healer DPS?

[Renathras]

A lot of people don't seem to read posts before replying to them. Let me help out with some bolding:

...I think the reality is that Yoshi P and the Devs don't want Healers to have to deal damage. Any fights that actually REQUIRE it in order to clear on patch are probably accidents/overtuned/unintended given all the statements, including the 2021 ones, to the contrary. The most charitable (to the DPS argument) way to look at it is that they want Healers to have an easy DPS "rotation" so they can easily achieve whatever DPS needs (if any) the encounters assume Healers will contribute. At worst to that argument, it means that they don't intend encounters to require Healer DPS and don't tune for it, so any Healer DPS at all is a bonus for the party.

I think they genuinely DON'T want healer gameplay to be based on doing damage or encounters tuned to it.

I DO think they're really bad at tuning, with P8S, specifically, being such an egregious case that they had to nerf it and make a public apology statement.

How you want to parse this is up to you, but I think the correct way to look at it isn't "they want Healers to do damage", I think it's more "they're really bad at tuning for Healers NOT to do damage", which is why they have the fallback point of the above "...at least the DPS 'rotation' is easy so that Healers can pretty easily meet the required amount of damage they need to contribute" when the Devs get it wrong. Which is almost all the time.

If they genuinely wanted encounters to be tuned around Healers doing a lot of damage, they could very easily say so. And considering we're talking Savage and Ultimates here, it's not like them saying so would be detrimental, so there's no reason for them to lie. The more likely take is they just suck at tuning the encounters well, and because it works, they just kinda roll with it.

EDIT:

See my response

I mean...SGE doesn't unlock at level 1. WHM doesn't have "cool lasers" aesthetic. The only thing WHM and SGE really have in common is that they're easy.

This is also true of SMN, DNC, and WAR.

The common thread to all these most played Jobs is that they are the easiest to play. I know it's hard to believe, but it seems that the general playerbase DOES like things that are easier. This doesn't mean everyone does. This doesn't mean that hard things should be removed. But it does mean that the general playerbase...does seem to like these Jobs, at least in part, because they are easier to play. Because that is the thing that's in common across all of them.

"But WAR is OP!"; but WHM isn't.
"But SMN does more damage than RDM!"; but less than BLM.
"But DNC has a dynamic rotation!"; but WHM and SGE do not.
"But WHM, WAR, and SMN start at level 1!"; but SGE and DNC do not.
"But DNC and SGE start near the level cap so less to level!"; but WHM, WAR, and SMN do not.

What do they all have in common, though?

They're all relatively easy to play, and widely considered the easiest in their roles.

For additional support, BRD was more played when it was considered "the easy one", and RDM was more played than SMN and BLM in ShB, when RDM was "the easy one". SAM and RPR are considered the easiest Melees by most, and are also the two most played (SAM more than RPR in JP, RPR more than SAM everywhere else; but in each region, the OTHER of them is 2nd place). And considering the Human tendency to want to just chill or take the paths of least resistance, it boggles my mind why people are so adamant at insisting this isn't or can't be true.

(Also: Not all, but most, of the stuff in the Healer forum is also opinion, not fact that would render her opinion invalid. It's more a "either could be true, or possibly some combination of them both")

I’d love to have more healing, buffing or anything other than DPS but let’s be honest here. Those who do not want to DPS as a healer lost this argument expansions ago.

That isn't really true. It's only required in some content (specifically Ultimates and early tier Savages), and the debate seems both alive and well AND the Devs' official statement siding with the non-damage focus.

I mean, I say this as a person that Glarespams like everyone else, but the argument isn't over, and people aren't going to move on until Yoshi P actually makes a definitive statement to the contrary.

Adding more DPS buttons does not affect the rest of the player base at large.

Yes, it does.

The only people that say this are people who want more DPS buttons added, implying a bias. Everyone opposed to adding more DPS buttons seems to feel it will, in fact, affect them. And we all know that it will and that they aren't talking about only doing casual content. At best, it's a red herring, possibly a straw red herring, and at worst, an absolute lie.

I do agree that SGE isn't really "damage focused" anymore than the other Healers, though. It COULD be, due to how Kardia works, but it...isn't.

Every single word that leaves your disingenuous tongue makes me want to go bite a rock.

She's right, though. You must bite a lot of rocks when confronted with the truth...

This is where the DPSing healer became the norm at all levels of endgame content rather than the exception.

"at all levels"?

It was really ShB when that happened. SB still had a lot of healers not DPSing in Expert, and it wasn't the norm. ShB is also when wall-to-wall pulls became the norm and healer DPS was simplified. THAT'S when healer DPS became the norm, when they were all unified to a DoT + spamnuke.