The arrogance of some people

[Niwashi]

In addition to helping everyone by getting them out of the dungeon faster, a healer DPSing will make the group clear actual fights faster which means there are less mechanics to do, less chance for people to run out of cooldowns/resources, less chances to make mistakes.

Valid points in many cases. But my main point was that they're not universal. So, looking at those ones one at a time:

getting out of the dungeon faster: A help if you want out quickly. But there are some dungeons I've run many many times over and never really gotten to even see what they look like because we were always racing past everything. It'd be really nice to be able to stay a bit longer and get the time to really see them once in a while.

less mechanics to do: The mechanics are the fun part. It's boring to just burn through every boss the same way. Plus there's the fact that many of the dungeons whose mechanics are now routinely skipped are low level learning dungeons designed for teaching new players how mechanics work. The biggest reason why so many players end up in endgame (or at least late game) dungeons totally clueless about how to handle mechanics is because the simple version of those mechanics are too often skipped in the earlier dungeons that are supposed to be teaching them.

less chance for people to run out of cooldowns/resources: But in a long fight, most of your cooldowns will come up again. And a lot of conservative gameplay focuses on making sure you're recuperating your resources as fast as you use them (though a lot of that is coming from the damage dealers' support skills rather than from the healer).

less chances to make mistakes: Some people in this thread have been advocating that healers are best when they're pushing the edge, getting in every possible point of damage they can manage, skirting the edge of letting players die without quite going over that line. That approach is creating more chances for serious mistakes, not less.
(Note: This last argument applies only to the drive to maximize healer DPS, not the one about wanting healers to do a bit of DPS in downtime when they'd otherwise be idle. I don't really have any problem with the later.)

Some healer DPS (Holy's stun, Shadowflare's slow) also has the side effect of reducing incoming damage on the tank, or in places like A3S, can slow enemies to give you more time to deal with them.

Ok, yes, I can agree with these. We could add debuf utility along with helping meet DPS checks as cases where it's useful.

[RiceisNice]

less chances to make mistakes: Some people in this thread have been advocating that healers are best when they're pushing the edge, getting in every possible point of damage they can manage, skirting the edge of letting players die without quite going over that line. That approach is creating more chances for serious mistakes, not less.
(Note: This last argument applies only to the drive to maximize healer DPS, not the one about wanting healers to do a bit of DPS in downtime when they'd otherwise be idle. I don't really have any problem with the later.)

Just to chime in on this , incoming damage to a tank can get very, very predictable, especially when it corelates to the tank's (lack) of tanking stance or cooldown utilization. Best example I can come up with is SMA's bee boss where you don't really need to top them off after. Every bit of damage down to the auto attack and "mini-tank buster" comes at a predictable interval; best example I can come up with is SMA's bosses where I practically do not need a heal on my warrior up until after the first breath sweep, or the bee boss after it's first mini-tank buster.

less mechanics to do: The mechanics are the fun part. It's boring to just burn through every boss the same way. Plus there's the fact that many of the dungeons whose mechanics are now routinely skipped are low level learning dungeons designed for teaching new players how mechanics work. The biggest reason why so many players end up in endgame (or at least late game) dungeons totally clueless about how to handle mechanics is because the simple version of those mechanics are too often skipped in the earlier dungeons that are supposed to be teaching them.

Semantics, but realistically speaking a lot of bosses don't have that many engaging mechanics to begin with, even in context of new expert dungeons that players have already queued for. Granted it's a bigger underlying problem (the dungeon in general being undertuned relative to the level sync, or when a typical player can access it), but you can't honest-to-goodness say that a lot of the low level dungeons have "interesting" mechanics even if you were to take away the overkilling of it, and it really doesn't punish the players enough to the point that they can fail every mechanic and still get a pass. Aside from that, the "simple version" mechanics are ones that are reoccuring throughout the game, not specifically to the boss fights (telegraphed AoEs for example); I wouldn't go as far to say that it's the reason why players fail in endgame dungeons because they're clueless on mechanics.

[Kaurie]

Valid points in many cases. But my main point was that they're not universal. So, looking at those ones one at a time:

getting out of the dungeon faster: A help if you want out quickly. But there are some dungeons I've run many many times over and never really gotten to even see what they look like because we were always racing past everything. It'd be really nice to be able to stay a bit longer and get the time to really see them once in a while.

less mechanics to do: The mechanics are the fun part. It's boring to just burn through every boss the same way. Plus there's the fact that many of the dungeons whose mechanics are now routinely skipped are low level learning dungeons designed for teaching new players how mechanics work. The biggest reason why so many players end up in endgame (or at least late game) dungeons totally clueless about how to handle mechanics is because the simple version of those mechanics are too often skipped in the earlier dungeons that are supposed to be teaching them.

less chance for people to run out of cooldowns/resources: But in a long fight, most of your cooldowns will come up again. And a lot of conservative gameplay focuses on making sure you're recuperating your resources as fast as you use them (though a lot of that is coming from the damage dealers' support skills rather than from the healer).

less chances to make mistakes: Some people in this thread have been advocating that healers are best when they're pushing the edge, getting in every possible point of damage they can manage, skirting the edge of letting players die without quite going over that line. That approach is creating more chances for serious mistakes, not less.
(Note: This last argument applies only to the drive to maximize healer DPS, not the one about wanting healers to do a bit of DPS in downtime when they'd otherwise be idle. I don't really have any problem with the later.)



Ok, yes, I can agree with these. We could add debuf utility along with helping meet DPS checks as cases where it's useful.

Niwashi, you are picking at straws. From this strain of reasoning, one could say there is no such thing as objective reasoning. Even how we interpret the world is based off of our subjective perspective. The argument you are trying to make isn't a good one, it's more or less a semantics argument that should be saved for a debate on some university class on the Philosophy of MMO Dungeon Running.

