Healer & Tank DPS (WoW vs FFXIV)

[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.

[Kuwagami]

I have to disagree as far as farm groups go. In farm groups you're wanting to squueze out every last malm of efficiency you can so you can get more kills in less time.

I would like to agree with you, but "skip soar or disband" prevents me to. People are just THAT bad at the game.

Don't get me wrong. Competent groups naturally skip [insert mechanic here] because their dps are actually pushing numbers (2 tanks 2 healers 4 dps style). When a "farming group" with 5 or even 6 dps goes the "skip mechanic or disband" way, there is no way they aren't trash-tier players. You just have to look at lakshmi farm groups. If they are going 5 dps solo tank way, you know they're bad and you should avoid them.

[Galgarion]

wordy-words

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. The obvious solution is to just embrace this unintentional design philosophy and run wild with it by making the raids harder, and that's what super-savage is all about, I think.

[kikix12]

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.

Sorry, but I can't agree. If these raids being cleared "ahead" is not intended, then why are they implemented before it is "intended" for them to be clearable?! It's simple. They are there as a challenge, to say that "If you think you can squeeze every last bit from your job, go ahead and kill it early.". If you don't want to take it, then wait till better gear is available.

As for the discussion, there's one simple addition I would add to the high-DPS healers.

Since their main job is healing, the DPS on healers is somewhat simple, as in, you will deal large part of your potential DPS even if you push one button over and over. For DPS jobs, you may very well stay behind if you are not particularly skilled. A bad player DPS'ing as a healer is likely to deal more damage than a bad player DPS'ing as a DPS class, as illogical as that sounds. So yes, people want the healers to attack if they have downtime from healing.

[Shurrikhan]

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..

Gave players DPS toolkits and frequently more than 50% downtime, in which to use said toolkits in group content.
= Did not intend healers' DPS toolkits to be used in group content. (?)

...What?

[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.

[Kitfox]

Staying in dps stance, healing and poping the minimum amount of CDs needed to barely survive in order to push out more dps is not playing optimally if you aren't in a static with members you are used to play with and trust, though. At best they'll barely follow up and manage to keep you alive, at worst you'll waste everyone's time by making people wipe needlessly in order to get 10 seconds faster kills.

Did I claim otherwise? What is optimal depends on the situation and risk tolerance. However, saying that you won't use the abilities on your hotbar because "they're not intended to be used" is asinine. If something is useful, you use it, if not, you don't.

[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.

[Galgarion]

Gave players DPS toolkits and frequently more than 50% downtime, in which to use said toolkits in group content.
= Did not intend healers' DPS toolkits to be used in group content. (?)

...What?

Keep your elipses to yourself. They've obviously come around since then, since the Smith quests now actively encourage healers to throw out some damage, but if you seriously thought they ever intended from the start for statics to use it to cheese savage, then you're crazy. If you're considering responding with a sarcastic rejoinder rebuking me for saying healers shouldn't dps, please look at my prior posts saying that Healers SHOULD dps (only lazy ones don't), and super-savage is clearly Square acknowleding that the player base is right re: support dps. (It is good).

[Kuwagami]

However, saying that you won't use the abilities on your hotbar because "they're not intended to be used" is asinine. If something is useful, you use it, if not, you don't.

Noone ever said that though?

I mean, I've seen debates on whether to take dps jewelry or not, whether to stay in tank stance or not, whether to be trigger-happy with cleric stance or not (rip I guess), but I have yet to see someone straight up ignoring 50 to 80% of their skills just because they have no direct action on their primary role (keeping hate or healing).

I did see some people back when CS was a thing saying that they weren't DPSing in PUGs because that was stressful to have 10 seconds of healing downtime with idiotic tanks/dps they could meet sometimes, but none were saying that they wouldn't consider dpsing out of CS to get used to it.


The problem with the "tanks should do 3k+ dps" crowd, is that they totally ignore circumstances in which said dps is allowed to occur. I am more than happy with a 2k dps tanks (showing they know their damage rotation and switch to dps stance when they aren't tanking anything) or healers with 500 dps (showing they did dps when they had downtime and confidence to not be ready to heal). I am not happy with 2k dps (your other temamates aren't here to carry your braindead button spamming).