Quote Originally Posted by Gemina View Post
Oh yeah, my nostalgia goes way back as well. I mained RDM in XI, and experienced it when it turned from a debuffing monster to a refresh/cure bot. The days where you were told to put your main weapon down because your damage was laughable, and took a knee to regain mana during combat. As uphill as times were back then, I miss them too. FFXIV is too aged now and well past those days. I wouldn't call it a sad state. Just a different one. When you've been playing the game for a really long time, you just have to go out there and find things you enjoy doing.

It is in the very nature of mmos to change. Certain things you once enjoyed will be lost, and other things will come around that you pick up. It's just how those virtual worlds spin, and players have to adapt if they are to continue finding enjoyment in the same mmo.
I know the nature of MMO's is to change and I am normally fine going with the flow. I have my preferred visions of healers like SCH and what I consider the good old times and I am okay with leaving them there because I know things change and heck encounters and party set ups and balance is different in 5.0 to what it was in 2.0 so maybe some of the things I prefer are less viable. Though IMO there is an evolution of 2.0 SCH that would have worked, but hey, I can let go of that if I have something I am enjoying.

But in this case I feel it's more a design issue than a case of "times change".

There are two camps for this:

1. For those who believe the role of the healer is just to heal.

If in most content you are healing only 30% of the time, then you're not really doing much healing at all. In this case our healing toolkit is too efficient for most content.

2. For those who believe the role of the healer is a mixed one, so a hybrid.

Functionally this is what we currently have. The design flaw is that there is a big chunk where there isn't much to do. The hybrid here is healing & DPS.

What if we stripped Dragoon down to Vorpal Thrust, Disembowel and Chaos Thurst and kept its buffs like Lance Charge, Battle Litany and Dragon Sight, then have Doom Spike remain as an AoE and if we buffed the damage output.

It'd still functionally be a DPS class, it still fulfills its role.

Yet this is still more complex and varied than what many of us are doing 70% of a run.

You would find Dragoons would be very unhappy and find their job unfillling to play. This is because job design is a key part of what makes content engaging for the player, mechanics alone aren't enough. Certain types of games might be fine with or benefit from a minimalist design approach when it comes to dealing damage. But FFXIV's design is based around a mix of job design and mechanics and they've not changed this approach.