If you thought the healer DPS debate would change with the change...

[Shurrikhan]

Not to derail this thread lol, but have we considered what things would be like if reversed?

It'd be unchanged.

You'd have people saying "always be casting something worth casting" and the others saying "but I don't wanna".

If our allies dealt less damage based on their % missing HP and healers' personal DPS was dog feces, then your "DPS healers" (and indeed any optimizing healer) would still deal damage part of the time. They just wouldn't hold on to off-rotation healing abilities for until a clip-less weave is possible, because that would now create less tDPS for their party, where it used to create more.

What's optimal would shift, but the fact that you'd have some people wanting to play optimally and others either not caring about or purposely neglecting optimal play wouldn't change.

[Granyala]

Also, do we actually have any concrete evidence that the devs are ignoring this feedback? For all we know they’ve already fixed all the issues and are just waiting to release the patch.

Not how it works.
Ultimately balancing of classes only matters in savage raids. Right now SE has to wait for normal mode raid data to see if there is sth amiss then they will adjust the extreme outliers before savage. Further adjustments will probably happen in patch 5.1.

Also, I don't see any issues. Trust me, if the game were changed and mandated full time healing, A LOT more people would complain and a lot more people would wipe because a lot of healers would not be able to cope.

Really, people are blowing this healer DPS thing way out of proportion. You have a few hardasses that are bitchy about it, the vast majority doesn't give a hoot either way.
Personally, I'd never pressure a healer into DPSing nor kick him (except for savage ofc). I might roll my eyes at his idling but I wouldn't say anything.

[Beelhi]

So I just did the 80 dungeons as Healer and honestly it's not much different than the 60/70 dungeons were back then at this point into the expansion. I had probably 70-80% dps uptime and not a single person died so I really struggle to understand where people get the "healers are forced to heal more now" from. The tank even told me "amazing heals" even tho i literally spammed holy/glare most of the time (and no, they weren't sarcastic because I left with 2 coms having a dps friend running with me)

If you indeed do heal most of time in a dungeon you're either
1.) a bad player/don't know the job well
2.) very undergeared and/or have party members very undergeared
3.) very unlucky to get
a.) a tank that doesn't know his job and doesn't use cd's
b.) dps that stand in every aoe possible and/or do single target rotation when tank pulls everything

If you don't dps as a healer when you can, if you literally stand still for 80% of the fight, I will kick you if you catch me in a bad mood because you might aswell be AFK.
If you dps to the point where you neglect healing, I will kick you, because you're interfering with my gameplay.

Basically, if you're on either side of the extreme in this debate I'll refuse to have you in my party.

And this is what this whole debate comes down to, extremes on either side.

I can also say that most of my leveling with WHM has been smooth, only once did i leave a party and that was because the tank pulled everything, used ONE CD, and then died when i went oom because I had to spam Cure II and even with OGCDs, Thin Air and Lucid I could not keep up because once the tank died, the mobs were barely 2/3 HP and some even closer to full HP because the two casters in the party were doing SINGLE target rotation. (and I don't go advocating for single target spells/actions to be removed outside of boss fights because a minority of players don't know how to do their job)

[TonberiScholar]

Due to a few design choices, Healer DPS is never going to "change" or "go away".

Reasoning:

• Devs STRONGLY ENCOURAGE sticking to recommended party role comps and STRONGLY DISCOURAGE excluding roles/jobs where possible
  
• Devs don't want you to replace Healers with DPS Roles if solo-healing was possible, so fights are built around spiky damage periods that need more available cooldowns than most Healers that'd attempt to solo can manage
  
• The "reward" for more efficient Healing in other MMOs is to either drop a Healer for a DPS role spec or job to gain more overall party DPS
  
• Since the devs don't want you to do this, they instead baked that "estimated party DPS increase" into the Healers themselves, using the tools they'd already added for soloing/thematic purposes

So, they can't get rid of it entirely without changing their fight design, estimated role composition and rules on party setup.

What they *can* do, however, is better integrate the Healing and DPS sides of the kits. Make the downtime between heals more relevant to your healing job and make the DPS less boring.

You can keep the standard reactive/familiar healing kit for every healer (homogenized a bit if need be), and use that as a baseline.

Then use the DPS kit and everything else to differentiate the Healers.

I have...opinions...that some of you may disagree with. Hopefully some of the following is at least an interesting read.

