The Healer DPS Problem, The Toxicity it incites

[PercibelTheren]

I never get the design philosophy Where healer needs to contribute to dps check. I admit l am biased because l used to play warcraft and l also play gw2 right now. After l looked at a parse after a gw2 raid, l see a dps did like 10 times more damage than me, and my friends told me that's normal because as a support, my job is to keep people alive and maintain their offensive buffs. I feel that's how healer/support should be...

I personally tend to prefer more offense oriented supports in most games. I would be fine with healers being mostly green DPS, but then the DPS part of our kit would need to actually be interesting.

[Zeastria]

I never get the design philosophy Where healer needs to contribute to dps check. I admit l am biased because l used to play warcraft and l also play gw2 right now. After l looked at a parse after a gw2 raid, l see a dps did like 10 times more damage than me, and my friends told me that's normal because as a support, my job is to keep people alive and maintain their offensive buffs. I feel that's how healer/support should be...

Agree, the whole point of having different roles is for them to be different...
Never understood the need to turn every role into a DPS..
If i wanted to play DPS - i would have played a DPS!

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I never get the design philosophy Where healer needs to contribute to dps check. I admit l am biased because l used to play warcraft and l also play gw2 right now. After l looked at a parse after a gw2 raid, l see a dps did like 10 times more damage than me, and my friends told me that's normal because as a support, my job is to keep people alive and maintain their offensive buffs. I feel that's how healer/support should be...

I bolded a small part of your reply as one of the many reasons why we spend so much time dealing damage. There's simply nothing else to contribute meaningfully once adequate healing is satisfied 90% of time.

[ChonkGoblinSuprem]

That is probably more an issue with someone who would rather be playing DPS but without even the little bit of patience to wait their turn in queue so they pop as a Healer and make it everyone else’s problem.

[SamSmoot]

Healers shouldn't have to heal? In about 60% of the roulettes I join, I'm frantically trying to keep the tank alive, and I'm lucky if I have time to DPS at all.

[Supersnow845]

Healers shouldn't have to heal? In about 60% of the roulettes I join, I'm frantically trying to keep the tank alive, and I'm lucky if I have time to DPS at all.

Honestly that either says more about you or you just have a string of really bad tanks

9 dungeons out of 10 I never have to touch a GCD heal and of those 9 5 of them I’m barely even touching an oGCD because the tank is healing themself anyway

[ASkellington]

Honestly that either says more about you or you just have a string of really bad tanks

9 dungeons out of 10 I never have to touch a GCD heal and of those 9 5 of them I’m barely even touching an oGCD because the tank is healing themself anyway

This. Depending on the tank I'm either cursing someone to the seventh pit of hell or... well no I'm still cursing someone to the seventh pit.

Either I'm cursing the tank because they have absolutely no idea what they're doing and no matter what CDs I have I couldn't keep them alive because they refuse to mitigate and stand in E V E R Y T H I N G (still thinking of YOU GNB in Malika's Hell with the 7 vuln stacks!) or I'm cursing the dev team for designing bores of bosses and trash because my tank is barely taking damage even in a W2W and TBs hit like a noodle even if they DON'T mitigate.

There aren't many inbetweens. Like I don't have a tank that's good, cycles through CDs and still have to GCD heal with them being the problem.

[Darnath]

Similiar experience as SamSmoot

I wish I had these godly groups people who they barely have anything to heal.

Dungeon trash? Unless it's a WAR tank, it's use Essential Dignity when the tank dips. Oops, tank dipped again. ED. Oops, tank dipped a third time? GCD time. Also, unless they make a way so we can see the timer left on tank CDs (especially short ones) don't know when their Bloodwhetting/Heart of Corundum/TBN is up to even know if the tank is gonna pop one of those and the healer can focus on DPS. Heck, I'd even like a way to increase the size of certain buffs so it's more obvious "Oh, GNB popped Heart of Corundum. Don't heal until the buff vanishes." And especially DRK 70? You're just piling on heals because they don't even have a short CD to use on trash. Why PLD got Sheltron moved to 40's while DRK is short CD less until 70 got me besides Dark Mind.

Raids or Trials? You ever get that group where two or three people keep moving about with the "scatter" markers (aka everybody gets hit with a mechanic) then they all give up and stand still and boom? It's not like Party Finder's where people are on discord and can say "Healer stay, I'll move". And no chat bubbles to make it clear who'll stay (if a person has a macro set to say that). So again heal bombing to fix that if they even survive that.

