The reason we healers DPS

[Urthdigger]

We've all been seeing the outcry over the healer changes. I won't be discussing that, not directly anyway, but I noticed a common thread from non-healers wondering WHY we care about the removal of DPS tools. I've seen arguments such as "Leave the DPS to the DPS and just heal," "Go play something else if you want to deal damage," and "You're just a DPS that wants a faster queue." Lets be real, if that last one was true I'd be a tank main.

The truth is, DPS healers like healing. Well, most of them anyway. There's no excuse for ones that forget to heal entirely, they're bad and this thread isn't about them. We all come to healing for different reasons, some of us want to do what we can to help a party succeed, some like the complexity of juggling various roles, some of us get a kick out of bringing a party out of the depths of failure. If we didn't like healing, we wouldn't be healers. Plain and simple. So, why care about DPS then?

The problem with healing is you can only be so good at it. There's a maximum limit to the amount of useful healing you can do, which is the amount of damage that the party is taking. In FFXIV in particular, this limit is EASILY reached. You can ignore most of your kit and spend half the fight sitting around and still hit that limit on most fights. Once you can heal that much, what point is there in doing better? Why pursue better gear, why study your class and make full use of your kit, why care about anything regarding your job? It won't help you keep people alive any better. It won't make the fight any faster. It won't make the mechanics easier on anyone. There's literally no point in improving past this point if you view healing as the only thing you should do as a healer.

The only thing improved healing-wise by improving your gear and skill once you hit that point is the amount of GCDs spent healing. Maybe that extra MND means you can top off that tankbuster in one cure II instead of two. Maybe you toss a divine benison on beforehand and tetragrammaton after to top them off without spending a single one. Maybe you work with your cohealer on who will use what abilities when to avoid stepping on toes. These are all examples of improving your play that reduce the amount of GCDs spent healing. But then, what do you do with all that free time?

Standing around is boring and helps nobody. But if you're not doing anything else, more DPS is always appreciated: It makes the fight take less time, allowing for more farming and reducing how long the party needs to go without making a mistake. It can reduce how long troublesome phases last, or even skip them entirely. It's an area where more gear and skill always leads to helping the party.

The truth of the matter is, we DPS because we want to excel at our job, and there is a hard limit on how much you can improve with just healing. Even increasing the damage output won't majorly change anything, it will just move the goalposts back a bit: You can't make something that's still difficult to heal with near the best gear you can wear without making it impossible at the entry level or making stats useless for healers.

I look at the amount of DPS I can put out as a badge of honor, but every drop of DPS I put out comes with the unspoken partner of "And I did it without anybody dying." I view healers who don't DPS as bad because it either means they have a lot to improve of in terms of skill or gear (And I'm happy to help them reach that point) or they need an improvement in attitude because they CAN help the party and willfully refuse to do so.

I love healing. But I don't need any more help doing it, not unless you drastically change combat across the entire game. What I could use are more ways to help the party in meaningful ways, more ways to do something productive with my downtime.

[Nedkel]

Because its fun.

Less DPS less fun.
Healing only is stupid and should never be consider as a good form of gameplay itself.

[Payadopa]

Why do you even play a healer then? That's like saying DPSs should tank more.

I'm glad they want to focus on healing.

[Avidria]

Because its fun.

Less DPS less fun.
Healing only is stupid and should never be consider as a good form of gameplay itself.

Personally I don't enjoy having to dps as a healer, and very much prefer spending most of my time just healing, with dps being optional. That's just more fun for me.

That said I recognize that that has never been the style of healing in this game, which is why I almost never play healers in FF. So I totally get why so many healers are upset, but I can't say I am. I might actually give AST and SCH another shot actually...

[Freyt]

Personally I don't enjoy having to dps as a healer, and very much prefer spending most of my time just healing, with dps being optional. That's just more fun for me.

That said I recognize that that has never been the style of healing in this game, which is why I almost never play healers in FF. So I totally get why so many healers are upset, but I can't say I am. I might actually give AST and SCH another shot actually...

People are overreacting to the DPS loss for 5.0. It won't be that big, and people will still expect you to DPS as a healer. If you don't want to do both, then you might to play anything other than healer.

[Avidria]

People are overreacting to the DPS loss for 5.0. It won't be that big, and people will still expect you to DPS as a healer. If you don't want to do both, then you might to play anything other than healer.

Hmm. Well, I'll still give it a shot I suppose. If it really isn't that big of a change, I'll just stick with bard I guess haha. Or dancer, if that's fun. We'll see.

[EaMett]

People are overreacting to the DPS loss for 5.0. It won't be that big, and people will still expect you to DPS as a healer. If you don't want to do both, then you might to play anything other than healer.

I think you're missing the point of the complaints. Healers don't care how much they dps. Or what their dps numbers are (other than relative to each other). What healers do care about is that healing downtime is about ~70% of their time for ultimate and closer to 90% for the rest of the encounters. That's a lot of time to be spamming one or two buttons, and subsequently a lot of time not having fun.
Healers like WHM have been asking for a bit more variety and options for their downtime. Instead they're still in the exact same situation but SCH was brought down to their level. Healers aren't even asking for a full dps rotation or anything, just by the twelve give us more than 2 buttons to press.

Not to mention that this also goes against any gameplay improvements we've been asking for these past 2 years in order to fix some clipping and weaving issues on healers. They fixed those for AST recently when they reduced malefic cast but they're breaking it in 5.0 for SCH (why?) and not fixing it for WHM.

