How is it like being a DPS?

[Karilyn]

Talk about skill ceilings all you want, but healing has the highest skill floor in the game.

I can definitely agree with that, though I feel a ton of that is just due to lazy DPSers. Every now and then I'll heal a group where all the DPSers aren't taking avoidable damage, and I could almost fall asleep with how easy it is. Healing's difficulty feels very very strongly tied to how much everyone else sucks or doesn't suck. By a very wide margin.

Until top level content, DPS can coast and all tanks need to know is to press 1-2-3 and not drive the mob car directly into the party.

For the most part, I'm only talking top level content. Minimum of Extreme Modes and First Coil, and maybe Ultima Weapon Hard. I feel it's poor judgement to discuss a class based on how it performs at low levels, unless it's specifically being requested, and I don't think OP was asking for that. So yeah for all my posts, unless stated otherwise, I'm talking about top level content, because that's really the only content where difficulty makes any difference. I'm also comparing what a good player of one class has to do relative to a good player of another class. Not about the ability of one class to carry other people who are sucking; at high level I make a reasonable assumption that you're trying to group up with others who are performing at least acceptably basic competency. So "that one dragoon mashing Full Thrust uncomboed" doesn't really play into my argument because frankly at that point, you might as well be 7 manning the dungeon. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask basic competency out of players, and chose to never again associate with players who can't manage at least a basic copy+paste rotation off of the Internet and avoid at least 80% of random shit flying around in fights. That's sorta, my bare bones minimum tolerable play, and thus anything worse than that doesn't figure into my considerations as I'll never play with such people more than once.

Sooooooo... Yeah... but I'll discuss low level stuff anyway. At low level stuff, DPS can coast the most, that's true. But especially as a Scholar, unless you're dealing with the most supreme ungodly idiocy you can just AFK your way through stuff with Fairy healing. Even as a White Mage, 90% of the time I'm just three button healing. Focus Target Cure Macro, Medica, and occasional Esuna. Unless I'm stuck with some extreme nonsense like a tank in something like Stone Vigil wearing level 20 Scalemail, I just don't have to pay attention because nothing is ever at serious risk of dying. Below level 50, as long as every character is wearing gear remotely appropriate for their level, there isn't a class in the game that can't coast through dungeons borderline AFK; tanks, healers and DPS alike. And even after 50, the first thing that presents even an iota of challenge is Ultima Weapon Hard.

Maybe pre-50, tanking is /slightly/ harder than DPS, but that's only because you have to /gasp/ press the tab key inbetween your single target attacks every once in a while if you're not a Warrior. So it's really like saying cream puffs are harder than marshmallows. It's only correct in the most technical of sense, but both are still faceroll coasting easy, and so is healing if nobody is mindblowingly undergeared. Healing is probably harder than both at low levels, but ehhhhhhhh it's still easy. You just have the highest capacity of the 3 rolls to carry the fuck out of extraordinarily bad players; then and only then does low level healing become difficult.

Starting around Ultima Weapon Hard is really where DPSing and Healing starts to become very noticeably harder than tanking, in such a way that you'd have to be incredibly ignorant of what Healers and DPS need to do if you think tanking is harder. And at that point, Healing difficulty increases logarithmically as the DPSers perform worse and worse, starting off somewhat easier than DPSers if DPS is performing perfectly, and becoming far far far harder, to outright impossible, if DPS is getting hit by too much shit.

I think your understanding of triage (a skill that only incredible healers master, and one that takes a long time) boils down to "tank first, DPS last" which is frankly incredibly ignorant. There are times when it ISN'T safe to get off the tank, but I HAVE to heal other people. I have to make that sort of decision a lot, and trust that my tank is competent enough to understand my situation and act accordingly. And surprise, not many of them do because they don't play healers.

EDIT: Subteraneanbird, I decided to fully address the second half of your post, dealing with the social elements, in an entire separate post, because I feel you deserve to be listened to and that half is a wildly different subject than what I addressed in the rest of this post, and you DESERVE to have a post entirely dedicated to being listened to the social problems. The rest of this post is only going to address the purely mechanical elements; if you don't care about that, you can skip to my next post, where I spend less time explaining and more time listening.

That's entirely 100% reasonably fair. I am a /bad/ healer. It is a skill I have always struggled with, and thus I admitted I didn't know what I was talking about for a healer's perspective. I can accept that healers sometimes are forced to unsafely heal others besides the tank. I don't think this necessarily invalidates my statement that DPS playing badly makes a healer's job more difficult, as it is my understanding that DPSers playing badly would force you to make such difficult decisions on a more frequent basis. And that DPSer sloppy play has a very powerful (albeit indirect) influence on the outcome of a fight due to forcing healers to make such decisions more often. But I fully and openly admit my shallow understanding of healing, and bow to your greater knowledge and skill and authority on the subject.

