What's your preferred change?

[Urthdigger]

For starters, I want the design to reflect how the game is actually played. To make a long story short there will ALWAYS be significant downtime where you're DPSing unless they fundamentally redesign combat in this game from the ground up. Straight up, with the ways encounter, gearing, and stats are designed there is no way around this. So embrace it, realize that DPS is as much a part of our play as it is for tanks and make combat more interesting.

Now, beyond that I'd also say give us more ways to contribute, and ideally I'd wrap the two together. Sage is actually a step in the right direction with DPS spells providing passive healing, but ideally I'd go with something similar: Allow our DPS during downtime to contribute meaningfully to our support role. It could be something simple like DPS actions contributing to fairy gauge or lilies, or something a bit more complicated like having combos for our spells with the finisher granting a party-wide buff.

Recognize that we'll spend a fair amount of our time DPSing especially as player skill and gear rises, but wrap that into the core support mentality.

[BooPoo]

For starters, I want the design to reflect how the game is actually played. To make a long story short there will ALWAYS be significant downtime where you're DPSing unless they fundamentally redesign combat in this game from the ground up. Straight up, with the ways encounter, gearing, and stats are designed there is no way around this. So embrace it, realize that DPS is as much a part of our play as it is for tanks and make combat more interesting.

Now, beyond that I'd also say give us more ways to contribute, and ideally I'd wrap the two together. Sage is actually a step in the right direction with DPS spells providing passive healing, but ideally I'd go with something similar: Allow our DPS during downtime to contribute meaningfully to our support role. It could be something simple like DPS actions contributing to fairy gauge or lilies, or something a bit more complicated like having combos for our spells with the finisher granting a party-wide buff.

Recognize that we'll spend a fair amount of our time DPSing especially as player skill and gear rises, but wrap that into the core support mentality.

I also have something in mind for the players who religiously hate DPSing as a healer. We can go further with the buff system AST currently has, and have a few healer whos damage contrib came from themselves (Sage etc.) and a few others that don't do complex damage rotation but buff teammates significantly.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-healer-issues

^ this first post (regularly updated) summaries almost everything.

[Calysto]

It could be something simple like DPS actions contributing to fairy gauge or lilies, or something a bit more complicated like having combos for our spells with the finisher granting a party-wide buff.

While not tied to dps, SCH had a freecure with sacred soil, and in SB "quickened aetherflow". they got rid of that because "reasons" ?
I think all that's left is freecure and enhanced benefic.

I'd go with 4 or 5 ; make it busier and most importantly fun.

[LaylaAlder]

There was a fake leaker a while back that said WHM was getting a Water → Water2 → Banish that sounded like it was supposed to be an OGCD attack. I'm actually kind of fond of it as a concept, as I like the idea of playing into the Land-Sea-Sky nature of the early druid-style theming, and having another OGCD attack to weave in more often when I don't have any heals that need to go out would be nice.