It's really out of place in this thread. It doesn't help support the notion that healers should or shouldn't DPS.

[Lancelot_Kahn]

It's amazing how a simple thread like this got so looooong...the answer is simple, OP had crappy i210 DPS players, the end. Why is this even turned into healers need to help DoT in normal dungeons?

YES, IF he/she can throw out some DoTs, but the fact is, nothing outside of primal ex, coil and savages have HARD DPS checks. IF you need healers to help out on DPS, take a closer look at your shitty "DPSers" in normal dungeons!

[Odett]

Valid points in many cases. But my main point was that they're not universal. So, looking at those ones one at a time:

getting out of the dungeon faster: A help if you want out quickly. But there are some dungeons I've run many many times over and never really gotten to even see what they look like because we were always racing past everything. It'd be really nice to be able to stay a bit longer and get the time to really see them once in a while.

less mechanics to do: The mechanics are the fun part. It's boring to just burn through every boss the same way. Plus there's the fact that many of the dungeons whose mechanics are now routinely skipped are low level learning dungeons designed for teaching new players how mechanics work. The biggest reason why so many players end up in endgame (or at least late game) dungeons totally clueless about how to handle mechanics is because the simple version of those mechanics are too often skipped in the earlier dungeons that are supposed to be teaching them.

less chance for people to run out of cooldowns/resources: But in a long fight, most of your cooldowns will come up again. And a lot of conservative gameplay focuses on making sure you're recuperating your resources as fast as you use them (though a lot of that is coming from the damage dealers' support skills rather than from the healer).

less chances to make mistakes: Some people in this thread have been advocating that healers are best when they're pushing the edge, getting in every possible point of damage they can manage, skirting the edge of letting players die without quite going over that line. That approach is creating more chances for serious mistakes, not less.
(Note: This last argument applies only to the drive to maximize healer DPS, not the one about wanting healers to do a bit of DPS in downtime when they'd otherwise be idle. I don't really have any problem with the later.)



Ok, yes, I can agree with these. We could add debuf utility along with helping meet DPS checks as cases where it's useful.

getting out of the dungeon faster: you're missing the point here. we're not arguing about speedruns. That is not what this thread is about and you have constantly ignored that every time someone refutes you. We're talking about healers who absolutely refuse to do anything during the big amount of healing downtimes that exist in this game, or think that overhealing is a good way to fill that void.

less mechanics to do: mechanics repeat themselves lol you're just making the fight last less time which segues into...

less chances to make mistakes: again, you're missing the point. the original poster said this in the context of making the fight shorter. Making the fight shorter allows less room for error. You can't f**k up if the enemy is dead.

You're honestly saying a lot of things without saying anything at all. We're not arguing semantics here.

[Kaurie]

It's amazing how a simple thread like this got so looooong...the answer is simple, OP had crappy i210 DPS players, the end. Why is this even turned into healers need to help DoT in normal dungeons?

YES, IF he/she can throw out some DoTs, but the fact is, nothing outside of primal ex, coil and savages have HARD DPS checks. IF you need healers to help out on DPS, take a closer look at your shitty "DPSers" in normal dungeons!

I am fairly certain, few to any posts in this entire thread are talking about needing the DPS from the healers. They're just talking about if healers are not DPSing then they are either new, lazy or bad (or some combination of the three). TBH I am much more forgiving of a healer who doesn't DPS in Savage content where the heal checks are high, than in normal dungeons when you need to cast a total of 4 cures and 1 regen per pull.

[FoxyAreku]

Lordy why is this thread still going?

And why is healer's doing dps such a hot button issue on these forums? Geez, no one says it's needed, just that you're lazy if you stand there doing nothing (which is true, and there shouldn't be any shame to admitting you're lazy about certain things in a video game).

Come on people move on.

[Andrea]

Lordy why is this thread still going?

And why is healer's doing dps such a hot button issue on these forums? Geez, no one says it's needed, just that you're lazy if you stand there doing nothing (which is true, and there shouldn't be any shame to admitting you're lazy about certain things in a video game).

Come on people move on.

It hurts peoples feelings when they are rightfully called lazy. So they try to justify their laziness

[Niwashi]

realistically speaking a lot of bosses don't have that many engaging mechanics to begin with

Well, even simple mechanics are more interesting than none. I can't think of a case where being able to skip a mechanic makes the game more fun rather than less. There might be one somewhere, but if so, I'd think it would be unusual rather than the norm. Most of the time, skipping mechanics seems to be about making the game more boring in exchange for getting it over with a little quicker.

The argument you are trying to make isn't a good one, it's more or less a semantics argument that should be saved for a debate on some university class on the Philosophy of MMO Dungeon Running.

If you think it's an argument that should be saved for a debate on some university class on the Philosophy of MMO Dungeon Running, apart from not being in a university, that's pretty much what this whole thread is. We're debating the approach to running dungeons. So I don't see how that makes it out of place.

And I'm a bit confused as to why you referred to it as being a semantics argument. (Though, ironically, now this question itself is going to be semantic, about your use of the word "semantic".) Either that word doesn't mean what you think it means, or else you're reading something into my posts that's not what I wrote, and I'm a bit curious as to which of those is the case. A semantics argument is one that shifts into discussing the meaning of words that are used to describe a situation rather than discussing the situation itself. Occasionally that's a necessary sideline if it seems part of the disagreement comes from different people interpreting words differently. Other times it just distracts from the main point. But up until this paragraph, nothing I've written in this thread was about what different terms mean. Simply taking a series of statements and addressing each one individually, as I did in the post you quoted, doesn't make a discussion of the points being made into a semantics argument.

[Cyrusskorrey]

Thank you OP, Freaking love you!!