I will agree for the most part Dungeon bosses and the majority of raids tanks are pretty self sufficient. But there are situations where I'm also pumping out heals in spurts. I prefer to keep people in the 80% or higher depending on what's coming up. I know "That's too high" but I trust the server tic as far as I can throw my car. Too many times I've waited to the last second to throw an Essential Dignity. Nope, goes on me instead and now I'm really in panic mode.

Just another reason I won't touch anything higher than duty roulette goods I guess. I can't stand the concept of "Letting people be at 50% is fine". Maybe if the netcode wasn't such garbage unless you're on NTT's backbone.

[Supersnow845]

Similiar experience as SamSmoot

I wish I had these godly groups people who they barely have anything to heal.

Dungeon trash? Unless it's a WAR tank, it's use Essential Dignity when the tank dips. Oops, tank dipped again. ED. Oops, tank dipped a third time? GCD time. Also, unless they make a way so we can see the timer left on tank CDs (especially short ones) don't know when their Bloodwhetting/Heart of Corundum/TBN is up to even know if the tank is gonna pop one of those and the healer can focus on DPS. Heck, I'd even like a way to increase the size of certain buffs so it's more obvious "Oh, GNB popped Heart of Corundum. Don't heal until the buff vanishes." And especially DRK 70? You're just piling on heals because they don't even have a short CD to use on trash. Why PLD got Sheltron moved to 40's while DRK is short CD less until 70 got me besides Dark Mind.

Raids or Trials? You ever get that group where two or three people keep moving about with the "scatter" markers (aka everybody gets hit with a mechanic) then they all give up and stand still and boom? It's not like Party Finder's where people are on discord and can say "Healer stay, I'll move". And no chat bubbles to make it clear who'll stay (if a person has a macro set to say that). So again heal bombing to fix that if they even survive that.

I will agree for the most part Dungeon bosses and the majority of raids tanks are pretty self sufficient. But there are situations where I'm also pumping out heals in spurts. I prefer to keep people in the 80% or higher depending on what's coming up. I know "That's too high" but I trust the server tic as far as I can throw my car. Too many times I've waited to the last second to throw an Essential Dignity. Nope, goes on me instead and now I'm really in panic mode.

Just another reason I won't touch anything higher than duty roulette goods I guess. I can't stand the concept of "Letting people be at 50% is fine". Maybe if the netcode wasn't such garbage unless you're on NTT's backbone.

I live in Australia on NA and 20% is still too high

Not like the tanks will even let themselves get that low with their level of self sustain though

[Sebazy]

Dungeon trash? Unless it's a WAR tank, it's use Essential Dignity when the tank dips. Oops, tank dipped again. ED. Oops, tank dipped a third time? GCD time.

This is more of a problem with gear scaling coupled with the strange difficulty spikes in leveling dungeons vs Experto.

Dungeons are much more threatening at or around min ilvl. The problem is that in leveling dungeons it's pretty common for people to be around that mark, whereas once you hit the level cap and get a couple of weeks of tome+24 man gear down you're absolutely smoking the recommended ilvls for expert roulette and thus we get the face roll.

I recently did a run of Lapis and avoided all healing oGCDs with only Assize on cooldown as usual. No benisons, no tetras, no bene, no asylum and just one fat fingered PI at the end of boss 2. I got a ~90% dps log on that run despite having to use Regen etc as my main source of healing on a DRK tank. Did I have to let the tank dip low to get that sort of damage whilst missing half of my kit? I'll let you be the judge of that.

Back onto the thread in general:

It's a depressingly common opinion that people seem to think that a healer does good DPS to the detriment of their party's safety. In the hands of a half decent player that's willing and able to pay attention, that's not the case at all. A big part of the problem is that at level 90, all we have to contribute to the party in basic endgame content is our damage which is tedious beyond belief, thus when significant swathes of the healer player base can't help but tune out and stop paying attention to the main screen I can only suggest that perhaps griping over the DPS mentality is kind of missing the point here. The real issue is how unengaging our gameplay is in casual endgame content. Until that gets addressed or we actually get another more interesting way in which we can productively contribute to the party, this isn't going to be resolved.