Who said this and can it apply to healers?

[Bastionus]

"Tanks are DPS with defense cooldowns"

Can healers be DPS with healing spells? Not as much DPS as a DPS but enough to make people want to play?

Reason I ask is not enough people wanna play healer. Before you say it I know there are other factors, such as no new healer, healer changers etc. But even before the expansion and the reveals I think Healer still wasn't a popular job to play compared to the others.

Scholar and White mage were ones that people tried more than Astro I heard (could be wrong) if someone wanted to try healer. One thing I noticed they have in common was they had more DPS/damaging skills than Astro (Back then).

Now White Mages are rewarded for healing with a DPS skill (cause you need to use healing lilies to get a blood lily for Misery) and I think that was a very smart concept.

Is this a wrong way to think that healers will seem more interesting and fun? Or is the method of 'we need to heal more' that Shadowbringers brought is the right answer? Cause personally for me as a healer main I don't mind doing heal after heal, but that seems to only occur in trash pulls in dungeons and the every now and then raid aoe damage spam that I seem to be noticing. Instead during boss fights AND ESPECIALLY IN MSQ I am just spamming my Malefic4 and Combust3...(the latter of which is the same potency of what combust 2 was so....new visual update and a 100Mp discount was all we got for that?)

Anyway let me know what you think please.

Tl;dr Was going the route of more healing needing to be done the right move for healers? Or should something else be done like more dps skills to make healer seem more intriguing so that we can get more people to try healer.

[Risvertasashi]

A number of people already think of healers this way

Scholar I heard and White mage were ones that people tried more than Astro I heard (could be wrong). One thing I notice they have in common was they had more DPS/damaging skills than Astro.

It depends on the strength of the healers. SCH has been the strongest for a very long time, and when Astro is stronger than white mage, it's clear rate will exceed it. Strength in raids... DPS does matter, but there are other factors too.

Especially in mid to high level raiding, healers DPS is seen as incredibly important. ie, it's not just dungeons. A healer that refuses to DPS will not have an easy time finding any group but the most inexperienced.

As for enticing more players to play healer, well, if they're really DPS hungry, the best way would not be to alter current designs necessarily, but to simply up potencies. Players that would normally play a DPS aren't going to find healer damage levels satisfying, and aren't going to want to have to interrupt their rotations to actually heal (nevermind the anxiety that comes with having more responsibility).

[Miiu]

Healers were never really popular. I think this is just a general problem. Most people want to do big damage numbers and be top on the dps parses Being the support-class isn't cool.
But I also heard from people that they don't want to deal with the responsibility of keeping players alive.

Overall slapping an interesting DPS rotation on a healer and call it a day is also the wrong approach. People who play healers love the mentality of the job and having them lean more into dps territory so just more people might try it out will most likely alienate some of the people who are currently maining healer.
I am also one of the players who has the opinion that healers right now aren't as fun as they used to be because we do even less now than we did before. I don't mind being stripped of every dps skill we have if the healing is suddenly more engaging and keeps us busy. But besides leveling and big dungeon pulls until we overgear those dungeons there isn't much healing to be done. Once people stop making mistakes in the extreme fights most of the time you spam your 1 nuke and refresh your dot.

[Donnicton]

Healers were never really popular. I think this is just a general problem. Most people want to do big damage numbers and be top on the dps parses Being the support-class isn't cool.
But I also heard from people that they don't want to deal with the responsibility of keeping players alive.

I mean, you can't really blame them. Why would you want all of the responsibility of keeping your group alive - be it through unavoidable damage of your group's own fault - for few of the accolades for succeeding and all of the blame if you fail, when you can just be a big ol' dps hero who puts out the big numbers and only ever has to worry about yourself when mechanics happen? This is an age old problem not specific to just FF14, though FF14 also has a fairly unique problem in that the populace is also screeching at healers over their dps on top of all of that too. You definitely need to have a certain mindset to want to play a healer unironically, especially in this game.

[RyuujinZERO]

I've been saying for a while since they nerfs to Healer, that tanks would never stand for it if they had 1 or 2 attacks, and a dozen defensive/threat skills. Afterall their 'role' is holding threat and not dying; NOT dealing damage right?

But the devs recognise that tank's fantasy is that of the warrior in shining armour with a giant weapon who stands between the enemy and his allies. but for some reason they can't accept the vision of a combat healer or battle tactician who uses magic/wits to both protect their allies and ruin their foes.