As a tank I would be especially interested in any tips in this regard. I know I'm inclined to throw extra cooldowns on myself if the raid as a whole is taking a ton of damage, or a DPSer needs to be raised. I'm not exactly sure what other things as a tank I can do to help a taxed healer other than that, and am fully open to any tips in that regard.

you can be doing the most inane ineffective shit nearly constantly, and because of your low visibility (there are many more DPS than healers, it is harder to notice+easier to explain away low damage vs low heals or low threat) you're not likely to ever get called out

I tend to stare at the party's health bars more than is healthy to do as a tank; in part because there's SOOOO few things for me to do while tanking, so the low visibility thing is something you can never really get away with in a raid of mine. That's part of why I'm so insistent on how many wipes are caused, at the very least indirectly, by DPSers taking too much damage, and overtaxing healers. Healers are mortals too, they shouldn't be expected to carry DPSers through sloppy play. Raiding is a team effort, and asking DPSers to put in a tiny bit more effort, so that Healing's difficulty drops to sane levels, is very reasonable.

Besides, staring at party health bars helps me be able to give better, more custom fitted advice to individuals who are struggling with specific mechanics; I feel that discussing with individuals specific things they are struggling with, is more beneficial than a vague generic raid-wide "Do better, I know you can, I believe in you, one more time guys!" Square please nerf threat and throw more mechanics for tanks to deal with so I can AFK less please even though I know it'll never happen. Shit's so easy I'm tired of falling asleep at the keyboard.

I also hold contention with "rotations are hard" because there's a lot in your favor with them. Maybe I'd believe you if you had to scour through Eorzea, fighting beings most foul to get your hands on a Tomestone that says "After Impulse Drive, follow up with Disembowel!" but that's not the case. Even if you're incapable of putting rotations together yourself given the info the game gives you, other people have already and once you verify their numbers are right and it is a good rotation, it entirely becomes rote memorization and pushing a sequence of buttons with very little to interrupt you.

I hold contention with this, though I might be biased because I play Black Mage. At least for Black Mages, it's only not-hard if you aren't min-maxing out your damage; the theoretical maximum DPS is delightfully difficult to achieve, and I'm highly attracted to the skill challenge involved in it. More than just that, Umbra Ice and Astral Fire are so bizarre that, while I eventually managed through extensive research to wheedle out the best rotations, and double-check the math myself, there's still an insane amount of misinformation on both Reddit and these forums, and even in major popular guides, with the correct information often harder to find (dat spreadsheet, so sexy).

Probably the worst is the endless posts on this forum and Reddit where people claim that the best AOE rotation is Astral 3 then Fire II until you're low mana then Flaring and transposing, even though the math has been endlessly laid out showing that it's by a wide margin superior to immediately Flare into Transpose, ignoring Fire II entirely, and only Fire IIing as your Spell Speed will allow when Transpose is on Cooldown and not a single Fire II more. Even just posting this paragraph will probably cause at least one person to angrily reply, insisting that Fire IIing all your mana is superior. And all that ignores the Mana Tick Double Flare Glitch, that maybe 10% of Black Mages know about and even fewer do. You can probably click through every single "Is my Black Mage Rotation correct?" and see 2-4 people per thread insisting on the Fire II AOE rotation, even though we have the Ultimate Black Mage Resource thread on this very forum. It's ridiculous. I'll go through a thread, even on this forum, and see 70% of the people in the thread advocating suboptimal rotations.

As for the deliciously skill-challenging min-maxy persuit of theoretical max DPS... that basically factors in a ton of bizarre mana-tick min-maxing you can do. The Mana Tick Double Flare Glitch is fun and all (And it certainly adds some fun skill to see how accurately and consistently you can count out 2.25 seconds, within an accuracy range that has to be hit of about a quarter second. It's harder than you think, especially when dodging deadly things, and especially factoring in that the 2.25 seconds doesn't start from the end of your spellcast but at the next mana tick, which is variable.). But there's even more bizarre little min-maxy things you can do every single time you hit Umbra Ice, because you have to pay attention to how quickly your mana tick occurred, and if your mana tick is slow to arrive, wait until it's been at least 1.30 or so seconds since your last mana tick before beginning your Fire III cast. It gets even weirder if you have a Firestarter proc, because then Fire III is instant cast, and you have to make a decision about your ability to fit a Blizzard I inbetween Thunder II and Transposed Fire III (or even a Scathe in rare situations to prevent Animation Lock on Transpose for getting 0.8s faster). And all this bizarre little timing and waiting variable intervals mini-game has to be done while dealing with other mechanics.

So yes, you're right, it is a fixed rotation, but it's not really rote memorization, at least if you're in pursuit of maximizing your performance, because of the huge amount of timing involved. Your rotation changes every time based on where your mana tick lands. It's a lot of fun, it's very dynamic, it requires paying a lot of attention and adjusting in response to mana tick timing, and it's a fun change of pace from rotation or proc based DPSing. It has given me a high interest in a possible theoretical class that has to wait short gaps of variable durations up to 3 seconds between moves, and accurately time them, in order to achieve maximum DPS. It's a lot more interesting than the standard rotation where you can mindlessly queue the next move without thinking. I doubt it'd ever be put in a game, because too many people wouldn't want to play something like that, but I think it'd be a delightful mental challenge, and always welcome new things that make the game harder for me.