Korean Live Letter and Job changes (Translated)

[Serilda]

that this kind of fight is even possible to heal is quite perverse and only goes to show just how powerful healers actually are. And despite this, healers can STILL add considerable damage in that fight.

I think that is a fair viewpoint. If it wasn't possible to just ignore healing most of the time and leave it to passive abilities, it wouldn't be so underwhelming, so being overpowered is definitely a big factor. Making healing twitchier so more people risk dying and having less fun isn't really the answer (and it's also a bit hard to balance; spells like Benediction require moderate levels of clairvoyance already due to its lag and not all healers are made equal in terms of preventing certain types of accidental death). Requiring more coordination between both healers would be lovely though; as things are there seldom seems to be much need to pay more than superficial attention to what the other is doing after picking your job/sect since your course of action is generally the same either way.

So I'm not moaning 100%, I do feel satisfied when I arrange encounters to challenge myself, like massively undersizing fights in Coil with mediocre gear and really pushing my friends (and myself) to the limit. And I'm sure people pushing the Savage content to its limit get that same feeling before they're all geared up too, but I want everything to be at least moderately exciting for healers right the way down to regular dungeons, without having to artificially modify the difficulty by asking your friends to take off their clothes and making mistakes on purpose.

I would also like to have more to do in fights to help the group without resorting to direct damage. I know it's taboo to mention it (and I don't think it handled it perfectly in any case - button bloat galore) but FFXI gave healers a lot of support abilities which made the role feel less pigeonholed without being DPS-with-a-few-overpowered-heals. I feel slightly less bored on AST because I have cards to play with. More support options for all healers which aren't reduced down to 'do more DPS so things die faster so people take no damage' would be a nice compromise.

[Zojha]

Requiring more coordination between both healers would be lovely though; as things are there seldom seems to be much need to pay more than superficial attention to what the other is doing after picking your job/sect since your course of action is generally the same either way.

Indeed - And that's not something restricted to healers either. As DPS, I only ever truly "interact" with people when there are tether, meteor or spread mechanics and usually in those cases there's a strategy set up beforehand so you don't really need to interact, but just act according to strategy (for example, set positions for mechanics that demand interaction). None of my support skills nor rotational abilities really "depend" on another person either, the biggest interaction is probably leaving Dancing Edge out so as to not needlessly overwrite the WARs debuff.

And yes, I totally agree it would be a huge boon to every "career healer" that wants to focus more on healing to get support abilities like AST cards. Seriously, I'd like to give you a cookie for noticing that, because in all the controversial healer DPS threads, the main argument in favor of healer DPS is to please do something useful in downtime, so if healers had those support abilities to use in downtime and those abilities would compare to DPS in usefulness, that would allow both parties to get what they want. It's great!