What I've realized about healing in XIV...

[RichardButte]

There's no fun at all in being the green colored DPS in a group

"Green DPS"! Perfect. I'll use that from now on...

I'm not going to go through this in any sort of itemized list because by now I have made my point

Your "point" has been that it's okay for healers to be "greed DPS" instead of actual healers because "it's different", much in the same way 1.0 decided to forsake a market board in favor of the retainer wards because "it's different".

Your argument (read: this whole post and arguably this thread) is that you feel healing isn't engaging in FFXIV and you proceed to cite healing in WoW as a positive comparison.

No, my argument is that a class labeled as a healer is supposed to heal, not heal maybe 20% of the time and spend the rest being "green DPS".

I only cite WoW as an example because its healing classes have constant rotations for healing, keeping them occupied the majority of the time. XIV's own DPS classes are a good example of the kind of deep, engaging rotations healers could have, but don't.

As to why this is a problem, go look at all of the shit healers are getting for not being green DPS. Hell, there's a thread on the first or second page of this forum demanding to know why healers don't DPS more (and they're not satisfied with the answer of "Trying to conserve mana in case things go to crap").

And SE is shooting themselves in the foot with this whole mess, as they've said a few times that they don't factor healer DPS into raid balancing, which is probably why savage raids get cleared the same damn day they're released!

If you like being a green DPS, fine, that's your opinion and you're entitled to it, but it is, objectively speaking, not how SE envisioned their raids working because they've SAID they don't factor healer DPS into balancing, yet healer DPS is a huge contribution to beating DPS checks because healers have nothing else to do most of the time.

All of this is because damage in this game comes out at either a trickle or a deluge, and healers can refill all of those HP bars in 1-2 casts anyway.

Seen all the videos of "Solo healed ______" kicking around? That's because it's actually not that much of an accomplishment to solo heal a lot of these fights due to the way damage works (which allows groups to bring yet another DPS which makes the difficulty of these encounters even MORE of a joke).

AST is very engaging to me. Because of the cards. I will say though, I do definitely wish that healers healed more often, as your main point is.

I used to enjoy AST because of the cards, but once I got everything down to muscle memory, it became soul-crushingly boring to play. :\

This goes back to basic design, but the question in this game isn't, "How should I go about healing this moment," but is instead, "Am I done healing," and honestly, the latter is inactive and can be boring. You either wait around or pop a dot. It being "boring" is subjective, but it is not nearly as engaging as a tank or DPS is, and I don't think making them more like a DPS makes sense.

And this is the problem for me: healers are the only class type where standing around, waiting for something to happen is actually baked into the class design.

At the very least, healer DPS abilities should cost next to nothing for mana so you don't have to worry about going OOM because of something completely out of your control (aka the raid suddenly screwing up and standing in the bad).