Quote Originally Posted by Saefinn View Post
SNIP
I've been saying it elsewhere for the longest time, but I'm bringing it to the forums now:

Healers, at their core, are broken.

You encapsulated the problem really well, but I'd like to expand on it some more.

Basically, Healer is the only role where more is often less. If the party is all at full HP, then any more healing you do has no effect other than to use up some of your MP.

No other role has this. DPS obviously want to be putting out as much DPS as possible, a few exceptions aside (such as Leviathan's instant-wipe if you hit him too hard), and Tanks generate enmity (and in the case of PLD and DRK, resources that can be used defensively) by doing damage, with no penalty for generating too much enmity and therefore it simply resolving into 'do as much damage as possible and you'll passively keep aggro.'

And this, I think, is the crux of the problem. What do you do when there's no more healing to be done? Well, the developers' answer to this question seems to be a reluctant "You could DPS a little, I guess..."

They seem to see the role's title as prescriptive. Healers must heal, anything else 'isn't their job' and so mustn't be encouraged and must be limited as strictly as possible. Buffing allies? Debuffing enemies? Dealing damage? None of these things are healing and therefore, their logic dictates, are not what the role is for.

This backs the developers into a corner. How can you make healing in and of itself fun and engaging? You need to give it depth. How do you make it deep? By making it in a similar vein to DPS' rotations... But then we run into a brick wall - The encounter design. To allow for a healing rotation, you need there to always be healing to do, with more always being good.

The issue is twofold: 1) More healing isn't always a good thing (such as when everyone at 100% HP), and 2) The encounter design means that there's often points where there's no healing necessary.

Obviously the developers don't want to have to go back and rework every single significant encounter in the game and so this means they cannot make healing rotations, which means they cannot make the act of healing as deep as the act of DPSing, and therefore it cannot be as fun.

The answer I would propose, then, is to move away from the role of "Healer" and into the role of "Support". This is far more open in terms of possibilities while fulfilling much the same party niche.

At the end of the day though, the one thing I want everyone to take away from this is that the core problem with the Healer role is that they are only 'Healers', while Tanks and DPS either have other things to do to engage them, or their primary focus is deep enough that it is inherently engaging.