How would you feel if shields had no upfront healing?

[Kabooa]

And the thing that bothers me the most out of all this is that if they actually did listen to the criticisms and worked to improve the gameplay experience for healers when no healing was needed, I strongly believe you and anyone else who's been staunchly defending the healers probably wouldn't be bothered by those changes at all. You'd continue to play the same way that you already do, so why do you even care in the first place?

I can answer that pretty easily.

Because I actually love playing support and healers. It's what I did in a previous life before FF14 ARR was even on my radar. In every MMO or team centric role based game, I was either the support or the tank. Often both, with DPS alts on the side. Imagine only limiting yourself to one facet of a game. Coming to FF14 and toying with the combat systems, I quickly realized tanking and healing here were not for me. Not because "I had to do damage". Because there just wasn't anything there. My healers were from Guild Wars 1, World of Warcraft, Aion, The Old Republic, Warhammer:AR, from team centric games like League of Legends, Overwatch. I could list others, but I think that gets the point across. I am the old tank and healer main. Even in the Old Republic where I started a Sniper at the insistence of my group at the time (Because they couldn't imagine anyone having fun playing healer or tank), I still rolled a juggernaut tank and played that way more.

So why do I get involved in discussions regarding healers? It's pretty easy to answer that. It's because I want to enjoy them like I used to. I want to see the depth I've seen them have in other games come here - to at least one of them. I've kind of accepted we won't see that, but I don't place the fault at SE alone.

If they DID listen to the loudest complaints and go in the directions being voiced (Spell "Combos" like weaponskills, more DoTs for the sake of DoTs, reduction of spell casting time), I not only don't gain in the ways I want to regarding them, I'd actively lose out as well.