Quote Originally Posted by Roeshel View Post
If the devs actually thought that healers should focus on dealing damage, they would have given us a proper and interesting rotation. But that's not the case now, is it? Healer's DPS being relevant is an afterthought, it is the consequence of smth else, it is not the primary focus and it has never been.
I couldn't disagree more. Damage is the primary focus in almost every single RPG I've ever played, single- or multi-player. When you're in combat, the combat is over when your enemy is dead. The thing that makes your enemy dead in 99+% of encounters is damage. Healing output can help you get there. Buffs can help you get there. Mitigation, debuffs, countering enemy attacks, those can all be important depending on the systems as designed. But at the end of the day, those are all supporting your ability to smack your enemy to death. I can count on one hand the number of games I've played where my healers haven't been respectable damage dealers. Fact is, if all but the most explicitly difficult content requires constant heals or support, most players are going to die. Squeenix wants most players to ultimately succeed in the vast majority of content. That gap between players on top of their heal/support game and the ones struggling to keep up through story dungeons is where the downtime comes in. That downtime has been pretty large in most games I've played. From tabletop D&D type games, to easy RPGs, to more difficult ones. I've never reached the end of a Final Fantasy game where my more heal-focused character wasn't spending a good 80% of their turns attacking the enemy in some way.

The ability to deal damage while healing is important, because that's the way RPGs are generally designed. FFXIV isn't some bizarro world exception to a rule where forum princess healers are "strangely" "forced" to deal damage. Healing is regularly a multitasking role with a sliding scale of downtime based on how skilled you get at your primarily important task. Having downtime that isn't a terrible, stupid snoozefest of a reward for gaining finesse at your basic task is one of the most important facets of designing a multitasker class. I don't enjoy playing healers because I'm particularly enamored with spamming Cure over and over and over again. I like healing because it's a balancing act that should be rewarding when you manage to minimize healing as much as you possibly can. Because that's the (perhaps ironic) definition of getting more skilled at healing, no matter how much of it you design into an encounter. Minimizing it is ALWAYS the eventual goal.