Healer DPS metagame for non savage content is getting old

[Destous]

Outside of current savage encounters, I spend maybe 10% of my time outside of Cleric Stance healing, because that's really all that's required of me to keep a party alive.

What it comes down to is that all incoming tank and raid damage is tuned down to trivial levels outside of the savage encounters, and it's led to some silly trends among healers, most notably that they're melding accuracy into their gear instead of something that would make them stronger healers. They're doing this because strengthening their heals at this point would be superfluous on top of overkill.

For content going forward, both normal and savage, please make incoming tank and group damage more relevant. Make it so relevant that healers aren't melding Accuracy because they expect to spend 90% of their time in Cleric Stance pretending to be caster DPS.

It's already bad enough that tanks meld and gear for optimal DPS; when you see the healers doing it too, then it should act as a red flag.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

The only thing it would do is make tanks either suffer a buttload of damage all the time to force healers to always heal, or they'll pound on the status effect so the healer can be ready to purge them. With what we have now, there's really nothing more healers can do other than heal or DPS.

[Dzian]

The only thing it would do is make tanks either suffer a buttload of damage all the time to force healers to always heal, or they'll pound on the status effect so the healer can be ready to purge them. With what we have now, there's really nothing more healers can do other than heal or DPS.

I personally think tanks should take more damage, and mitigation should be stronger at the same time...
this would create a real difference to using cool downs vs not and would have a much more noticeable impact in content.

I can run expert on scholar practically live in cleric stance never see the tank pop a single cooldown and still my fairy is enough to keep them alive with little more than a stoneskin between pulls.

I think it should kind of be a tank that uses cooldowns really well should need minimal healing
a tank that doesn't should need a proverbial ton of healing...
the difference between using cooldowns and not should be much more noticeable and significant. where as currently you hardly notice

also think part of the blame is due to "balance" it heavily restricts diversity. for example it doesn't matter if the tank is a pld war or drk, I can still cleric stance my way through an entire dungeon cos the amount of damage they all take is almost exactly the same. it'd be kinda nice if there was a bit of diversity between tanks.
oh a paladin. ok little to no healing required as they have strong cool downs so I will mostly be doing dps...
oh a warrior I probably won't be doing much dps as his mitigation is much weaker so he'll need a lot of heals but he'll be smashing the dps anyway
oh a drk, middle of the road maybe kind of half and half..

currently though it doesn't matter what class the tank is you can still cleric all the way through the content.. because "balance"

[Khalithar]

The only thing it would do is make tanks either suffer a buttload of damage all the time to force healers to always heal.

I just want to chime in on this because Blizzard did exactly that in the wrath of the lich king xpac a few years ago and tanking in this scenario wasn't very fun. The average boss could hit you for roughly half your hp, popping a cooldown in these situations just meant you died in three hits instead of two and gave the healers an extra moment to top you off. It created a scenario where everyone in the raid group had to constantly be at 100% hp at all times because if they were less than that there would be a good chance of them being killed by the next AoE, is that really what healers want in this game? I agree the damage is a bit too low now but they have to be careful about going too far in making it higher because it could very easily create the scenario I listed above.

Now there can most certainly be a middle ground between the two, but I have a feeling (I could be wrong) that even if they did a small increase in the outgoing damage, healers would still figure out the patterns and continue to work on maximizing their dps, everyone would figure out how much extra VIT (if any) they needed to survive then go back to maximizing their dps because as someone said somewhere in the thread, so far "throwing as much dps as possible at something" is still the most viable strategy.

[Zojha]

It created a scenario where everyone in the raid group had to constantly be at 100% hp at all times because if they were less than that there would be a good chance of them being killed by the next AoE[...]

Which just goes back to healing being way too powerful.

If a healer can heal 50% of one's health per GCD, making healers heal requires mobs to hit for roughly 50% of one's health per GCD. If a healer takes 10 GCDs for the same health, mobs need to hit for far less for the same effect.

But that alone doesn't really help much. The issue is that healing simply has no mastery to it. If you make healers only heal in the current heal setup, it becomes a 2-4 button job. The only thing resembling synergy are free cure and benefic proccs. Decisionmaking is nigh nonexistent. Mana management is a non-issue. How often do you even think about what heal to use? Why ever use a smaller one unless you're out of mana from holy spamming? Tetragrammaton, Benediction, Lustrate and Essential Dignity all cost zero mana either, so using your emergency cooldowns outside of emergencies has no consequences.

It's a super-shallow system. Not really surprising many healers DPS out of sheer boredom.

[HyperiusUltima]

That's true. However, the thing about Cleric Stance and DPSing as a Healer boils down to knowing what to do in a fight and knowing openings. The more you do a portion of the fight, the easier the openings are to find. However, sometimes it's unsafe for even the smallest of openings for what's coming next(Sephirot EX Jumps after DPS and Healer/OT are grouped up) since there would be high raid damage coming out. Even then, there's also attacks that hit the raid relatively hard(Sephirot EX Tiferets around 4-5k each raid-wide back to back).

Sometimes others expect you to deal DPS when the other healer can't solo heal a certain portion.

[seekified]

This is actually a very good point that I had never considered. If healers actually had to heal in regular content, we wouldn't have such an inflamed debate on healer DPS. As things are now, I fully assume that I'll be able to stay in CS for most of a dungeon run unless the rest of the party is sub-par.

This is also why I enjoy enormous pulls so much - when I tank, it means I actually have to pop CDs and stay on my toes with positioning and aggro (because the rest of the time tanking is also dead easy outside of EX/savage), as a healer I might have to do more than just that initial adlo and then going full CS. When I DPS, I have to make sure everything dies before the tank runs out of cooldowns. Essentially, door-to-door pulls is the only way for players with any skill to actually have to give a damn in dungeon runs.

[Kimimoto]

Hopefully they get rid of accuracy all together in 4.0, and make dying to damage common so healers actually have to heal

[Luascadan]

Boss auto damage greatly being increased is one method.

Thinking Bennu's in T12. High auto high frequency.

But I think another question should be asked: Is a change required? Tanking & Healing are different in this game but also rewarding in ways other games are not. (The same can be said for say, WoW's tanking method vs XIV's. Different, Both rewarding for different reasons.)

[Rawrz]

Anything they do to healers, they'll have to do to the off tank and main tank as well. If the off healer doesn't have time to dps, the off tank won't have time to be in DPS stance. Good bye Ninja Enmity utility and half of tanks/healer skills.