An arguement towards having Healing on DPS

[Cynfael]

I just recently realized something rather mindblowing when i thought about it.

I see the community constantly complaining about summoners wanting physick to be useful. to be honest. For the longest time i thought that they had somewhat a point since i didn't have experience with other classes but on thought of class abilities and spells. i came to the realization.

Out of every class in the game. Only blackmage is the one that DOES NOT have a self healing ability of some kind.

To people that say DPS should not have a heal. all classes have them.
-Disciples of war have second wind. Some others even have bloodbath which also heal themselves.
-Redmage has Vercure
-Summoner has a (Mind attuned) physick and now Pheonix
-Blue mage.... is bluemage
-Healers be healers
-Hell even the tanks have abilities that heal.

This kinda makes the removal of Drain as one of the things that makes black mage completely different.

I actually argue.. That Drain should have been buffed and given solely to blackmage. Or one of their abilities modified to add a vampiric effect or some sort. Bring them up so they can too be self reliant.

And yea i want Arcanist_Physick to be Int based. But i think the black mage should get something for themselves too. Sure they have a shield. but that is on a 2 minute cooldown. They are the ones most deserving of a heal ability.

Putting aside BLU since it doesn't really matter outside of BLU-themed content, the only serviceable, spammable heal on that list is Vercure, which I strongly believe was included only so that RDM could lay claim to an iconic White Magic Cure and so that they had a self-targeting spell to set up Dual Cast during phase transitions.

There's nothing wrong with non-healers having an emergency heal, but you only need to look at how many RDMs stop doing their actual jobs in favor of trying to do the healer's job to see what happens when we give DPS access to viable, on-demand healing. I've had the argument presented to me that we shouldn't withhold tools simply because some bad players might not use them correctly, but to me this is a fundamental design issue. If you want a role trinity design not to be a complete mess, you do have to shoehorn players into their roles to an extent. You can't make them be good at those roles, but you can at least limit their ability to try to screw up the entire system by not giving them tools that are likely to encourage them to ignore their assigned role.*


*Obviously this doesn't apply to the same extent to healers since healing in this game is not a full-time job and they need DPS tools if they want to do anything other than sit on their thumbs between heals. The DPS role, on the other hand, really has only one job to do, and healing themselves and others on a regular basis is not it.