Quote Originally Posted by Lambdafish View Post
You have no idea how much I want to talk about game design and meta shifting within the mechanics.
Let's talk about that, sounds much more interesting than the last 80 pages.
Quote Originally Posted by Lambdafish View Post
The problem with the game mechanics is that if you take healer DPS away, healing becomes a hollow experience. The entire content and job design of healing needs to be designed around being healer centric, and it is in fact designed around DPS (Holy, Miasma, Bio, Stone, Aero, Broil, Gravity, Combust etc.), and healers need new mechanics to replace and shift the healing meta before anything of note will happen.
The game being designed the way it is currently, I don't think healers should be any more healer centric than they currently are. They could possibly slightly lower the burst damage and increase attrition damage but that's probably the most they could do. The problem with focusing too much on healing is that the amount healing needed is always hard capped by incoming damage, and gear progression means the incoming damage decreases over time, making any gear progression for healers fairly meaningless. A friend pointed out that the way this is tackled in other games is that you can drop healers out of the group in favour of more damage when the gear allows it, however, this isn't all that practical in FFXIV when the game forces a 2/2/4 setup for most content. Another reason they can't fully get rid of damage spells is because all classes need to be able to solo certain content. That means we're left with a problem: What should healers do with surplus time and resources that aren't spent on healing?

One option would be to offer other options in group play that outshine personal damage that people use in solo play, creating a new supportive gameplay style.

The actions players are able to use can be roughly divide into: Attacking, Healing, Buffing and Debuffing. Furthermore, buffing and debuffing can be divided into offensive and defensive sides. Defensive buffs play into the damage mitigation and healing side, so it's probably best if we forget about them for now. We're left with offensive buffs and debuffs.

Offensive buffs and debuffs would be the easiest way to build into a more supportive playstyle. To keep the role active, these actions would also need to have a short duration, perhaps a regular GCD length. Examples could be like a castable Life Surge on any party member, or casted Trick Attack on the enemy, perhaps with a 3-5 second duration.

If they wanted to go with a more of a "management" type gameplay, the (de)buffs could be longer but weaker in power. The gameplay would then consist of keeping multiple different buffs and debuffs up in a rotation, similar to DoTs. AST kind of already plays into this, despite the long CD on cards and the RNG, although card management is off the GCD so it doesn't have the opportunity cost of damage spells.

I guess my suggestion for new support style mechanics would be offensive buffs and debuffs on GCD, that directly compete with the opportunity cost of nuking in party scenarios.