“Oh -uhh… well… she was c-c-c-carried…”… Quick to accusations much?
Actually, quick to lie much?
No, it’s just afk is being defined as a couple gcds in this thread is just obviously stupid.
You’re not exactly better then Sop here either tbh.
Doesn’t sound like those runs were any good if the healers are in their dps specs.
You see, i don’t solely operate under the mindset of “higher numbers above all else = safer fights”. I’m more of a mechanics first kind of sort.
Not to mention, i just use normal dungeons just to get things done here and there. Unless i’m asked to do it in mythic or heroic.
How? If the person wants to take that route, i don’t see how that’s bad, unless it personally offends you. (via by calling that person selfish while selfishly making demands or telling that person is bad.)
Oh you are doing a good job of that. Clearly, by the other replies you have gotten even before I posted in this thread, as well as the person who posted after.
I actually don’t see anything wrong with Bariedorielor’s post. I do think you’re getting into the mud a bit here. Similar to how I don’t like my motives being misrepresented as wanting to harass novice healers, I don’t think that he’s eager to enforce laziness either.
I wouldn’t say “above all else.” Obviously if you don’t do mechanics right, you die and it’s difficult to call a fight where someone died “safe.” The point is trying to make when I say that is that when a fight is shorter, there are fewer opportunities for someone to die so you will see fewer deaths. If I HAVE to make a choice between mechanics and damage then I’ll pick mechanics because I’m somewhat attached to being alive, but I don’t think that’s a choice I have to make. I’d rather have both. If I can’t have both, then my new goal is to improve my skills so that I CAN have both.
When you start doing consideration like this, it’s not important to factor whether or not the current damage will kill your tank/DPS. The current damage has already happened. What you need to do is a quick analysis of ‘will the next hit kill my party member?’ If the answer to that is ‘no’, then spend the GCD on a damage spell (provided all your buffs are up). If the answer to that is ‘yes’, then spend the GCDs to come on healing until it wouldn’t. As far as I’m aware, nothing in the game can 100-0 the tank unless it’s mechanics or a party wipe.
Your tanks also have mitigation they can use to sponge damage to either enable a support DPS burst or cover for a support that might have gone a little overboard with their DPS, like Ignore Pain for Warriors. Sure, it’s not a Revenge, but it gives me wiggle room if the support’s either slow on the draw or doing something else. There’s also Last Stand which, again, keeps Warriors upright without input from the support and allows them to do something else or salvage their GCD for a heal.
Ultimately, healing accomplishes two things; it manages healing check mechanics like unavoidable AoE or tankbusters, and also covers mistakes in play from failing mechanics. Both are mitigated by additional DPS, making it a fantastic addition for any healer to add to their rotations and kit. It’s about finding the balance with your tank and how far you can push it before you need to start healing them. If I get healed from 80% to full as a Warrior, that’s kind of annoying because nothing in this game threatens me at 80%, even without Ignore Pain or Last Stand. That could have been damage.
ABC is about spending your GCDs wisely. That means using open GCDs to advance the overall goal of the party; defeating the encounter. If you decide to, say, spam Power Word: Fortitude during the healing downtime, that’s not helping the fight (unless Fort fell off but how long have you been at this encounter for THAT to happen?). Using a GCD to throw SWP on the enemy though, that’s a good GCD because that will tick. Same thing with Holy Fire. Then go back to healing if your tank’s starting to get low or they lack mitigation. Otherwise, toss a cheeky Smite in there.
Honestly I kind of wish there were more invuln mechanics for tanks because post-Benediction Superbolide is some of the most chaotic fun you can have in a group. Well, for the GNB, at least. XD
The problem is this level of play is, admittedly, fairly high in execution to nail perfectly, but if there’s one thing the WoW community does it blow things way out of proportion and immediately claim mastery of any technique, no matter how esoteric or difficult. If world-first and professional guilds are doing it, obviously everyone else needs to, and they’ll hold people to standards they themselves may not meet. Or they’ll just engage in toxic elitism, another favorite pastime of the community.