GCD Cast Time Heals are Boring and Restrictive

See above. Stuff like Cure, Benefic and Physick (and the fact we get them so early) are, at the root of things, why we have these arguments all the time.

You get them early, so it's "assumed" that's what you're supposed to be doing all the time. Your early game revolves around either spending a GCD healing or spending a GCD damaging, and it creates a false dichotomy. You're supposed to do both, but with undergeared/learning Tanks and learning DPS, that's often a challenge.

Then later on you get other tools that, when used more efficiently, can almost completely obsolete the standard GCD Heals. Stuff like Regen, Tetra, Lustrate, etc.

What I propose is this: We remove the GCD Cast-time heals from the early game, entirely. So Physick, Cure I, Cure II, Benefic I and Benefic II are (temporarily) gone.

• Give every Healer, as their first healing ability (level 2), the equivalent of Lustrate, Tetragrammaton or Essential Dignity. 3 Charges, 20s cooldown. (No Aetherflow interaction/requirement on Lustrate)
  
• Give every Healer, as their second healing ability (level 8 or so), Regen or an equivalent (Diurnal Benefic or a mini Fey Union that doesn't use gauge).
  
• Every Healer's third healing ability should be a Medica clone (use Fey Blessing for Scholar's). GCD, cast-time, kinda expensive.
  
• Fourth Healing ability: An oGCD, low-cooldown AoE HoT. Whispering Dawn, Medica II, Diurnal Aspected Helios, etc. The latter two would be made into MP-free oGCDs with their duration equal to their cooldown, to prevent spamming.
  
• Keep the current slate of Role Abilities (meaning they all have Esuna, Swiftcast, Surecast, Lucid Dreaming and the others).
  
• Add Physick (SCH version, remove from SCH baseline) and an Energy Drain clone ("Aspir") as Role Actions for Healers

You've made any existing Healer able to handle Duty Finder content without homogenizing much beyond what already exists, and you've still got most of their ability sets left to mess around with.

And, surprise, most of these are oGCDs, with an instant-cast and a long-cast time big ol' AoE Healnuke also represented.

This opens up the floor for some changed "Healing Downtime Filler" that can be used to better differentiate the Jobs without getting DF randos killed.

**Making DPS Filler Interesting but also Healing-relevant**

I think, especially with Shadowbringers, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone that actually enjoys Healer DPS rotations. Even those of us who try to live up to ABC get kinda frustrated with them. They're boring and they don't interact with any of the rest of the kit. That should probably change.

White Mage

They should stay mostly the same, honestly. The "iconic" FF healer should be the simplest one to pick up and also the easiest one to wreck face with.

There's a reason "Holy" and "Flare" were the two forbidden magics in FFV's tower scenario.

• Afflatus Misery's the best thing, Job-wise, that they've added in Shadowbringers. It's the first instance of tying healing and DPS parts of a kit together. It's great, but could use a few tweaks.
  
• First off, it needs to be a bit stronger to better "compete" with "just spam Glare", even though it's better at AoE and lets you use healing resources and then get some of your potential "lost" DPS back. Bump it up to like 1000 Potency.
  
• Make Afflatus Misery grant a Potency buff to your next three Glares
  
• Let an expiring Dia have a chance to grant a Lily
  
• Let a Cure II proc have a chance to grant a Lily
  
• Keep the current Lily generation on top
  
• Give WHM back Cure I at 20-something, as an MP-free 1.5s Cast GCD heal. Make crits with it reduce PoM's recharge time.
  
• Their DPS kit stays mostly the same, and they get cures charging nuke to buff a filler, with the DoT charging the nuke and their "unlimited" heal having a chance to speed up their hyper-mode.
  

[Lersayil]

So I just did the 80 dungeons as Healer and honestly it's not much different than the 60/70 dungeons were back then at this point into the expansion. I had probably 70-80% dps uptime and not a single person died so I really struggle to understand where people get the "healers are forced to heal more now" from. The tank even told me "amazing heals" even tho i literally spammed holy/glare most of the time (and no, they weren't sarcastic because I left with 2 coms having a dps friend running with me)

If you indeed do heal most of time in a dungeon you're either
1.) a bad player/don't know the job well
2.) very undergeared and/or have party members very undergeared
3.) very unlucky to get
a.) a tank that doesn't know his job and doesn't use cd's
b.) dps that stand in every aoe possible and/or do single target rotation when tank pulls everything

If you don't dps as a healer when you can, if you literally stand still for 80% of the fight, I will kick you if you catch me in a bad mood because you might aswell be AFK.
If you dps to the point where you neglect healing, I will kick you, because you're interfering with my gameplay.

