How would you feel if shields had no upfront healing?

[Semirhage]

Hey, I get excited when I hit that extra Broil! But your general point might be right. To be honest, I don't have enough experience playing non-healer jobs at a high level to judge this. I realise people find this hard to believe, but I actually have fun playing healer.

I used to. They kept stripping things off my favored job and replacing them with nothing. Generalizing my abilities into the role system. Slashing my already admittedly small, low-nuance damage kit not to build on anything, but just to make it smaller because other people were b*tching about it being either too haaaaaaaaard or complaining they "weren't getting healed", which as far as I'm concerned is code for "make those healbots only heal meeeeee and have no other responsibilities, only *I* can make mistakes!"

Eventually I got fed up with it and tried out a DPS for more than just questing and dungeons. It made healing feel a hundred times worse. RDM flows as smooth as butter. Its abilities all have clear uses you don't have to contort logic to invent a scenario for, even if they're niche. Even swiftcast. It doesn't require you to awkwardly fire off useless overheal casts just to move. It has a goofy damage buff that's still *way* better than Presence of Mind, because it at least aligns with everyone else's buffs, applies to the party, and it doesn't shift your GCD forward and misalign your weave windows even further.

When I'm playing one of the better-designed DPS it just becomes so much clearer how utterly ignored the healer role is. When I run Pagalth'an on WHM I just roll my eyes, spam lilies between pulls, clip my casts to use Assize because screw it, thaaaaat's how you play it, and spend 95% of my boss time tapping the 1 key like a zombie.