It's past time, Yoshi-P...

[TaranTatsuuchi]

Bah, seems I missed the 'healer dps' debate...

Oh well...

It is not a problem on the direction of the game. It is a problem on the direction of the community. Community is the only responsible of this situation. A community which don't let tank be tanks and healer be healers.

Actually, the meta is based on the design of the game.
It is the game's design that has brought about the dps meta.

And would require the content designers to adjust how they design their content to change that.

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Your "3-5 seconds of downtime" is a complete lie. People already made several videos of them doing nothing but healing through a dungeon to show how much downtime there is and how few healing spells you actually need to cast.
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I think it was Taika who had a 17% active time run of something as a pure healer? That means 83% of their time spent in that dungeon was inactive.
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Indeed it was Taika.

And I happen to have the quote available.
Just for posterity...

Yesterday I did some testing on how it really is like to only heal in expert roulette, which I think is a good example because it's content probably ran by majority of player base this discussion is relevant to.

I queued to expert roulette as WHM and we got Xelpathol. In addition to me, the party consisted of a WAR who had never tanked the dungeon before (no endgame experience as WAR), a BLM (his Savage job, currently on A11S progression), and a DRG (no endgame experience as DRG). So quite a random party composition with people more or less familiar with their roles in that dungeon.

The WAR pulled as much as he could at the time (not knowing the dungeon as tank he failed this a couple of times) and I would only use my healing abilities. This was the result, my every single heal cast for the whole 21 min dungeon run:

- Regen x24
- Medica II x16
- Asylum x7
- Assize x4
- Cure II x5 (between pulls, not during them)
- Tetra x4

So in addition to Medica II, the only thing I actually had to cast in the whole dungeon was Cure II, which I did a total of 5 times (between pulls, not during them). Everything else was instant cast abilities. I also used Eye for an Eye on tank and sometimes Esuna, and I cast stoneskin on everyone between pulls.

Even with this little use of healing, my overheal was 35,9%, so the actual healing requirements for this dungeon are even lower. I was active 17% of the whole dungeon while the rest of my group members were active 72-77% of the dungeon.

This is a perfect example of the low healing requirements in the game and how it causes a huge activity difference between a healer who doesn't DPS and their group members. On that run I did not contribute nearly as much as my group members, in fact I was using /icam and doing /mandervilledance while they were actually making an effort. If it would have been the tank or a DD only being active 17% of the time and dancing and idling for the rest, they would have been removed from the party, but for me, some people would actually argue I was doing just fine.

I took a video of the whole run and uploaded it in case someone's interested. This is the final boss fight, during which the only things I actually cast were 3 Medica IIs. Other than that, I used Regen (4), Assize (2) and Asylum (2). Here's the direct link to the fight: https://youtu.be/jBgMe5uHPsE?t=17m17s

TLDR: Not DPSing as a healer means you're just being carried by your group members for over 80% of the dungeon time.

[Xerek]

Not a full solution, but what if SE were to tighten iLvl caps? Using Expert, for example. Ala Mhigo was rough my first time in my i290 gear, as was Shinryu normal. Now I can stomp both with impunity. While some of that can be attributed to experience, I have to think my i338 gear has a weeeee bit to do with it.

So I wonder, if there was a tighter iLvl limit, would it help make it feel more chalenging?

[Tridus]

Not a full solution, but what if SE were to tighten iLvl caps? Using Expert, for example. Ala Mhigo was rough my first time in my i290 gear, as was Shinryu normal. Now I can stomp both with impunity. While some of that can be attributed to experience, I have to think my i338 gear has a weeeee bit to do with it.

So I wonder, if there was a tighter iLvl limit, would it help make it feel more chalenging?

Ala Mhigo already caps at 310, and you're stomping it there. That's not a huge uptick from 290. It would make it harder to cap it at 290, but it'd also remove any sense of progression.

The main reason why it's gotten easier is people know what to expect in it now, whereas we were all figuring it out early on. Rabanastre is showing the same kind of curve on it, where it started off as a nightmare fuel gong show but is quickly getting smoother as familiarity goes up.

[Paladinleeds]

I've been mulling over things, and I've had a potential idea for how SE could approach if they did actually decide to change it.

You know how in certain solo duties you get that "Breaking limits in a way only a Warrior of Light can" (for example, providing a 100% uptime powerful regen on tanks and DPS, and I'm not sure what on healers)? What if they retuned the DPS of healers and tanks to be garbage, made it so mitigation and healing was much harder, but in order to allow progression in solo content, that buff just shows up more often? With it being retweaked to allow for more damage from tanks and healers too. That would allow them to crush this "DPS meta" without breaking solo duty. Should they do it? I'm on the fence, as much as I'd love to see it, I fear it may end up being detrimental to the game. But, if they DID decide to pursue it, this is how they could do it.

[Sylvina]

That quote is absolute bullshit for 90% of all roullete pugs, the tank takes way too much damage especially on big pulls for any of that crap to be true. If he had to heal THAT little he's either way overgeared or the tank was way above average.