The notion that healers should accept having literally 3 attack skills that they spam ad nauseaum as filler 'because their role is healing' is absurd, and I for one won't stand for it. I've been SCH main since 2.0 early access but that ended with ShB, the new DPS rotation bores me beyond tears.

[Urthdigger]

Honestly, I could see them making all our heals into oGCD abilities (Likely on a charge system to accommodate situations where you need to spam heals for a bit), and make topping up people's HP akin to a tank popping their defensive cooldowns. It'd wholly separate the resources used for healing and DPS.

That said, I'm not entirely certain if I'd enjoy it? I've always been in the "Healers should try and DPS as much as they can" camp, but part of the appeal of healer for me has been that dance of figuring out whether I should heal or if it's safe to DPS. I would hope that if this change happened, that they would make the DPS side more enticing, or even make some of our heals do more than just heal. I would love for healer to keep that "Support" kind of role, giving each combo ways to increase the damage or survivability of the party (I don't mean give some one, and some the other. I mean each healer should be capable of doing both in some way.) Give us a shield that works like Blackest Night and gives a benefit when it pops, like a slow on the enemy or a defense boost to the party. Give us a heal that grants a damage buff based on how much actual health (not overheal) was cured. Give us some more support on top of the additional DPS.

[Risvertasashi]

I've been saying for a while since they nerfs to Healer, that tanks would never stand for it if they had 1 or 2 attacks, and a dozen defensive/threat skills. Afterall their 'role' is holding threat and not dying; NOT dealing damage right?

Well it's a bit more complex than that. Enmity is generated via attacks to having DPS combos is dual purpose. DPS for healers is an interruption of the healing flow, they're separate things.

That aside even if you give healers 3 hotbars worth of DPS abilities, no DPS-minded player is going to want to play a role that hits like a wet noodle (and that includes current WHM), has to detarget the boss sometimes, and gets blamed when things go wrong (even when the blame is correctly placed!).

[Hatstand]

Well it's a bit more complex than that. Enmity is generated via attacks to having DPS combos is dual purpose. DPS for healers is an interruption of the healing flow, they're separate things.

That aside even if you give healers 3 hotbars worth of DPS abilities, no DPS-minded player is going to want to play a role that hits like a wet noodle (and that includes current WHM), has to detarget the boss sometimes, and gets blamed when things go wrong (even when the blame is correctly placed!).

Dps on tanks having a dual purpose is a design choice. If they simply removed all damage from tanking abilities but just made them generate as much enmity as if they had done damage tanks would still be able to tank. If they lowered tank dps some to the point that they couldn't gain enough enmity through dpsing then tanks dpsing would be taking a break from their tanking rotation. Similarly, you could design a system where dpsing was part of a healer's healing by, say, making a mechanic similar to the lily gauge which fills up a healing resource based on how much damage you've done. You can't blame bad design choices on other game design choices. They're all ultimately up to the devs to decide.

Edit: To be clear, I don't think they should do that to tanks, but it would be a similar approach to what they did to healers, in saying "tanks should spend more time tanking" (as oppposed to dpsing.)

[Zfz]

I've always thought that the reason healers are getting extremely simplified offensive loadouts is because a significant part of a healer's job is reacting to stupid. DPS wandering off in the wrong direction, standing in the wrong place, dying etc. Tanks don't have that. There's no "stupid" to react to as a tank. As such, it's just less frustrating for the healer to never have to worry about a dps rotation. Without a rotation, the logical thing to do is to spam the single highest dps skill, and hence the simplified kit. DOTs throw in a twist on it but essentially they are the same principle.

But then if healers have an actual dps rotation, it would make balancing difficult and potentially make content harder because now the healer dps is severely impacted when there's stupid in the party, forcing the healer to break the rotation and gimping healer dps.

Personally, though, I wouldn't mind trying out a design where healing is completely turned on its head and we heal by doing dps, like how tanks hold aggro by doing dps now. Things like damage to the target causes spill healing and we can "ignite" DOTs for a raid heal etc. Making the game have only DPS, but three different types: one dedicated to dps, one with a tanking kit, and one with a healing kit. But it would require a complete overhaul of every single encounter that involves a healer in this game, making it impossible at this stage.

[Kabooa]

Why not just have everyone heal themselves, and then not have any tanks or healers?