6 Years without a healer?

[Darkpaw]

Actually rather interesting how everyone sees this as only healer balance being the reason. When he also stated that Gunbreaker as a tank was decided early because it was difficult to break down tank classes as MT and OT with 3 so they knew they wanted to bring in a tank job so they could balance that properly as two MT and two OT. As for people saying there are 5 or 6 ranged classes, while technically accurate it is also a falsehood. You have 3 or 4 counting BLU caster DPS, and 2 physical ranged DPS, and the physical ranged DPS haven't been balanced. Ever. So a new physical ranged DPS was actually needed so they could even attempt to balance that role. Now is that a good reason for no new healer. Eh, that's debatable, and more than likely probably not.

However, that is the answer that we were given and to some degree it is also understandable. I get the frustration of no new healer for six years, but I think their reasoning has been somewhat misrepresented whether that be by the dev team themselves or perhaps a translation error, or even just the community misunderstanding their words isn't important. But it seems to me that they are trying to balance everything out with this decision and not just worry about healer balance. So the lack of a new healer isn't stating that healers still need time to be balanced even though I'm sure there are still some issues to work out. More like it's important to balance everything else out before adding in a new healer.

[Hustensaft]

You have 3 or 4 counting BLU caster DPS, and 2 physical ranged DPS, and the physical ranged DPS haven't been balanced. Ever. So a new physical ranged DPS was actually needed so they could even attempt to balance that role. Now is that a good reason for no new healer. Eh, that's debatable, and more than likely probably not.

DPS are selected by what provides the highest raid DPS... adding DNC into the equation changes absolutely nothing about which of the three ranged physical DPS is being taken to a raid - you just have one more spec competing for one of the four damage slots.

You can even argue that adding a new physical DPS job adds more restriction to raid setups. MNK and RDM have physical support skills - while BLM and SMN do not - and 7 out of 10 DPS jobs deal physical damage.

[Lambdafish]

DPS are selected by what provides the highest raid DPS... adding DNC into the equation changes absolutely nothing about which of the three ranged physical DPS is being taken to a raid - you just have one more spec competing for one of the four damage slots.

That might be true for casual content (for queue time convenience), but for high end content the roles are indeed split up to have 2 tanks/2 healers/1 ranged/1 caster. And that's not a community thing, there are fights that require two ranged DPS, and the ranged and caster jobs are intentionally designed to not synergize with each other very well.

With that in mind, it makes sense why the Devs would want to add to the role type that is lacking.