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.