As a healer, is it my job to DPS? A new perspective.

[Judge_Xero]

2. Again, DPS are not expected to heal primarily because no one needs them to. Even if they were any good at it, a DPS healing would never be desirable unless the healer were incapacitated.

While this is sort of nit picky, in the context of Raids that we are currently on, I do expect the DPS to look after themselves as far as healing certain things. Second Wind/Blood Bath/Mana Wall. While insignificant for sustained healing if they aren't going to be damaged again for a while and it saves me a GCD to DPS I absolutely require it to be used.

Every, static that I know of expects, scholar to be the dps OH. In my experience, this is expected, the problem is with the expectations of the community in which some may have no understanding of the difficulty or stress put on the person

Rightfully so, that is the current Healer Meta. SCH stems from a DPS Class (Arcanist) and has a very powerful Healing Pet. Anyone who Raids knows the difficulty and stress of Raiding. It's not just on the Healers to perform well, everyone needs to pull their weight. So of course it will be the expectations of the community that if you are going to Raid that you should be competent at the role you are playing. There's a reason it's called the "Hardest Content" because you can't just squeeze by with minimal effort, which in turn makes the gameplay of it "Stressful" at times.

Outside of gameplay of a role that should have been learned from level 1->60, raid groups will also look into gear, especially as Off-Healer. For one thing an Off-Healer better be accuracy capped either with or without Food especially SCH due to how it allows MP recovery from Energy Drains. That's an immediate Red Flag that someone is going to under perform before any fights even begin and shows they have limited knowledge of the Healer Meta and/or their class. Even if someone is inexperienced they should at least cover all the basics of their class because those are things you don't want to have to learn/struggle with on top of learning the fights.

FFXIV has a great community, so instead of posting in a thread full of people that are Pro-Healer DPS, about how you are unhappy with how you perform as a SCH Support Healer, you should put your energies into creating your own thread stating your difficulties and ask how you can become an amazing SCH that any static would line up to run with.

[Feyona]

I tried to underline my points. You are not actually arguing, you are just calling out things and want everyone to belive that those are set in stone, instead of giving actual examples or explaining in which context your experiences were made!
And therefor it sounds for me like:

And again, you did not give any answer to any of my questions. I don't want to be rude or anything, but it seems as if you tried entering savage content once, got a bad group and decided you don't like the way fights/healers are designed and you don't like the community. :/
All I ask for is more information, so I can try to understand your point of view.

Have given an example, that was a group. Was calling out my experience and that could happen to anyone too. This is just a waste of time tbh Ill let those that understand what Im sayin understand and those that dont dont. Im not sure anyones interested anyway

[Cynfael]

While this is sort of nit picky, in the context of Raids that we are currently on, I do expect the DPS to look after themselves as far as healing certain things. Second Wind/Blood Bath/Mana Wall. While insignificant for sustained healing if they aren't going to be damaged again for a while and it saves me a GCD to DPS I absolutely require it to be used.

I was alluding to caster DPS using healing spells; I don't think there's any question that Second Wind and mitigation cooldowns can be useful.

[Judge_Xero]

I was alluding to caster DPS using healing spells; I don't think there's any question that Second Wind and mitigation cooldowns can be useful.

Oh for sure. I knew what you meant. Just thought it was a good opportunity to point out what other duties great DPS are responsible for outside of doing damage.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

This isnt meant to be rude,but this is a bit like writing a degree assigment, where every point has to be explained with references. Every, static that I know of expects, scholar to be the dps OH. In my experience, this is expected, the problem is with the expectations of the comunity in which some may have no understand of the difficuly or stress put on the person

This is not unique to healers. When I progged A12, defamation and puddles were huge stresser because I knew if I messed either up, we likely weren't going to recover. In fact, I had one night where I was supposed to go right for puddles and couldn't stop going left simply because it was the puddle I was closest to and my brain tunneled. I felt awful half the night since stress on everyone was high and if I didn't correct my mistakes or readjust positions, I'd be replaced by someone who could. Welcome to Savage raiding. Unless you happen to group with a bunch of friends of comparable skill, you will have to deal with high pressure situations. As a Scholar, the expectation is to DPS. If you want to heal, advertise yourself that way and you may find a group where the Astro or White Mage focuses on the damage. If you can't handle larger heal requirements or DPS in between sharing the healing role, then quite frankly, Savage is too much for you at this point.

If you wish to be blunt, in Savage content, yes, it's "DPS or gtfo." The only exception is if you can solo heal most of the fights. While more doable in A9-10. It's incredibly taxing to handle in A11-12. Expecting to go into the hardest content in the game without playing to the most efficient level is silly. FFXIV encourages healer DPS. If that meta isn't for you, then neither is this game.

That isn't me twisting your words, by the way. I'm simply not sugarcoating how things are.

