Quote Originally Posted by Liam_Harper View Post
Completely impossible.

I don't think people realize how impossible this is. The difference between a party of semi-inexperienced players challenging a fight at min-ilv and a well coordinated BiS geared group with a perfect heal map and group mitigation planning is worlds apart. Even if the damage was high enough that the first example had to heal 100% of the time, the skilled group would reduce that to well below half.

Also, ff14 follows a very strict 1 healer per 4 players composition. A game like WoW you can be flexible, adding more or reducing your number of healers as you learn a fight. This issue means FF14 will always be stuck with a situation where gear+experience results in increasing downtime.

Obviously incoming damage could be bumped a good bit, but you'd never eliminate downtime, so being able to fill it is important.
To emphasise this. I've been doing some E8S min ilvl and her initial AoE, Absolute Zero will literally one-shot everyone except the tanks without a minimum of 20% mitigation, if not more. And even with said mitigation, you're dropping down to 10k. It hurts. Which is great, yes? We should have more of those! While I agree to an extent, especially seeing she only ever uses it once the entire fight, if Shiva spammed it with relative frequency, more casual and midcore players simply wouldn't be able to handle it. Case in point, Brute Justice and Living Liquid. Not only were both mechanic vomit, they dealt obscene amounts of damage. The end result was two tiers with the lowest success rate in this game's history.

Most players in this game are neither equip to handle a constant barrage of outgoing damage nor do they want to. And it isn't necessarily fun for the DPS or Tanks either who will likely die often to mechanics and damage they have no control over because the healer lacked experience. This is especially true in casual content where players primary concern is having fun, not worrying every other AoE will kill their party.

While they definitely should increase outgoing damage. Like you said, there will always be downtime. DPSing isn't inherently bad as "filler" either. It's the one-button approach that is.