For anyone who mains a healer and have joined a serious raid group will have come across about the meta when it comes to healers and doing damage.
For those that do not know the current healing meta is that if an Astrologian is in the party they will be the main healer who will focus on all the healer needed while the White Mage or Scholar will simply do damage until any extra healing is needed (which is a problem I will go into later) and the same applies that if you do not have an Astrologian then the White Mage will do the healing (and still damage where can) while the Scholar will mostly focus on dealing damage.
Personally, I am not against doing damage as a healer but I am a great believer that if you are doing a fight where you do not need two healers you may as well take another DPS (such as the Scholar going Summoner) which is why I still hope that we will see a job called Geomancer split away from Conjurer so for fights where someone else is solo healing I am still able to play the class I enjoy the most.
Anyhow, getting onto the debate – should healers actually be expected to deal damage in duties. There is a few view points on this and one of the major ones is no and that those that enjoy healing should just be able to focus on healing and not expect to have to deal damage. A problem with that is Final Fantasy XIV’s design is pretty much you don’t need two healers – nothing really hits that hard to always have to be healing and that every single damage in the game is predictable once you know what to do and thus can just pre-cast everything.
Another debate I have seen and one I can agree with is that healers should not be expected to deal damage in order to make up from the lack of damage done by the damage dealers. On the other side, there is little reason to not deal damage as there is quite a bit of down time during raids and it can be boring at times to just sit there.
The real question honestly is that people have to be allowed to decide if they want to deal damage or not and not to have a stigma applied just because they enjoy healing and don’t feel like doing damage and not to simply replace with another healer that would (although I wouldn’t blame someone for kicking a healer and replacing for a healer that will damage as it does make things go faster).
The problem as written above is that the game has to make the healers do our actual job more – why not have protect need refreshing after a far shorter time or something.
Either way, this short rant is really just to vent about it but the current healer meta is likely to stay but a bit of advice I would give to those just wanting to heal – play as an Astrologian as they tend to be the main healer right now while White Mages and Scholars deal damage.
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