[TheMurrkin4]

i think you hit the mark spot on. i myself enjoy playing Whm when i'm not letting the Inner Beast out, and i feel extremely useless if i'm "only healing" as i've been prompted by teammates a few times under no form of duress due to improper healing. Long story short, you always have spare time as a healer, if you're not helping burn mobs or bosses, you're hurting your squad. Now with that said, if you let your tank go down because you threw out one too many stones, you have not performed your duty as a healer AT ALL.

[Melixy]

For starters, I don't think anyone should go in with the mindset that SCHs have to off-heal. Especially with this current raid tier, there's a lot more mitigation happening than burst healing (with obvious exceptions like Mega Holy after Temporal Stasis and Gravitational Anomaly in A12S). I tend to main heal A9S and A10S as AST while the SCH does more work in A11S and A12S since there's a lot more necessary mitigation in those fights. Both the SCH and I are accuracy capped because a single offensive spell that misses the boss is wasted MP and I'd rather sacrifice some secondary stats so that my spells actually hit the target.

Second, I don't understand why healers opt to not DPS. Is it laziness? I don't understand not wanting to DPS, even on simpler content such as a dungeon. It makes the run go so, so, so much faster. It can cut down on time you spend in expert and it helps push phases in raid. The combined DPS of myself on AST and our SCH in A9S is more than that of an average DPS player. We're able to do this and also do our primary job of keeping people alive effectively... so why wouldn't we? Not doing it hurts the group and raiding is a group activity. And before anyone says "Yeah just because you can do it doesn't mean I can"-- it's all practice. All you gotta do is try and work at it.

Third, every fight is basically a dance. You repeat the dance every week in raid... and after time, you, as a healer, will recognize when big damage is happening and when no damage is happening. So you will inherently know when it becomes safe to toss out some DPS. There's no fight in this game where the damage is constant and to the point where healers only have to focus on healing. In fact, there are parts like A12S Chronofoil, where Alexander Prime doesn't even do any damage, auto-attacks included. And if you're in any decent group, the ranged should've had MP regen going for the healers during the boss's ultimate, so it's not like you're going to be low on MP. In that instance, it would make me upset to just see a healer standing there doing nothing.

Almost every ability in FFXIV has a purpose in combat. Ignoring offensive spells as a healer is ignoring a significant part of the job. Imagine if I just ignored all my cards on AST because those aren't "healing" anyone and only Bole mitigates damage. My static would light my bum on fire at best. And they'd had every right to because I wouldn't be doing my best for the group's sake. And raiding is a group activity. You have to help the group in any way you can or you won't succeed.

But make no mistake-- healing IS your job, and it DOES take priority over DPSing. And there's no such thing as "I wasn't allowed to heal when necessary"... if it's necessary, then by all means, heal. If people told you otherwise, then there's either a bizarre miscommunication happening or they're not the type of person you want to run with. It's just silly to ignore a bunch of abilities that the game has given you. If you don't feel comfortable DPSing yet, then maybe take time to practice it. If you need help, there's a bountiful amount of sources that would love to help you out-- myself included.

[Sylvain]

Because it helps the team.
[/QUOTE]
I might have been not clear enough. The problem isn't that it helps or not. I know it helps and it's actually great that it does.
The problem is that healer are so grossly overpowered in this game (3aoe heal and raid is stopped) that reaching the point where you can spend a significant portion of the fight nuking the boss is too easy. Hence the whole "healer should dps whenever they can" issue so many have.

Thanks to cleric stance having a nearly non existent cooldown. You can swap stance so effectively that, unless the fight is extremly healing intensive to the point both healer need to spam, you can at the very least always squeeze some dot every 20-30sec.


The problem (to me) is that you're not required to overgear the content nor to have a group that dodges absolutely everything perfectly to do dmg.
Even if people do mess up, even if you do lack gear, you'll have the time to put dots. After all, failing a dodge in a savage raid usually result in a OS or weakening debuff which will OS you next time so... you can't even heal that.

So right now, instead of having healer-dps as a reward, it becomes something canon that you have to do whenever possible.



I know these are different games, but I'll still compare.

When I was raiding as a healer in WoW, the default raid dmg was high enough to keep healer busy. Assuming one was assigned to tank dmg and one to raid dmg, as long as people would dodge properly, you could effecitvely have 1.5heal if not 2 on the tank most of the time.
People not dodging properly on the otherhand would force heal on them which would increase the amount of heal, the assigned healer on the tank, has to dish to keep him alive, effectively making him run low on mana much faster. Also, since tanks take far greater dmg in WoW than FF, you can't reasliticaly have one healer dropping the tank for more than a few seconds without the threat of a dead tank.

In that scenario, when you reached the point where every one dance perfectly, tank have more gear and we psuh through mechanic faster, yes you could have one healer shoot some dmg time to time.

