Latest Official Developer Statements About Healer DPS?

[Renathras]

They completely changed stance. P8S before nerf wouldve been 100% impossible to clear without healer DPS imo.

You can't use P8S before the nerf since they explicitly said it was tuned too high and shouldn't have been.

We know this isn't true because of raids like E8S being mathematically impossible to clear on patch without healers doing DPS, even in top 1% optimized speedrun environments.

This is more the issue. It may not be INTENDED, but it seems to be true. But:

I'm aware of remarks from 2021.

...this is the stated position.

Given all of this...

I'm just curious to know what the devs have officially said about this sort of thing. Thanks for the help on that!

...I think the reality is that Yoshi P and the Devs don't want Healers to have to deal damage. Any fights that actually REQUIRE it in order to clear on patch are probably accidents/overtuned/unintended given all the statements, including the 2021 ones, to the contrary. The most charitable (to the DPS argument) way to look at it is that they want Healers to have an easy DPS "rotation" so they can easily achieve whatever DPS needs (if any) the encounters assume Healers will contribute. At worst to that argument, it means that they don't intend encounters to require Healer DPS and don't tune for it, so any Healer DPS at all is a bonus for the party.

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EDIT:

That quote from 2021 should be taken with a humongous grain of salt. I would find it interesting to know how really "unique" Sage feels to an experienced healer ? I would say that while it has some nice animations, it's not really really so distinct from the other healers.

You can somewhat question my skill, but I've been healing in MMOs since the early 2000s. SGE feels pretty different to SCH. Nizzi made a good breakdown of this on the healer forum here: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6309157

SGE is far more mobile, but its healing is also much more responsive while SCH's kit is more powerful but requires more forethought. Even their DPS optimizations are different and in kind of opposite directions; SGE has damage neutral (or even positive) movement options while SCH's movement tool is a damage loss, SCH has a weaving DPS option at the cost of healing and mitigation resources while SGE has an independent GCD damage gain but requires near-melee range and its healing/mitigation resource is exslusively for healing/mitigation, and SGE has a strong bomb party heal (that's again damage neutral) while SCH has a direct damage loss but extremely powerful party barrier combo. SGE is more light and responsive but a bit weaker for that agility, while SCH has more weight and clunk but also more power.

They're alike on paper from a 10,000 foot overview (that also handwaves away some differences that are kind of important), but on the ground level, they play completely differently, imo.