Healer & Tank DPS (WoW vs FFXIV)

[Katryn]

It all boils down to ABC: Always Be Casting. No one is going to freak out if a tank needs more heals, but no one wants to deal with a healer spamming /dance emotes during combat. Ever. It's lazy and disrespectful to the group. Fights in this game are scripted, so people can ideally memorize when to use abilities. It's not like WoW where everyone is constantly taking spikes of damage. And healers here tend to have a fair number of ways to fix their mana if it's running low, so generally 'standing to get mp back' does not apply. As for tanks, their dps skills / rotation work in tandem with their hate gathering skills so not using them would be a waste.

[Taika]

Whether it's taken into account or not is irrelevant. Stop blaming design intent for your inability to play optimally.

This is also true: it makes no sense to not contribute with DPS when you easily can, and whatever is said about the development decisions has no effect on how the raids should actually be played. Also, it's simply ridiculous to claim asking your DDs to overgear the content AND perform 85-90% of their perfect optimal capacity just so you can perform at 50% (probably less) is somehow fair.

[Galgarion]

snip

Bosses have too much health, and healers have too much free time. Full stop. This is a game where everything is telegraphed in advance. Anyone who can brush their teeth while breathing through their nose is capable of avoiding excessive damage, leaving healers with absolutely no reason not to join in on the gang-bang. I'm not a huge stickler for healers always dpsing, but just because I'm laid back doesn't mean they aren't being lazy as hell if they're just standing there waiting for my bar to dip enough to justify a Cure II. No stance dancing = No excuses, y'know?

[Shurrikhan]

It's less that WoW healer dps is low as that they're further into their latest expansion by which to see a bigger gap between DPS and healer dps potential, and that in WoW it takes more GCDs to top someone off, by combination of higher player HP proportionate to damage and less healing, and there being more "white" (AA/steady) damage, on average.

Being able to try to ban anyone who would point out your performance objectively probably doesn't help the situation, as the assumption may end up being that the DPS are playing optimally, thus leaving only the healers and tanks to squeeze out more DPS, when in fact they've a good twentieth or more (typically more) DPS potential to go, which means a lot over 4 DPS.

[AriaFairchild]

Mechanic skipping, ending fight early = everybody happy.

No need for savage/extreme raiding, a dungeon example is in Castrum Abania: the more drugs you let the last boss inject, the more bonkers the fight become.

If you play a WHM, how can you resist firing off Holy? Like...it's godsdamn satisfying chain-casting Holy and obliterating trash around you.

[Taika]

Oh, let's be honest here: Healer and Tank dps was intended only for "single-player mode" to let people level these jobs in the campaign without being utterly dependant on groups like support roles were in FFXI. It was completely unintended for people to use this mechanic to bust open savage raids months ahead of what was intended, and Square has been trying to put a stopper in the bottle ever since.

I can't really agree consisering how DPS has been an important part of healer gameplay since 1.0 (1.0 WHM here). They've had many chances to discourage it but instead they've been increasing its role over time by adding more and stronger DPS abilities, by making raids require healer DPS (Gordias), and now encouraging it by removing cleric stance without nerfing the damage. It's not likely they originally intended it to have as big of a role, but their design choices certainly haven't discouraged it, but had the opposite effect.

[Cenerae]

I raided WoW at mythic difficulty until the first big content patch hit Legion (by which point I'd had enough).

The healing design there is that healers are intended to be throwing out heals most of the time. If you don't outgear the content by a fair margin, you aren't going to have much free time to actually throw out any damage. And WoW healer damage is also pathetic by comparison to what the DPS and tanks can do. The one exception was discipline priest, which was designed around healing through casting offensive spells, and even they didn't have amazing DPS (if you had solid uninterrupted DPS and never had to stop to do healing, you could match a tank or a bad DPS of your own gear level).

That doesn't mean that healers in high end content don't still throw out damage. In fact, it's a very good idea to since all WoW healers have at least one mana-free method of dealing damage. And that damage can be important when pushing through new content. But in a 20 man raid, your 3-5 healers are going to account for maybe 1% of the raid's total DPS. A little more if you have a discipline priest (unless their design was radically changed since I last played), but overall not a significant amount.

And as for dungeon content, if you're doing mythic plus dungeons, you are going to be far too occupied trying to keep the group alive to have much of a DPS window.

Compare that all to here, where the healing comes in periodic bursts, and where in between those bursts you generally don't have a lot to do because your healing relative to a WoW healer is much more potent, and where a simple regen can do most of the work to negate a boss autoattacking the tank. That leaves you with time where you're not doing anything. If you're not doing anything, then there's no reason not to throw out some damage spells unless you know for sure that you risk running out of mana later into a fight if you throw one more nuke out. Healer DPS is very strong and can make up a significant portion of a group's overall damage when played well.