But in FF with
tank health dropping slowly
aoe heal being too potent
song making healers a botomless pool of mana
And finally, every aoe applying a weakening debuff making the next one OS you (or nearly)

Healer can't be overwhelmed by the dmg the group takes as it will extremly quickly range from
Everyone dodges --> nothing to do
People don't dodge --> they stack debuff and it's simply a matter of time before they get OS by the next aoe.

I've gone over why either decreasing healing output or increasing damage input without significantly changing the current system would not accomplish the intended goal.

While more would probably be needed to change the current system. I do believe it would change a lot. One being probly less healthy for the game though.

If SE were to substiantally increase the boss dmg outpout, currentely as most aoe tend to do already do high dmg (which is then healed through 1click thanks to our op aoe heal)
It would probably be through the boss AA, if you raise the AA enough to the point where you effectively need one healer spamming the tank and occasionnaly the help of the second one.
Well... unless this is a weird ass fight where there are no raid dmg, you couldn't realistically drop the tank heal, even for 5sec, as the tank would probly die, leaving one healer to the raid heal.. which is already how it is played.
But this would simply lead to health bar being much more spiky which would probly not please most casual healers.

On the other hand, reducing our heal potency and keeping the same kind of dmg output boss currently do, if done properly, would still force both healer to constantly heal, but instead of fearing that the tank get bursted during that 5sec you're in cleric stance, this 5sec you're not healing would just be heal you have to catch up.
This could also allow different mechanics than burst, weakening debuff, and simple OS to punish the raid.

I'm not a big fan or player's health yoyoing every few sec. I do not miss burning crusade tanks passing from 100 to 0 in 0.8sec.
So I'd prefer having less potent heal.

I mean, ultimately, think of the current raiding meta.
But divise direct heal by 2 and aoe heal by 3. (and perhaps, to make the switch to cleric stance a more meaningfull act, increase its cd to 20sec)
Healer would probably be able to heal through the current mechanic (spare a few one that would need a nurf, like A11 burst on one player).
If most of the time one healer is enough, then 2 healer full time should also do the trick.
People would still agree that heal dps is prefered, but since healer would take much more time top the raid, (and if on top of that you do the 20sec cleric stance thing), then this conversation would probably doesn't exist as the number of group reaching that point, where you can effectively lose one healer for 20sec would be something much harder to reach and more "hardcore" (at this points it means you have 1/4th of the current heal, for 20sec...

And that's assuming there is something wrong, which is arguable.

There is something wrong with the current system, otherwise this post wouldn't reach this amount of pages and It wouldn't be a recurrent topic on english and japanese forums and reddit.
I mean, do you see people creating thread to say as healer they love to stance dance and apply dmg? No you don't. Because these people either don't care or like the system. (Most) People don't go on forum to say how much they love one aspect of their job. They either ask question, do request, propose idea or complain. Or ultimately do guides.

Right now what you see is a new post about the dps heal issue every now and then and people arguing wether or not they should dps, what it means to be a healer etc etc etc...
When this topic will reach its end, you'll just have to wait a few month before seeing someone asking "why should I dps?" or "why don't healer want to dps?"

So the fact this topic is something recurrent proves there's something wrong.
I've never seen a post remotely close from that on WoW and Wildstar forums, this is only a FF14 issue (thanks to cleric stance...)

So please don't say you're not even sure it is an issue because you might enjoy the current system.



edit: clarified the healer post part as it was ambiguous

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Honestly, Sylvain, you won't get an argument from me regarding healing potency. I have long advocated for either healing spells to be weakened or mobs to actually hurt. This same problem extends to tanking as well. If I pulled the dev preferred 3-4 pack, the healer could /sit at the dungeon entrance and I wouldn't even notice, let alone even consider a cooldown. In fact, you barely need cooldowns for mass pulls in Xelphatol. I rotate them to help the healer DPS more than anything. One means of increasing the difficulty and heal requirements could be simply adding more consistent attacks from enemies as a whole. It's hard to say precisely what changes might benefit the game overall, but I do hope Stormblood improves upon where Heavensward lacked. The sheer ease of dungeons and the devs constant attempts to gate off massive pulls hurt the enjoyment, at least for me.

[AmeliaVerves]

Have given an example, that was a group. Was calling out my experience and that could happen to anyone too. This is just a waste of time tbh Ill let those that understand what Im sayin understand and those that dont dont. Im not sure anyones interested anyway

So, ever since you are not reading what I write (seems like it's because my arguments are valid and you cant compete with them, so I will take this as a win for me ), I will stop here and repeat myself one last time.

You are talking about the whole community referring to one group, which is more than illogical and when I asked for more examples, to prove your point in saying "a lot of people are like that", you refused to give me one, so this is finished for me and I will stick with the thought you found one group, which refused you and you were pissed about that and now complain about everything.


(Sarcasm confirmed.)