The Healer DPS Problem, The Toxicity it incites

[JiraTyanu]

The Healer DPS Problem: Toxicity it incites

Y'know, I'm not even going to beat around the bush with this. The title says everything, I'm sitting here doing a dungeon and a healer refuses to even use their off GCD abilities.

Sure the tank was a gunbreaker but that's not an excuse for the healer not to fill the role they chose, this is what brings me to the forums today. Not just for this run, but to address what I feel is becoming a MAJOR problem.

In FFXIV we have all sorts of jobs that fill multiple roles, Tanks/Healers/DPS. Y'know, the "holy trinity" as it were.

All jobs have a little bit of the other roles stuff, healing, dps, etc. Having mitigations and heals on DPS, having DPS and mitigations on healers, having heals and DPS on tanks.

But where the problem comes in? Is when people see the .01% players parses and think "Oh that's all that should be needed."

I legitimately had a combat mentor in the novice network tell me ahem.. "Tank's don't need a healer to even clear ultimate content."

To which I say, congrats I guess? Because that doesn't speak for the average player, the average individual isn't gonna be some person who picks the best of the best tank and gets BiS gear, running only the hardest content you can get into, topping the charts, etc.

No, the average player wants to sit here and enjoy the game. The toxic mentality of "Healers shouldn't have to heal." is a plague that needs to go away.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

I honestly just think Healers need more responsibilities and Urgency.
Healers should add Deeps when they can, but they should Ultimately be focused on Healing. The game just needs more time for Healers to be..yknow, Healers.
We also wouldn't be having these "Healers aren't needed" instances, if Tanks wernt designed to self-sustain to pretty much pick up the healers slack.

[JiraTyanu]

I honestly just think Healers need more responsibilities and Urgency.
Healers should add Deeps when they can, but they should Ultimately be focused on Healing. The game just needs more time for Healers to be..yknow, Healers.
We also wouldn't be having these "Healers aren't needed" instances, if Tanks wernt designed to self-sustain to pretty much pick up the healers slack.

I mean you're not at all wrong there, they should definitely increase the urgency.. But y'know. Just because tanks can heal? Doesn't mean healers should ignore their role.

[Amnmaat]

Healers are designed for ultimates, everything else doesn't require you to use oGCD healing. This is the amazing game with the best job design out there (sarcasm).

[DixieBellOCE]

The Healer DPS Problem: Toxicity it incites

Y'know, I'm not even going to beat around the bush with this. The title says everything, I'm sitting here doing a dungeon and a healer refuses to even use their off GCD abilities.

Sure the tank was a gunbreaker but that's not an excuse for the healer not to fill the role they chose, this is what brings me to the forums today. Not just for this run, but to address what I feel is becoming a MAJOR problem.

In FFXIV we have all sorts of jobs that fill multiple roles, Tanks/Healers/DPS. Y'know, the "holy trinity" as it were.

All jobs have a little bit of the other roles stuff, healing, dps, etc. Having mitigations and heals on DPS, having DPS and mitigations on healers, having heals and DPS on tanks.

But where the problem comes in? Is when people see the .01% players parses and think "Oh that's all that should be needed."

I legitimately had a combat mentor in the novice network tell me ahem.. "Tank's don't need a healer to even clear ultimate content."

To which I say, congrats I guess? Because that doesn't speak for the average player, the average individual isn't gonna be some person who picks the best of the best tank and gets BiS gear, running only the hardest content you can get into, topping the charts, etc.

No, the average player wants to sit here and enjoy the game. The toxic mentality of "Healers shouldn't have to heal." is a plague that needs to go away.

Wanna know the solution to this?

Stop making normal content braindead easy and design it so people have to PLAY THE GAME to progress.

The fact that you can clear any and all normal content in the game without a healer just speaks volumes to how piss easy everything is in the current state of the game.
Give every single fight a heal check, give every single fight a DPS check.

Then watch how the playerbase improves to compensate for it.

Lazy gameplay breeds lazy players, plain and simple.

[Absurdity]

I'm sitting here doing a dungeon and a healer refuses to even use their off GCD abilities.

Healers not using oGCD heals is also not a healer dps problem.
Not using your completely consequence-free healing that can be weaved between wearing out your 1 key isn't a healer dps problem, it's a "being bad at the game" problem.


Those people have existed since this game's inception and you will never get rid of them, especially not when the job design team caters to exactly the kind of people that never want to improve and will never improve.

[Heroman3003]

Give every single fight a heal check, give every single fight a DPS check.

Then watch how the playerbase improves to compensate for it.