That's why it's made out to be an expectation here, and why in WoW people rarely care about it. The way the tanks and healers are modelled are very differently. In WoW, healers are intended to do little else besides heal, since tanks take a constant beating and healers can't just spike a tank from near death to a comfortable health level with 1 OGCD.

[loreleidiangelo]

I raided WoW at mythic difficulty until the first big content patch hit Legion (by which point I'd had enough).

The healing design there is that healers are intended to be throwing out heals most of the time. If you don't outgear the content by a fair margin, you aren't going to have much free time to actually throw out any damage. And WoW healer damage is also pathetic by comparison to what the DPS and tanks can do. The one exception was discipline priest, which was designed around healing through casting offensive spells, and even they didn't have amazing DPS (if you had solid uninterrupted DPS and never had to stop to do healing, you could match a tank or a bad DPS of your own gear level).

That doesn't mean that healers in high end content don't still throw out damage. In fact, it's a very good idea to since all WoW healers have at least one mana-free method of dealing damage. And that damage can be important when pushing through new content. But in a 20 man raid, your 3-5 healers are going to account for maybe 1% of the raid's total DPS. A little more if you have a discipline priest (unless their design was radically changed since I last played), but overall not a significant amount.

And as for dungeon content, if you're doing mythic plus dungeons, you are going to be far too occupied trying to keep the group alive to have much of a DPS window.

Compare that all to here, where the healing comes in periodic bursts, and where in between those bursts you generally don't have a lot to do because your healing relative to a WoW healer is much more potent, and where a simple regen can do most of the work to negate a boss autoattacking the tank. That leaves you with time where you're not doing anything. If you're not doing anything, then there's no reason not to throw out some damage spells unless you know for sure that you risk running out of mana later into a fight if you throw one more nuke out. Healer DPS is very strong and can make up a significant portion of a group's overall damage when played well.

That's why it's made out to be an expectation here, and why in WoW people rarely care about it. The way the tanks and healers are modelled are very differently. In WoW, healers are intended to do little else besides heal, since tanks take a constant beating and healers can't just spike a tank from near death to a comfortable health level with 1 OGCD.

This is the truest and most correct answer, I think. Talk all you want about which is "better", it really just boils down to the fact that the tank and healer roles in World of Warcraft are designed with completely different end goals in mind. Tanks have a bunch of powerful cooldowns that in some ways can trivialize most easier content, and when things like Essential Dignity crit for half a tanks' health bar and almost all of a DPSs' health bar the combined result is really just that the only way you can remotely engage yourself is by trying to optimize your damage.

If XIV ever TRULY wants to get rid of the "tank and healer DPS meta" they need to start by nerfing the crap out of their general kits, and I'm not sure how well that would go over with the lower percentile of the playerbase.

EDIT: On further reflection, a lot of it is how CONTENT is designed, too. There are large spikes of damage, but at set intervals, so raid encounters are generally more about powering health bars back to full before the next "eff you" AOE or tank hit, and a ton of the mechanics for the most part are meant to be the sort that if you screw them up even marginally, you just get one-shot or possibly even wipe your entire raid group depending. In WoW, things aren't exactly set in stone (there's still limits to how "random" the fights truly are, of course), so for the most part there's a big constant emphasis on tanks always having a cooldown up and healers always having the party over a certain percentage of health just in case. In WoW raids are more about outlasting the boss; in XIV, it's more about dancing the mechs while optimizing so you don't hit enrage.

[Shurrikhan]

In WoW raids are more about outlasting the boss; in XIV, it's more about dancing the mechs while optimizing so you don't hit enrage.

This really is the best summary available.

[Teranuh]

First, encounters are all designed to be downed without healers DPSing. It just really, really helps because DPS can't always play optimally due to AOEs, etc (I'm being really polite here....Some just aren't good).

Generally speaking, there is downtime in almost every fight for healers to DPS. As for tanks, they're always DPSing to tank anyways and simply stance dance when not actively tanking to do a bit more. It's all about efficiency - If a healer is casting nothing, there is no major damage incoming, and the healer isn't out of mana, why wouldn't they deal some damage? As a healer myself, I kind of find it annoying because it adds one more thing I have to keep track of on top of mechanics and keeping everyone alive but at the same time, this is how encounters are designed. There's no real reason I can't DPS, for example, at the start of Susano EX or right after Susy's transition - nothing's really happening at those moments to keep me from doing so.