FF14 Becoming More "Solo Friendly" is bad, Maybe

[IdowhatIwant]

Since I started this game as a healer where I don't get the to experience the difference in muscle memory I think its ok so far and accepted as is xD I guess SE could improve the heal potency and cooldown of some skills to change more gcd heals to gcd dps skills? Maybe a compromise of when used on friendly target = heal, on unfriendly target = damage? I guess I cant see the issue yet on my end since Glare, Dia and Afflatus Misery seem smooth in normal play with cleansing, mitigation and healing but maybe in a perfect play comp where there's not much healing needed unless raidwide its super boring xD

I dont know any of those skills nor have been here long enough to know a job's identity I saw on the ff14 site there's pure healers and barrier healers, are these the identity thing? I've only play summoner as a pure dps class so far and it does summon stuff to deal damage lol Hmm might it be nostalgia?

See your knowledge is a bit limited on the subject as a whole, which is why I said many opinions you have do not hold as much merit. Barrier healers and pure healers is essentially new to this expansion, and was another step of homogenization between the classes. Astrologian, use to have two different stances, one which provided regens, and one that provided barriers. The card system was completely different from what it is now, where most cards now improve damage on x and y roles, they used to apply different buffs so would have to think as to who would benefit most from the differing buffs. It was a very support oriented healer compared to the other healers and had a lot of spell speed buffs for itself to cast fast. Scholar used to have a large part of summoners kit, which is not the kit it has currently. It was a very high DPS healer that also provided shields and direct heals from it's fairy (which also provided various buffs to dps and to healing as well). WHM used to be a very strong single target and aoe healer, with dots and direct damage spells that was never expanded upon. Biggest problem, is most of your healers simply heal through OGCDs, and the content doesn't promote much healing outside of raid wide healing which like you said is super boring. It has been a problem for several expansions now which is why a lot of healers are fed up.

Job identity can be a little more complicated to really dive into with out getting into specifics. A good example is summoner right now has a pretty good identity as a summoner, but its identity used to be a dot mage. Now I think the direction they have moved in summoner is good, but its game play has taken major steps backwards.
Machinest, is now the pure ranged DPS with no buffs, summons a robot and uses various random tools to blast enemies with. This class use to actually be a ranged class that provided a bit of damage buff support with various turrets, and relied on a ammo system to increase the damage of there attacks and make them combo into other attacks. Machinest has also always had a heat gauge but it served a different purpose than it does now. The current heat gauge builds up and you dump it on heat blasts pretty boring. The old gauge would buff your skills and damage based off the heat level while guass barrel was on (ie 10 heat was a 10% damage buff). When the gauge was between 50 - 100 heat your skills would upgrade to stronger skills, once the gun would over heat, you would keep the 100% damage buff for about 10 seconds before the gun would cool off and gauss barrel would be unusable for 10 seconds. I know in heavensward you had to actually reactive gauss barrel after each over heat, I can't remember if you had to in Stormblood.

Most of the tanks used to have a specific identity as well which came from there tank and dps stances. For tank stances Warrior would get increased health, increased healing. Paladin and Dark Knight would take reduced damage and all tank stances would reduce damage dealt. Warrior specifically also had different skills based on the stances. For DPS stance, Warrior would get increased damage, as well as build stacks (later gauge) that would also increase it's crit stance but could be dumped on Fell Cleave for high damage (the stacks and gauge was built in both stances but provided a parry buff in tank stance IIRC). Paladin dps stance would cause there auto attacks to double attack. Darkknight dps stance would increase it's damage by 15% IIRC and was usable while tank stance was on. Dark Knight also played much more differently as it had to manage MP due to it's dps stance halting MP regeneration and slowly draining it as well. It hard a skill called Dark Arts which would buff up various skills at the cost of a large chunk of mp. Gun Breaker never really had stance identity attached to it, as it came after DPS stances was removed and tank stance was turned into emnity generation on / off. I guess Gun Breaker can be the lots of combos tank.

I could go on and how these classes used to play and how they are now, but I wanted to give a couple specific examples some you may be familiar with some you may not be to help you understand why people don't like the pruning and want class identity and engagement back. As you can clearly kind of see where that engagement fell off as pruning and reworks happened, and it is really a matter of opinion as to which versions were better. Personally I preferred the older versions of most of the classes.