Basically, if you're on either side of the extreme in this debate I'll refuse to have you in my party.

And this is what this whole debate comes down to, extremes on either side.

I can also say that most of my leveling with WHM has been smooth, only once did i leave a party and that was because the tank pulled everything, used ONE CD, and then died when i went oom because I had to spam Cure II and even with OGCDs, Thin Air and Lucid I could not keep up because once the tank died, the mobs were barely 2/3 HP and some even closer to full HP because the two casters in the party were doing SINGLE target rotation. (and I don't go advocating for single target spells/actions to be removed outside of boss fights because a minority of players don't know how to do their job)

I think WHM is the exception as always, for better or worse. On dungeon back-to-back pulls its very rare as an SCH that I don't have to healbomb the tank. In the best of cases I have about 50% of my GCDs open for AOE. In the worst of cases that drops to 0% and as soon as I run out of CDs / resources, the situation devolves into mana use only, which potency wise is rather weak, usually not enough to maintain the tank if the mobs are still going in full force (aka low dps).

On normal pulls / bosses though? Yeah, dps all the way. Aside from bursts / mistakes most if not all of my GCDs are free for Broil spam.

[Shurrikhan]

They are not required to dps.
Give it just 1 second to listen to this guy (interviewer).

https://youtu.be/5la_nyC5BO0?t=281

Yoshi P is our boss of the bosses, what do you need more than his words itself?

A game that gives us something else to do with our (massive amounts of) downtime than just dpsing?

That the director says "I'd rather not have healers be obliged to dps" means no more than a principal saying "I'd rather none of my students fall behind." It's a nice enough intention, but meaningless until that leader and their staff make it so.

[Wiccan026]

Let's not lose sight of the fact that the WHM in question here isn't taken seriously. Don't judge a community by it's village idiot =(

They weren't the only ones I've seen or cry for a nerf for the other two healers though.

Nerfs almost get called for in games by somebody when the job/class they play isn't in the right spot, instead of asking for buffs (I'm also not saying people don't ask for buffs either) and the sad thing is most time the devs nerf versus buff in a good portion of those situations.

I think my main problem here is Im just being a stickler for what actually is, which is kind of pointless :P.

Not a lot of folks asked for nerfs but some did, and that's never the better route to take.

[Banriikku]

Wow we are still at the point: stop doing nothing? Really? That was not the question - never was. Healer DP's dont matter at all so a healer can prioritize heals and buff over damage. You dislike that? You say healers dont change ? Thats untrue at all and you know that. Only whm have the neede buff received. Astro and Scholar need some adjustments. Even Whm need some adjustments because that damage potential and mitigation potential is too high (stun) also the mere numbers of instant heals is a little bit off the chart. So the only healer that has a donwtime after heals are Whm. Also successful clear of a Dungeon/Raid is always a group effort. I dont demand anything besides the assigned job of the respective class - tanking, healing, damaging - thats it. If things like this keep up Se will take harder measures to counteract this.

[Alphras]

First of if your group expects you to dps, you are expected to dps. That's it. Discussions on the healer forums don't help to change this expectation.

In this game you have alot of downtime as healer a in regards to your global cooldowns (I would say up to 80% in the current extreme trials, or up to 100% with a static). You have two options to fill this downtime.
1. Do damage
2. Do nothing

At the end of the day, dps (combined healer dps mind you) is a measurement of how well you are healing.

They are not required to dps.
Give it just 1 second to listen to this guy (interviewer).

https://youtu.be/5la_nyC5BO0?t=281

Yoshi P is our boss of the bosses, what do you need more than his words itself?
Its just that and only that, just because NPC deal damage from time to time does not mean the whole game balance is based on it.
Heck our game got even a rebalance patch where healers lost one of their DPS skill, and tanks got squisher to enforce healers to heal more, it clearly moved towards healers to heal more, you could see it clearly in fflogs where SCH and AST are dealing relatively a lot less dps than they used to.

Healers are not required to dps, fin, fim, finito, ende, koniec.

His opinion doesn't really matter in this discussion at all if the game isn't designed to reflect it.

[Awha]

Snip

I get what you are saying, so if I may ask what are you arguing for? Based off your statement regarding requirements of a role I would say you do not think doing the bare minimum is what healers or any role should be an appropriate standard. So where do the differences lay?