Don't say all that, all these little nuances make me miss it even more now.
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Flip side. I personally don't think Heals should have more dps options, they should have less. they should always always always do much less damage than a pure DPS job does, like a Tank should as well and I don't buy that they need it to clear solo content, that's just lazy. A Healer has high survivability and can keep themselves up and running longer than a dps, so they SHOULD have to work at killing something for longer than a pure DPS should in solo content. It's a given, a price paid for the gifts given just like a DPS should have to pour out the damage fast to bring a mob down before it can lay enough damage onto them to kill them. Players should use skill, not streamlined homogenized structure of a job in order to do solo things. You don't over pull, you don't rush if you can't heal yourself, or don't have mitigation abilities like a tank to prevent damage. DPS learn to be careful, Tanks learn to mitigate and tank through, Healers learn to heal on their feet through mechanics and still get heals off or...they die. It's all skill building. Give any class too many tools from another classes toolkit and you remove that sharp crisp feeling of the class all together. A healer should never be seen as a DPS contribution significant enough to justify interrupting their main function or as something relied on to clear content. Neither should a healer be optional in group content, DPS and Tanks shouldn't have heals that can see them through pulls in group designed content...period. Marginalizing a class so some others can feel like superpowers doesn't make players happier, it makes them feel...marginalized and like their efforts in their chosen class are not appreciated or respected.
Healers and tanks already do half the damage a DPS can output. Adding a few extra buttons isn't going to change that much.
They have no issues with tanks having high survivability, high self healing (Warriors LOL), and an interesting dps rotation. But for some magical reason that same standard can't apply to Healers?
More buttons to press to DPS =/= More total DPS dealt
Then the answer is to make everything exactly the same. Nothing left out.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a little bit of damage variance (maybe from 0.1% to 3% or whatever sweet number that is), so long as the whole roster is viable to clear regularly & it only start to matter at the mountain top of speedkill-minmaxing purposes. Right now the best reward to me would be not getting bored out of pressing 1 button as much as melees do their auto-attacks. :(
Again, why should healers deal only 40%-60% of the damage a DPS job can do when every type of content can and has been cleared without any healers?
Because having that level of a safety net while also being able to match the DPS numbers of equally skilled DPS jobs invalidates those other DPS jobs. MCH already has a hard enough time just competing with BRD and DNC as is without suddenly having to worry about a Healer completing taking their job as well. I could understand increasing Healer/Tank DPS numbers to be at least 75% of a DPS job but there needs to at least be enough of a difference to not cause DPS jobs to be invalid as well.
The solution is simple. Make optimized Healer DPS dependent on the presence of DPS party members. This can be done through unique buffs and unique traits. Machinist is competing against melee jobs as their buttons do not do anything different than those of a melee job. Everything is the same "Deal x amount of potency to target" with a different skill animation.