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

[Avoidy]

it's interesting to hear different perspective however we do have a certain amount of healers that can provide buffs already- SCH has recitation and AST has the card system. i like the PVP card system for AST, and that could be fun to add for PVE. SCh used to have differences in the fairies and I don't see why they could bring that back to add some different buffs. However that doesn't mean that groups should start asking for any one type of healer, just like any other job wouldn't like groups starting to be formed and excluding a specific DPS job or tank job.

Personally I wouldn't want to always be a group's "mana battery", resource management is part of each job's responsibility, that's not at all unique to this game, nor is having mitigation available to all roles, although the extent of that mitigation is arguably much higher for some roles than in some other games.

I'm aware that other healers have buffs, but since they're all damage oriented forms of support that you just sort of press once and then forget about, it can make things feel a little bland imo. In my ideal scenario, healers would feel maybe a bit more like bard, solely in the sense that they would have ongoing buffs to consider and way more spinning plates to make up for their abysmal dps rotation. But in order to do this, the entire game would need to be changed since like you said already, people basically manage themselves at this point. As just one dumb example, whenever I do any 4-man oriented daily content with friends, we just WAR/3DPS it. I know it's just dungeons, but that's also a massive chunk of the game where you straight up don't need this role at all depending on your comp, and it's not even a hard comp to set up. Meanwhile, in the game I alluded to earlier, healers felt necessary and vital to a team's success and quality of life in all forms of content, not just the top 1% of stuff that most people don't even bother doing.

But yeah, they'd need to change the whole game to make something like that work. People are too self sufficient as it stands. It's why I don't even bother healing anymore. I need to change my forum profile because it still says WHM, but I haven't played that job much in a while. I enjoyed AST for a bit, but then they went and gutted the fun from that as well. So now I play bard when I feel like supporting, and even that barely scratches the itch, so most of the time I just scrap the desire completely and play blm. I have more fun healing when I play Warrior at this point.