Quote Originally Posted by Semirhage View Post
If the devs think the number of abilities healers have for dealing damage is the cause of them using said abilities so often, they've got support class game design all wrong.

"Healers spend too much time doing damage and not enough healing" is a consequence of low outgoing damage. Healers failing to keep the party alive and tunnel visioning on damage is a consequence of either being unskilled at healing, making a mistake, zoning out because the damage dealing is just so incredibly boring, or some combination of the three.

The current state of healers is down to a confluence of mindsets. Some of the most important are:
- Healing Should Be Easy So Sprouts Aren't Scared (which makes healing a snooze)
- Healers Should Heal Only And Nothing Else (which makes damage dealing a snooze, because apparently making damage kits boring is how you discourage using them?)
- Expecting Healers To Do Damage Is A Stain On The BadWrongEvil Community (which encourages newbie healers to never improve, which in turn empowers the idea that keeping healers simple and boring is a Good Thing That The Devs Want)

Those three mindsets keep dragging the healing role into the trashfire that it keeps returning to. Even when they make baby steps out of it, it just comes right back again. You don't catch the DPS forums making faces at the idea that they should, shock and horror, use Feint, or Addle, or buff the party, because DPS Should Deal Damage Only And Nothing Else.
Something else I don't understand is why we can't also break healers down into how easy it is for them heal? Like one thing about ARR's WHM and SCH was that SCHs had a much harder time healing. We needed to manage our damage reductions and actually use our shields because our only real way to power heal the party was through succor spam. Meanwhile WHMs had a much easier time with Cure III and Medica II to make it very easy for them to respond to heavy damage with equally heavy healing. What's wrong with having some more complex healers for players that want that? Why does every healer NEED to appeal to every healer player? As long as the numbers are balanced at the end of the day, who not add some variety in how challenging different healers are? It seems to not be a problem for DPS players to have more complex DPS than others.