YES, precisely! This I think it was annoys me the most! I have a few Thaumaturge friends, and we always switched on and off the role of healing. I mean, in parties, we didn't even have a designated healer. If we saw one another doing something different, whoever wasn't in the process of casting another spell, they'd heal.
The whole point of this game was to not necessarily force people in classes to fill one roll only. But that's what they're doing now and it's...It's horrible! I agree, I loved being able to farm my own things! Even in XI as a red mage, it was incredibly hard to solo. As a white mage or black mage? No way! Scholar? Not likely.
Conjurers weren't the perfect soloers. My GOD, I remember when we first got NM's we watched a 50 con solo for almost an hour that ridiculous sheep. It's not like pre-patch we could fire off spell after spell after spell, and have enough MP to cure ourselves and another party. It wasn't like that at all!
Even with 100 VIT and great gear, as a Conjurer I still took on an enormous amount of damage, using sleeps, and spiritbind to cut my AM spells in half I still had to carefully ration my MP to have enough to cure myself if I ever got in the red. Cons should be able to solo, and they were able to, but they weren't perfect. Saying a mage job shouldn't be able to solo, says who? XIV was breaking out of the box that gave roles to specific classes. I liked that I was able to play a mage and still be able to hold my own.
Now with the removal of a basic attack unless I'm in melee range, and the nerfing of Thaumaturge's potential as another healer, how is this in anyway progressive? If anything I'd go as far as to say it's regressive.
If the job of WHM removed my capabilities of casting nukes, or destroyed my nukes to the point where it's like casting Thunder as scholar with my white book equiped, I could live with that if it boosted my healing capabilities and gave me more effective and wider ranged cures in the form of Curaga.
You guys are defensive of a system that has its heart in the right place, but you're blind to the fact that it could have been implemented better, and at a later time. There were so many other things the team could have done to make this more attractive. You must be a masochist to like the system the way it is now.