I think they learned a lesson as early as back in Heavensward that making 'regular' content too difficult will not breed better players, it will breed sudden, extreme and vocal pushback against it, and since then didn't try that one again, despite circumstances changing quite a lot by modern day.

[CelestiCer]

On one hand? you do have a lot of toxic Healer parsers... for some reason it's often WHM parsers. Had my encounter with Dice when I don't even do parsing, I loath it... Admire if you can do it? but my god its something else if you get DPS shamed for it. Or yelled at in VC by a WHM parser for having a Non-Kaiten opinion about doing all I can to help another party clear a fight. " What Celesti!? What!? What?! Say it then!? What?! " <- Ironic as I don't talk on VC ever... Like this overfocus on DPS or performance cause healers don't really have much else to do and healing has been made either to easy in most content? or trivialized to the point of irrelevancy. Look at what they done to the Omega Ultimate raid on how its possible to clear it without a healer. And then there's a good group of healers who really wish their Job or role to be improved in either Design or gameplay... and for years nothing is done. Their probably asking the same thing some of us DPS are where they don't necessarily want the skill-floor to increase keeping it player friendly? but skill-ceiling lifted to allow for some skill-expression beyond spamming 1 DPS button...

Stop making most of the content that's casual braindead... or? Stop making the Jobs braindead that we use to do braindead content allowing for truly optional skill-expression? or both, as @Dixie points out I agree... It only encourages players to be lazier. Nothing that encourages players to improve. And once met with an ounce of hardship? they loath it. Ironic... as the MSQ of Endwalker states the opposite, that we should embrace hardships to get the best out of us and overcome adversity. Instead? we just like to be lazy, easier, dumber, more streamlined, every job hollower...

[Supersnow845]

Square designs jobs so that healers aren’t needed in 90% of content then people get angry when healers end up patchwork fixing this problem by playing a gimped caster

You know what we had the design you are asking for, every single dumb suggestion y’all come up with is literally just “coils”, and we dumped it, you know why, because this isn’t an MMO, this is an e thot simulator with a side of braindead combat

[Amnmaat]

Square designs jobs so that healers aren’t needed in 90% of content then people get angry when healers end up patchwork fixing this problem by playing a gimped caster

You know what we had the design you are asking for, every single dumb suggestion y’all come up with is literally just “coils”, and we dumped it, you know why, because this isn’t an MMO, this is an e thot simulator with a side of braindead combat

I did expert roulete the other day with 2 tanks and 2 dps the other day and we didn't miss the healers at all, in fact our clear time was no different from when we run it with a healer.

Wanna know the solution to this?

Stop making normal content braindead easy and design it so people have to PLAY THE GAME to progress.

The fact that you can clear any and all normal content in the game without a healer just speaks volumes to how piss easy everything is in the current state of the game.
Give every single fight a heal check, give every single fight a DPS check.

Then watch how the playerbase improves to compensate for it.

Lazy gameplay breeds lazy players, plain and simple.

Instead of solving the wall to wall pulls and how it can destroy innocent healers who are either learning the role or learning a new healer job, square enix keeps designing every dungeon with 2 mobs between bosses. Literally almost every dungeon from level 1 to level 90 is designed the same way, and we call this the best mmorpg ever made? Hahahaha

Look, what xiv needs is new blood, new blood who's ready to create something new; what if the beginning of the Aetherfont dungeon was a 5 minute wave of polar bears which ended with a huge aether-drinking bear (coca cola reference) before you face the first boss? What if after the first boss you had to race, yes, you heard me right, you had to race penguins to the finish line as you make your way to the second boss; everyone in the party would need to outrace all the penguins or the entire party would have to re-race them again. What if after the second boss you had to swim underwater to catch 100 fish to summon the last boss?

I know I went off from your original point, but my point is that square enix is just bland and out of ideas. If they're worried about big pulls and how making squishier tanks would stress out healers, then how about not designing dungeons with big pulls anymore? Instead, introduce new encounters in content/dungeons where you don't have to balance healers and tanks around big pulls.

PS. Yes, I know tanks and healers are designed around ultimates, but one of their big worries is also the toxicity that occurred early on in Stormblood when they made tanks very squishy. I know a lot of you don't remember this or weren't around for this. But that's why White mage had a lot of healing skills during that expansion, they actually tried to make tanks squishy so that healers would start making use of all these oGCDs. But you can all guess what happened after people complained that tanks were too squishy? They gave tanks more hp and more defense. That mentality started the slow decline in battle content.

I still remember tanking and healing the first 2 stormblood expert dungeons and feeling badass healing or tanking all that incoming damage; it took good knowledge of the job you were using.