[MoroMurasaki]

That quote is absolute bullshit for 90% of all roullete pugs, the tank takes way too much damage especially on big pulls for any of that crap to be true. If he had to heal THAT little he's either way overgeared or the tank was way above average.

"I don't like facts that are inconvenient to my narrative, must be untrue despite fflog/video evidence."

C'mon there buddy, I know irrefutable evidence is inconvenient when it's supporting your opposition but to call a perfectly fine example of an experiment by a very respected forum user 'bullshit' is really childish.

Will every expert roulette only require 17% healing? No, but Taika didn't say that, the point was made that this one did. Maybe that Savage prog BLM tipped the scales with great DPS. Maybe the WAR could have been more conservative in his pulls to require even less healing. The point is not that every expert roulette requires 17% healing uptime but rather that if a dungeon can be completed at 17% then it seems insane to argue any healer doesn't have the time to throw in some DPS.

[Taika]

That quote is absolute bullshit for 90% of all roullete pugs, the tank takes way too much damage especially on big pulls for any of that crap to be true. If he had to heal THAT little he's either way overgeared or the tank was way above average.

I'm showing you mine and the tank's gear at the end of the video if you're interested in checking instead of shouting "BS!" All of the tank's gear was from previous patch tier, and my item level was 249 and the patch was 3.4 so available item level was 270 (with 275 weapon). Tank also had never tanked the dungeon before (and didn't play tank in general).

I found the most interesting thing in this experiment was that I didn't need to cast a single Cure spell during any pulls or boss fights (I only casted them a few times between pulls). I did cast Medica II which was the only cast-time ability I used. My overheal % was quite high (in part because of the Medica IIs), so could probably have gotten by with much less healing too.

[Sebazy]

That quote is absolute bullshit for 90% of all roullete pugs, the tank takes way too much damage especially on big pulls for any of that crap to be true. If he had to heal THAT little he's either way overgeared or the tank was way above average.

Actually it really isn't.

When there was a huge healer debate on the forums here, I made a habit of recording and uploading pretty much every roulette I did. The old Cleric Stance made it especially easy to work out healing vs DPS uptime and I can confirm that even on particularly rough runs, I never saw my CS uptime drop below 80%, with 85-90% being attainable with a decent group. My active rate averaged around 90% which is still the case today and I feel that very little has changed on this front. Bosses can still almost entirely be healed with regen and oGCDS. I'll willingly admit that I throw a few cure IIs here and there during trash pulls but I've found my best results working those lilies leading into Assize where possible.

Amusingly I did a 2 WHM run on Skalla the other day, on the super large pull leading to The Old One (second boss), over the ~50 seconds it took us to kill that we did: 4 regens, 2 cures, 2 tetras, 2 assizes, oh and 4 Aero IIIs and 17 Holys. That's on arguably the largest most annoying trash pull going in current content.

[Tint]

[...] I never saw my CS uptime drop below 80%, with 85-90% being attainable with a decent group. My active rate averaged around 90% which is still the case today and I feel that very little has changed on this front. Bosses can still almost entirely be healed with regen and oGCDS. I'll willingly admit that I throw a few cure IIs here and there during trash pulls but I've found my best results working those lilies leading into Assize where possible.

wiiiich brings us back to the original purpose of this topic. not IF healers should be dpsing, since we already have cleared this question years ago, BUT if healers should be dpsing this much.

up to 90% dps uptime on a healer is in my eyes not acceptable. this should not be possible.

healing has turned into a dps role with an annoying utility and most boring rotation. rather than throwing dps skills between your heals, wich feels good and rewarding, you have to stop dpsing to throw a heal, wich causes a negative impact on your dps and doesn't feel rewarding in the slightest.

[Sebazy]

wiiiich brings us back to the original purpose of this topic. not IF healers should be dpsing, since we already have cleared this question years ago, BUT if healers should be dpsing this much.

up to 90% dps uptime on a healer is in my eyes not acceptable. this should not be possible.

Absolutely agreed here, I'd love to see disruptive mechanics diverting my attention from just smashing aero/holy as hard and fast as I can. The issue of course is how do so without ruining things for people less geared or mechanically skilled than me.

In all honesty, the only thought I have would be to dabble with CC again much like what we had in the ARR Betas, it was the norm to CC everything due to trash packs being larger and hitting far harder relative to how less geared people were. Juggling a bunch of Repose timers makes it much harder to go nuts with the dps!

But that raises another questions: Why do you need DPS jobs if a bunch of healers - that's is on the bottom of the DPS numbers - are capable of meeting DPS checks and not hit enrage? And why DPS jobs, that deals way more damage than a healer and a bit more than a tank, don't meet those minimum numbers without the healer's and tank's help? Isn't that not even fishy?

Regarding point 1, the bulk of content is tuned to such a low standard that the DPS checks are barely worthy of the word. Thus Shinryu getting killed by 3 people, or mid field raid teams killing O1S on day one of it's release with 20+ deaths. On the flipside, O4S was literally unkillable upon release without a fairly significant amount of healer and tank DPS pitched in.

I've got no qualms with the content, but I think SE need figure out a means of getting a much more progressive difficulty curve going across a wider range of content than what we have now.