Is there a bit of a knee-jerk reaction? Sure. But keep in mind SE has a history of making what I can only refer to as "mind boggling" healer changes over the past few years. Things like Lilies that every healer in the forum only had to take a glance at to figure out would be useless, and the first iteration of PI? youch. Etc. etc. These aren't just simple mess-ups. They're "I don't really play healer much" levels of screw ups. We've been rightfully concerned.
Adding to this they've kept baiting us with lines like "we need to balance healers before so and so", yet healers keep being this footnote in their live letters. Last live letter was hilarious. They went over the tanks with some depth, went over gunbraker with in-game footage, went over most of the DPS classes with in-game footage and explanations. And somewhere in the middle there they had like 5mn of "well those are the healers, whm wings, sch seraph, something something AST" done, no in-game footage, nothing, they even skipped a healer slide LOL. And this is right after they reassured and tried to hype us about big plans they had for healers (when it turned out DNC was a dps and not a healer). What are they thinking?
Honestly, the most info we ever get about healers is because media and influencers are proactive in asking them questions (bless them). If it weren't for that we wouldn't have gotten anything out of SE. Sadly those questions are usually generic and miss the role subtleties.

So yeah, when their "great plan", a 4 year endeavor and roadmap to set up a 4th healer is finally revealed.....we get these changes dropped on us? And this might be pedantic of me but they didn't even get some potencies right (and it's not tooltip errors like there have been for other classes). I know they're "subject to change" but c'mon after 6 years these should be basic concepts for them. It certainly isn't helping us feel confident in their ability to deal with healers.

So yeah, healers got their panties in a bunch, but it's a whole 2 year buildup and set of events that led to it.

[Reiryuu]

I think you're missing the point of the complaints. Healers don't care how much they dps. (snip).

While I agree with most of what you said, DPS or at least contribution is still an issue. Why? Simple. You have only a certain amount of time to complete an encounter. No amount of healing will ever be able to extend this time limit unless SE decides to remove it for this expansion (which doesn't seem likely). If any one class of healer paired with any one else does not have the healing output to keep a raid alive from the damage an encounter outputs, the heals on that job will have to be buffed. This means, that in order to complete any given raid, you still need to focus on which job is going to give you the most DPS contribution to beat the clock.


Yes, I want something to do during downtime when I'm not healing... not that WHM has many oGCD abilities to use in the first place so I have to wait on cooldowns regardless most of the time... But I'm still worried that since, well, WHM still has no raid utility to buff raid DPS in any way and I'm really not convinced that Misery is going to do anything since... well... 4 GCDs for 900 potency < 4 GCDs for 1200 potency with glare... I guess if you really have to use that lily heal enough you get... something back... but... I dunno it seems rather meh to me. Not sure if I'm missing something or what. Everyone seems convinced it is the most epic ability ever.

If all jobs are equivalent pDPS wise, and all jobs have enough healing... then AST and SCH with their buffs are still going to win out because of that tiny bit more that can help beat the clock.

[Brightamethyst]

I think you're missing the point of the complaints. Healers don't care how much they dps. Or what their dps numbers are (other than relative to each other). What healers do care about is that healing downtime is about ~70% of their time for ultimate and closer to 90% for the rest of the encounters. That's a lot of time to be spamming one or two buttons, and subsequently a lot of time not having fun.
Healers like WHM have been asking for a bit more variety and options for their downtime. Instead they're still in the exact same situation but SCH was brought down to their level. Healers aren't even asking for a full dps rotation or anything, just by the twelve give us more than 2 buttons to press.

Exactly. Healers don't want more DPS options for sake of big numbers. They want them because the alternative is pressing one button over and over for 80% of any given dungeon or trial. Healing is so strong and damage is so predictable that there's literally no need for healing most of the time. For the vast majority of any dungeon the only options are DPS, or stand around doing literally nothing.

Is there a bit of a knee-jerk reaction? Sure. But keep in mind SE has a history of making what I can only refer to as "mind boggling" healer changes over the past few years. Things like Lilies that every healer in the forum only had to take a glance at to figure out would be useless, and the first iteration of PI? youch. Etc. etc. These aren't just simple mess-ups. They're "I don't really play healer much" levels of screw ups. We've been rightfully concerned.

Again, this.

Are we being unfair by prejudging things we haven't personally tried? Maybe a little, but considering how badly SE has screwed up healers in the past (and how reluctant they are to fix even obviously broken things) we have every right to be concerned by these changes. I can only assume that no one on the dev team has ever actually played a healer before, because I can't imagine any other scenario that leads to these changes.

I hope we're all wrong. I really do. Unfortunately, there's a very good chance that a few weeks for now the expansion will go live and prove all the pissed off healers right (at which point nothing will change for months, or even years, because SE.)

[PondHollow]

People are overreacting to the DPS loss for 5.0. It won't be that big, and people will still expect you to DPS as a healer. If you don't want to do both, then you might to play anything other than healer.

Pre-release complaints about Stormblood turned out to be very accurate, and what you're missing is that more than half the time we will likely be pressing one button. Think of it like this: running Sastasha as a Scholar is boring because it almost entirely consists of casting Ruin. Everything from level 1 to 70 is going to be like that, and it's unlikely Shadowbringers will be any different without making it unclearable for a lot of less skilled people or new healers.