The Healer DPS Problem, The Toxicity it incites

[Connor]

Considering content is literally designed for healers to not be healing, it’s not hard to see some people saying ‘let’s just play this so I can spam one (maybe 2 if they’re feeling particularly productive) dps ability the entire dungeon and get 3 comms for exceptional contribution’. I mean, it’s fairly easy to evidence too lol. Go into any fight and do high healing but mid/low dps, you’re going to get heavy side-eye from your party and 0 comms. Do absolute minimal healing but high dps? 7 comms you win healers lol. You could solo heal an an entire party of new players through difficult content and carry them across the finish line, and you’re still going to be labelled a shit healer if you don’t maximise dps the entire time. And ultimately, why wouldn’t you maximise dps and just ignore healing? Maximising healing is literally just a case of pressing of pressing one of many, many, many buttons lol.

You can very easily get through an entire dungeon without touching a single heal if you have the right tank, and even if you do need a heal you can just smash one of the many, many, many overwhelmingly powerful oGCD heals to get like the majority of their health back at once.

Honestly I could see them making healers like Bard where the ancillary role (healing/support) becomes entirely automated as part of the main role (dps). Like, healers will just spam the ever-loving fuck out of their one dps spell and every time they do it’ll put the party back to full health. And the worst part? I honestly think a large amount of players would praise such a design.

Truthfully, I don’t even think some players want healers to be healing; they essentially want them to be dps with some extra healing OGCDs cooldowns (nothing that will EVER interrupt their precious dps, of course).

Then you’ve got the even more depressing fact that the game is literally designed for healers to be this way anyway . The devs just refuse to actually make healers full dps with some healing oGCDs because I guess they’d have to admit the last 5-6 years of healer design was just a massive failure lol, and they can’t be having that

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Are you saying I have to do more as a healer than just making sure the Duty Finder queue pops?

/s

[Denji]

the only thing i'm going to be toxic about here is the fact that you decided to center-align your post, op.

but for real; the only tank class i've seen that can properly get away without a healer is a war and even that requires strictly adhering to specific cds being popped in a particular order and the assumption that they know to sometimes hold onto a 100% angy bar just so they can pop bloodwhetting + thrill and max out the heals in conjunction with inner release which ends up just being a dps loss anyway because of said holding onto angy.

now don't get me wrong, i get a sense of satisfaction when we blast through everything in a few minutes but i'm not interested in running at 100% all the time forever always. sometimes i just wanna relax, get my tomes/WT nonsense and not have to hyperfocus on what i'm doing and that's, y'know, fine and always allowed.

it's the same reason why i don't like people who pull for me when i'm tanking lmao. like i'm not a baby, i'm going to pull wall to wall even if my healer sucks because i know how to mitigate but you're killing the vibes and encouraging me to slow down by having to repeatedly save your stupid ass.

if the healer wants to heal, go ahead. less for me to worry about. although i'm gonna speak up if i see you just standing there spamming cure 2 instead of just popping a regen and medica II and occasionally healing me to get blood lilies because that's just silly.

[GoatOfWar]

You can thank War for this; the tank that set the standard.

[sharknado]

When I was on my first job, as a healer, I did notice later on that some tanks needed way more healing than others (first assuming it was the instance or whatever). Then I dared to start leveling a tank job and noticed that healers differed a lot between dungeon runs. I even learned what and how to pull in older instances based on healer performance/behavior - like if a healer gets overwhelmed easily in Snowcloak I did not mass pull the drakes doing AoE as some healers just could not handle such relatively low but high in total damage. I also had cure III spam and healer running nearly on no mana or cure I in Endwalker leveling dungeon.

There are multiple DPS in the group, but usually one or two tanks and healers. If they perform in any way out of the ordinary it will be visible vs the DPS. And players will behave out of the ordinary just because their skills, and intent aren't to optimize performance or the game didn't tell them what and how to do it. The average player isn't watching YT or Twitch and isn't on the forums. We would have millions of posts daily if they did.

The ARR experience is dated and things like freecure, cure 1/2/3 isn't helping either and that's the only starting healer fresh players get. Tanking is a bit more clear I guess. You take an axe, you go smash things with an axe

[Dzian]

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.

You can clear a lot of the games content barely pressing any buttons at all.. wasn't that long ago had that video circulating where players literally auto attacked there way through content.

Which leads to this.

Lazy gameplay breeds lazy players, plain and simple.

When you can clear content without trying. What's the point in trying.

A lot of the content this game has its actually harder to fail than suceed

[Jojoya]

[CENTER]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.

Are you certain that healer was aware they have those oGCD abilities outside of you saying so?

My own experience with a relative who started playing the game last year (I didn't find out until several months later) - if the game didn't place an ability on their first hotbar (they hid the second one to reduce screen clutter since it was empty when they first created the character), they didn't know the ability existed. They thought the game would put all the abilities they needed onto the hotbar.

The game tutorial does a decent job of explaining things to players with previous RPG experience but those without are left in the dark. Opening the Playguide doesn't help - there is no Class Guide, only a Job Guide. It has a list of jobs that the new player can't play because they're not level 30 yet.

They need to add a Class Guide to the Playguide for new players that lists the classes they can play and how they relate to jobs. Even the job guides aren't that helpful because you have to scroll down through the wall of PvE and PvP actions before you get a "these are your basic combos and this is the information on your job gauge". And that's it.

So if the answer was the player didn't know those oGCDs even exist, I'm not surprised. Rather than expect every player to know what they're doing (regardless of level since boosts are a thing), try to be polite and helpful. As players, we're going to be better teachers for new players than any written guide SE creates.

If the player doesn't want the help and they're preventing the party from completing the duty, then vote to kick.

[Derio]

WAR pretty much set the dungeon standard. If you are a healer and you have a warrior in your party you wont do a single GCD heal for them or even a OGCD heal for them because their self healing is that strong.

[ZephyrMenodora]

WAR pretty much set the dungeon standard. If you are a healer and you have a warrior in your party you wont do a single GCD heal for them or even a OGCD heal for them because their self healing is that strong.

It's so bad from a Healer POV that I forgot I sometimes have to heal at times lol.

[Semirhage]

Oh are we pretending that healers who deal damage because it's the thing that skilled healers do and is intrinsic to their skill ceiling and healers that deal damage and forget to heal because they're terrible at healing are the same people again?

Never change, FFXIV community. HeALeRs shOULd hEaL onLy, yet again, every time, from people who don't play healers and aren't interested in their gameplay loop. Or from people who *do* play healers and aren't particularly skilled at them, so they like to project their lack of skill onto people who are actually good at healing, because someone maximizing their throughput and occasionally slipping up is totally worse at the game than Sylphie Curespammer. :eyeroll: