If they made healers into pure healers, would you still play it?

[Saefinn]

If they had left WHMs raw healing as it was but upped it's DPS potential to match AST and SCH ... Why bring the other 2 when you can just do double WHM and have uber throughput AND uber dps?

In a vacuum, The 3 Healers did around as much DPS as each other. But when you put them together, One healer got stuck being "The Healer" while the other one turned into a Green DPS. And that healer stuck in "The Healer" role was always the one with the more potent heals.

Giving WHM more utility would obviously mean balance has to be adjusted elsewhere, but this is what they asked for at the time. 3.0 made WHM's identity of "the healiest healer" redundant, but is the design choice SE has tried to stick to.

Yes, I know balance is hard, but I feel people's hangups over balance is emphasised too heavily I know to a degree yes, it's important, but I settle at "good enough to do the content", balance should not be considered more important than how fun something is to play.

It's really when you're at that top percentile level where you're incapable of pushing your numbers harder but the next guy is that it truly matters and let's face it, people who care at the level are likely to pick whatever is meta, especially if they're aiming for world first and things and there will always be jobs that are excluded from that. But...this seems like a smaller number to accommodate for at the cost of other people enjoying their role?

Outside of that, what it'll affect is how much better you have to be to top the next guy, but is a variety in difficulty between jobs such a bad thing?

And it'll affect people who have the mentality "I must pick meta over not meta" despite their group not being near the percentile where it really matters and end up turning away a non-meta player with a high DPS for a meta player with mediocre one...which annoyingly is something I've seen happen and it's stupid IMO.

I never suggested changing existing design. You brought up GC and and Shiva, i just answered your question. I specifically said "Encounter design going forward". No retroactive changes needed. Old content functions exactly as it does now and interacts with our kits in the same way.
But in the future? We might need to change up how we approach healing in the new content. Much like how current healing power, even when scaled down into previous tiers of content, blows away the kind of power we originally had when it was relevant.

On the GC and Shiva I corrected myself because I misunderstood what you were trying to say. But putting all that aside, I think there are wires crossed, because I think we are in agreement right up until the point I believe we need more to do in our downtime, especially for easier content.

Given this difference and there being a problem with playing a healer being boring for a most of the game's existing content, I am curious how you'd deal with the following:

Expert Roulettes
Level 80 Roulettes
Normal Raid Roulette
Alliance Raid Roulette
Level 50/60/70 roulette
Trial Roulette
Levelling Roulette
FATE Grinding for EXP
Doing Palace of the Dead/Heaven on High
Being a new player levelling a healer & doing quests
Doing Solo Instances
Doing Eureka
Doing Bozja when it comes out (as I predict it'll follow the current trend) - especially the 1v1 fights.

If our only adjustment is to change all encounter design for the future, this is the only content healing is fun in. This is all content where 40 to 85% of the time I've got to DPS because my healing is too efficient. Because with this change, I'm locked out of enjoying 95% of the game's content as a healer...which is pretty much where I am now, where it was not the case before. Just, I'd be in a better place with new content (but I bet with iLevel increases, people knowing fights better and better geared people, finding things more second natured, we'd start seeing more downtime anyway).

[Sylve]

Big Snip

Sadly, As much as i would enjoy a world where the game was made for fun over balance concerns, The slightest glance in the direction of MMO history indicates impossibility thanks to players Thanos level obsession with absolute balance .

The SCH/WHM pairing in ARR worked wonderfully, because the SCH's role was to blunt the incoming damage while the WHM patched up the team. Nowadays? If any job is perceived to be 'weak' comparatively, it'll be ditched and shunned.
Stormblood WHM says hello again. The many threads you can find on Jobs being 'barred' from PF groups due to meta obsession also share greetings.

One would argue that there is a difficulty scale to our current Healing jobs. WHM is super easy to pick up and play. It's kit is a hammer and everything looks like a nail. SCH needs planning and preparation to do well while AST can be pretty technical at times due to its rather varied kit.
I'd love for the 6.0 Healer to be a difficult but rewarding job to play well.

And it'll affect people who have the mentality "I must pick meta over not meta" despite their group not being near the percentile where it really matters and end up turning away a non-meta player with a high DPS for a meta player with mediocre one...which annoyingly is something I've seen happen and it's stupid IMO.

Sadly, the masses like to look at data, like FFlogs and parses in general, and then make an assumption about the worthiness of jobs for their party. Like when SAM was ostracised for it being perceived as weak and a liability compared to other DPS.
Individual player skill be damned, if the parses and the speedrunners claim a job is weak it simply must be true!

On the GC and Shiva I corrected myself because I misunderstood what you were trying to say. But putting all that aside, I think there are wires crossed, because I think we are in agreement right up until the point I believe we need more to do in our downtime, especially for easier content.

I actually do understand what you're after here, we just disagree on downtime as a concept.
You believe that downtime is our "time to dps", while i believe that downtime shouldn't exist at all. We should be mingling healing and DPS consistently through the entire fight.

Our DPS 'kits' wouldn't feel quite so mind numbing if Glare usage was woven amongst healing GCDs. I don't support a dps like rotation for healing OR damage.
We should be dynamically responding to the condition of the party from start to finish. That can't happen for as long as the big damage is heavily scripted to line up with recasts for every tool we have.
There is no dynamism to the fights.
We learn "Mechanic Name = X Damage = Y Tool to fix", and then that tool is ready to fix that mechanics damage every time it's ready.

Given this difference and there being a problem with playing a healer being boring for a most of the game's existing content, I am curious how you'd deal with the following:

Assuming for a moment that you mean this in a hypothetical scenario in which encounter design changed for new content, then the reply is simple. I'd deal with that exactly as i dealt with ARR content during Heavensward and Stormblood content currently.
In that the content isn't fun to heal right now, and that wouldn't change with a hypothetical design change in new current content.

Once Heavensward got under way, ARR content felt like an absolute joke where it used to provide fun. Likewise with Heavensward content come Stormblood. Vault had a high rate of failure in HW, particularly the final boss.
Now? That dungeon is obliterated every time.

The encounter mechanics have steadily gotten more complex over time up to current. ShB stuff is more entertaining to heal than Stormblood stuff, despite Stormblood stuff being fun at the time of its relevance.
It will ALWAYS feel worse to play old content because the new content is better made. That's been true from ARR up till now.

They don't have the manpower or budget to rebuild every fight from ARR to ShB, nor would it be realistic to ever expect that.
Since Jobs wouldn't change, they'd play in old content exactly as they do right now no matter what they do with encounter design philosophy in 6.0 and onwards. But we'd end up with a more rewarding endgame play experience from that point onward, and i believe that to be worth trying to achieve.