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

[Ixon]

I would agree with your elaboration, with the exception of "further reduced to DPS" because they still have a suite of mitigation abilities and also care the most about positioning. Also, XIV is already a DPS-driven game--all of the jobs are already "reduced to DPS." The problem is that tanks get DPS mini-games while healers get single-button DPS spam.

I also think the "flavor" is quite irrelevant, since there are many different ways to give a tank flavor than self-sustaining through self-heals. If they in fact do need more to do outside of DPS, perhaps the raid design should focus more on forcing them to single-target DPS- or healer-busters. But I think healing themselves--on top of being, as you observe, mostly unneeded--is treading too much on the already quite narrow role of healers.

And blah blah I've already talked at length in this thread about how the self-sustain is really just the devs' way of making the game relatively fail-proof because XIV cares more about reeling in new casual players than challenging their skill. But I still think Arthur hit on perhaps the one thing that is the biggest culprit for healer irrelevancy.

As I have stated previously, the issue is two-part: Tanks and Healers built up power-creep due to the necessity of wanting them to "feel" stronger with each expansion, and the scaled down difficulty of overall content as they wanted to appeal to as many of the incoming player base as possible. These changes are great for the casual and newer players in simple content like Normal Modes and Dungeons, but hurts the fun and engagement of it's more veteran/hardcore players even in it's Savage tiers. The trick now is how do you make jobs fundamentally more of a challenge and more engaging to veteran players without taxing the skill floor and without making more casual/newer players a complete hindrance in a majority of content. As a tank, it does feel nice to have such a powerful kit that I can carry any party in 4 to 8 man content with, but in the same vein, it feels wasted and boring in current Savage content. This is doubly so with healers having a lackluster DPS rotation to fill in the gaps.

I am still of the mind that they should scrap or combine 1/3rd of healers healing kits, replace them with engaging DPS options, while scaling down tank sustainability and increasing DPS checks in some fights to help bring back the feeling of the trinity, thus allowing tanks and especially healers to feel more like the roles they are supposed to be. However, I do not think any changes to that degree will happen till after the next Ultimate, as I believe Yoshi and the devs are worried they might break something within the jobs and the next Ultimate that was already put on hold for so long.