The thing is, doing absolutely nothing isn’t helpful at all. It just isn’t. If there’s an enemy in front of your party and your choice is, essentially, skip turn, that’s not helping the party do it’s job which is to defeat the enemy. DPS is a damage mitigation tool, an important function for support players, because it shortens the fight by however much the support player can put out. Losing one GCD to cast or maintain SWP is not going to cost you the encounter unless you’re ignoring the tank’s health too much or your DPS keeps standing in mechanics and just expects you to bail them out. An open GCD is a decision-making exercise, not a hard-and-fast rule.
A healer loses nothing by adding damage to their rotation, especially if the encounter has downtime between necessary heals. A well-built tank is going to be extremely durable even under heavy attack, it’s the job after all. If your party respects mechanics, those are going to be largely mitigated and you, if you’ve done research on the encounter, will know how much healing about needs to be done. After that, it’s just looking out for tankbusters and using your open GCDs to either do damage if your team is doing well, or healing up mistakes if your team isn’t.
Simply put, a healer that can DPS is more valuable than a healer that can’t, because there’s no better status to put on an enemy that ‘dead’, and DPS is the only way to do that.
The thing is, you’re actually fooling yourself. You’re not widening the margin of error by blowing GCDs overhealing or doing nothing (or as I’ve heard some support call it, ‘waiting and watching’), you’re actually stacking the odds against yourself. DPS is the only route to victory, like it or not, and the more that gets put into the enemy, the faster it dies and everyone receives loot. Now, a support player has to DPS responsibly; focus too hard, and the tank gets in trouble or DPS start dropping to room-wide damage, but too little and the fight takes that much longer to complete.
Now, the common refrain from support players is ‘well why doesn’t the DPS just do better then’, and the answer is diminishing returns. The DPS is already doing their rotations, hitting all of their buttons, and presumably performing the best they can. Maybe they have a skill issue or they drop a combo or two, but they’re already using every tool in their kit to make the fight end faster. Supports that don’t DPS, well, aren’t. To put it this way, it’s harder to go from 80% efficiency to 95% efficiency than to go from 0% efficiency to 40% efficiency, and you get MUCH bigger gains, too. You’d honestly be surprised how quickly it adds up.
Yep. The win condition for fights in this game is that the enemy has 0 hp, not that your allies are at full health. Damage helps you win, healing helps you to not lose.
And not losing is important, because not losing is a prerequisite to winning, but once you stop losing it’s time to start winning.
No one expects a healer to do a large amount of dmg, alot of players that play high level content like to min/max and most of the time that comes down to their dmg. In shadowlands any healer could just heal a key. The skill is knowing when to do dmg and when to heal. It adds a layer of complexity that gives people room to grow and get better and keeps them interested. With the next update changing to way mythic plus works and dmg dealt by mobs it could mean your alot more busy with healing than dmg. But i still think that if the team is topped off on heals you should still be pressing dmg abilities, no one should be idle and doing nothing in a key.
So I’m bumping this thread again because a guildmate shared this video with me (completely unbidden by the way, I didn’t broach this healers doing damage topic with him. He just thought this was an interesting video I’d enjoy.) This video isn’t directly about the topic of healers doing damage but it is about open vs. instrumental (goal-oriented) play and the effect that has on WoW (and MMOs as a whole I suppose).
Anyway true to my guildie’s expectations I did indeed find this video fascinating so I’m slapping it down here as well. Now… it is over 80 minutes long and I did watch it through to the end. But that understandably a tall ask so to summarize as best as I can:
WoW exists in a world where information dissemination is incredibly easy. Elite players develop strategies that are incredibly effective and it’s very easy for these effective strategies to get passed down to ALL players to the point where executing them becomes expected. The video dives into a lot of Warcraft history including the effect that addons have had on the median player’s skill and how proficient players are expected to be as a general matter of culture. There’s even a section on WoW Classic and how it’s created a very different environment from WoW vanilla despite being nearly exactly the same software.
Any way I really do recommend giving the video a watch because my spark notes version doesn’t really do it justice and I thought a lot of the ideas it presents are directly applicable to this conversation when viewing optimizing healer damage as instrumental play. Enjoy.