Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[SeverianLyonesse]

I think they meant bad healer players.

I meant both sides, yeah.

Not really? Perhaps it is my experience but even with bad tanks and dps I still don't use everything. Collective Unconciousness can 100% be removed and with some moving of skills I can guarentee most healers will not feel it. CI can also be removed by either trait upgrading it to Exalt or just flat removed. Neutral Sect'd A.Bene can fill it's spot for when I need to shield a DPS or my tank.

That is where we differ on our opinions for redundancies. Where you see it as less tools, I see it as more chances to creatively use what tools I have left to salvage a situation. THAT is what healing imo is lacking for engagement and WHY I want unnecessary skills or just some skills period gone.

Does that make sense?

I understand you, and I don't disagree with that perspective. I think I *could* probably have more fun healing if I had to be choosier--and, in reality, I already am kind of choosy and ignore several spells almost entirely, if only because I forget they exist.

What I am saying is that you are also a good healer, and I am not. The game is designed so that players who are new to healing or bad at healing still have a good chance at keeping even a bad tank alive. The game is designed to be clearable even if both your healer and your tank are terrible. Put another way, the game is designed to be clearable by an extremely low skill threshold to accommodate an increasingly unskilled playerbase. Or, put even a third way, the players' ignorance already creates so much artificial difficulty that all the skill bloat is the developers' way of compensative for that artificial difficulty.

And does that work? To an extent, yes. Usually at least one of either the healer or the tank can limp the group to the end within one or two wipes, because they are never far from where a slight adjustment could help them clear. It's not efficient or very high-skill, but the system gives the party extremely good odds to clear, and that in turn reduces friction over player skill. With tighter kits, we would have much more rage because players wouldn't be able to compensate for each other as much.

why are they designing jobs around people who just dont press buttons? you CANNOT add anything to help make healing easier for these players, other than a tutorial or literal invincibility buffs. i see this shit every time i queue for a roulette, and is the reason i just exclusively heal: bad players just dont use skills. i rather be redundant in dps thats always useful and leads to fun gameplay when healing is covered than redundant in healing ill never ever need while spamming 1 endlessly

Exactly this. I have to reiterate that I don't exactly *like* that this is FF XIV's design philosophy. Just that it quite self-evidently prioritizes accessibility, and the healer/tank design reflects that implementing that philosophy just amounts to mitigation/healing bloat to compensate for, exactly as you said, people who don't press buttons. But again, I think there is a distinction to be had, because they have a two-prong approach to dealing with players who don't push buttons:

1) Shift the challenge difficulty to more "intuitive" things that do not involve button pushing like scripting AoE-avoidance dances.
2) Shift the responsibility for pushing buttons onto other players. The button bloat is *partly* to throw a bunch of things at the inept player and hope they will stick (faulty logic, I know), but moreso it exists so other players have more tools to *compensate* for the inept player. Again, in theory this bloat keeps the party balanced in favor of clearing, because at this point in XIV's design (and ignoring the occasional DPS check), as long as the tank stays alive then clearing isn't a matter of skill but of patience. Having so much redundancy between tanks and healers literally halves failure rates because now you have two roles whose primary concern is a single health bar and each has a very reasonable ability to single-handedly maintain it.