I thought Yoshi wants healer to focus on healing only..

[Vidu]

They've been inconsistent at best in their comments. In one interview Yoshi will say "Of course I want healers to still DPS when they don't need to heal." and in others he'll say "We feel healers trying to optimize DPS is bad." Perhaps they don't realize that the only real benefit of optimizing healing is increasing healing downtime... which means optimizing DPS. The two go hand in hand.

I dont see anything inconsistent with those statments? "Optimizing dps" and "not standing around twiddling your thumbs" are two different things that dont contradict each other. Casting damage-spells when there is clearly no need to heal because everyone is well above 50% HP is different from optimizing your dps by letting the tanks HP drop to 2k to heal them with benediction so you've got more time to cast stone.

[Freyt]

No one has ever said that.

[Mikhaill]

They've been inconsistent at best in their comments. In one interview Yoshi will say "Of course I want healers to still DPS when they don't need to heal." and in others he'll say "We feel healers trying to optimize DPS is bad." Perhaps they don't realize that the only real benefit of optimizing healing is increasing healing downtime... which means optimizing DPS. The two go hand in hand.

I feel like...
If you can DPS, you should.
You always prioritize healing first and when there's downtime, you DPS.
Might as well or you're just chilling for no reason then everyone cries
when they wipe because they couldn't meet the DPS check because your heals
were overhealing or doing nothing. They dunno what to do with this I guess lol.

[Kazrah]

The challenge I think devs are facing here is that they want healer damage as an option, but not a requirement. The problem is that players make it a requirement to compensate for how bad their DPS is.

[Connor]

I don’t really get why they don’t just flat out say what they actually want healers to ‘do’ or ‘don’t do’. It’s undeniable that DPS is a huge part of the healer role by design, so why they don’t just come and say ‘healers should be dealing damage’.

And then of course, you have the fact that despite the devs act like dealing damage is a choice on the part of the healer (which it really isn’t unless you want to afk). Then, to make things even more confusing, they give us a ton of extremely powerful oGCD heals that let us DPS even harder, but then lower of the amount of damage dealing options.

Basically they’re saying they want healers to heal, then design the entirety of the game the exact opposite way, then start making changes that go completely against the design they’ve created. I’m honestly not sure why they’re doing this, it’s like they’re trying to cover up what healers actually are, like they’re somehow embarrassed by how DPS heavy they are. Even though they’re the ones that made it like that in the first place.

As far as I’m aware I’ve never heard developers mention that healers in FFXIV are largely offense-oriented, or that they’re capable of dealing respectable damage, or that they don’t fit with the traditional ‘final Fantasy healer healer’ role. They just act like none of these extremely important damage aspects of the healers don’t exist and that this isn’t an issue anyone has come across

[Hawklaser]

The challenge I think devs are facing here is that they want healer damage as an option, but not a requirement. The problem is that players make it a requirement to compensate for how bad their DPS is.

If I could like this more than once I would.

As a healer, I'd rather be doing things more focused on healing and supporting the group instead of doing damage when possible. Right now once healing is taken care of, the next best thing I can contribute to a group is doing damage for that very specific reason. Even if there were more varied ways I could support the group, I'd still probably feel that doing damage would be the next best option unless the other support options were pretty significant.

[Mikhaill]

If I could like this more than once I would.

As a healer, I'd rather be doing things more focused on healing and supporting the group instead of doing damage when possible. Right now once healing is taken care of, the next best thing I can contribute to a group is doing damage for that very specific reason. Even if there were more varied ways I could support the group, I'd still probably feel that doing damage would be the next best option unless the other support options were pretty significant.

A fix would be having more intensive healing for us to do, honestly.
I don't mind DPSing but I prefer to heal lol.

[Hazama999]

DPS culture.

[RubixCube]

And yet all our role quests are dps focused, with healing reduced to a 'healing' action.

Except for one quest where we're given four basic healing actions and reminded how to use them as the fight progresses... I'm still salty haha.

[Hawklaser]

A fix would be having more intensive healing for us to do, honestly.
I don't mind DPSing but I prefer to heal lol.

The flip side to this though, is how can they make the healing more intensive without making things too difficult for the average player? Keep in mind there are groups out there that struggle to put out the DPS to meet Titiania Normal's Add phases DPS check without the healers also going DPS mode for example. If you think the bulk of the average healers can handle more intense healing and also pitch in DPS to help pick up the slack when do get in those groups that are very clearly struggling on the DPS side as well, by all means ramp up the intensity. I don't think thats the case however.

As much as I would like to see things get harder in certain aspects of the game, just ramping up the intensity of the healing required would more than likely lead to the content getting an overall nerf to compensate for the slack decent healers are no longer able to pick up reliably.