Just remove healers.

[Silverbane]

To be quite honest, I would rather swim a mile in a sea of broken glass than be subjected to an hour of playing this game's healers.

LOL. Someone who doesn't play healers starts a thread advocating removing them from the game.
I stocked up on popcorn when I saw this thread launch, but I clearly didn't get enough.

OTOH, SGE is my favorite class to play (followed by SCH, WAR, and DNC, roughly in that order).
So obviously I do not want healers removed from the game.

But I'm not an endgame elitist suffering ennui: I'm just another subscriber playing through the MSQ for the fourth time in seven years, with the new perspective provided by the dislosures of Endwalker.

But as SE is quite aware, players like me pay the same subscription fee as the endgame elitists do. And there's probably more of us.

[Martynek]

LOL. Someone who doesn't play healers starts a thread advocating removing them from the game.

The only reason I can conclusively say that healers should be removed is because I have experience with them.
I violently regret every second I spent in that dreaded hellhole and if I could be granted any one wish, I would ask that I never wasted that time.

But I'm not an endgame elitist suffering ennui

What makes you think I am? Or is this just more of your crybullying - "If they disagree with me, it must be because they're a toxic elitist!" You've done this several times before and it's the same script each time. It's getting stale. Get some new material.

[Silverbane]

The only reason I can conclusively say that healers should be removed is because I have experience with them.
I violently regret every second I spent in that dreaded hellhole and if I could be granted any one wish, I would ask that I never wasted that time.

So what? The people I play with tried ninja and didn't like it; I personally haven't particularly enjoyed any of the melee DPS classes I've played. But you don't see me advocating removing melee DPS.

What makes you think I am?

I never said you were anything.
If I had, I might have said you were a troll, or a spoiled child.
But I didn't say that.

Other people like things you don't. Get over it.

[Martynek]

So what? The people I play with tried ninja and didn't like it; I personally haven't particularly enjoyed any of the melee DPS classes I've played. But you don't see me advocating removing melee DPS.
Other people like things you don't. Get over it.

You are not being forced to include Ninjas in your groups to be able to play the game. You are, however, forced to bring a healer. What if I want to play the game with my friends, but none of us want to play a healer? Should we just have to give in and knowingly subject one another to mental torture?
Other people do not like the things you do. Get over it.
This is a problem here because the healing role is so absurdly homogenised to the point that there might as well be only a single job within it - To further elaborate on that:

I want to put together a group for a raid.

I do not want to play a job that has frantic, high APM weaving windows every minute. I do not have to bring a Gunbreaker.
I do not want to play a job that has a rotation that is almost entirely expressed through powerful GCDs, with very infrequent usage of oGCD attacks. I do not have to bring a Warrior.
I do not want to play a job that fights exclusively in melee, with no way of keeping active at a distance. I do not have to bring a Monk.
I do not want to play a job that has a large amount of reliance on RNG to determine the flow of its rotation. I do not have to bring a Dancer.
I do not want to play a job with long cast times and little freeform mobility. I do not have to bring a Black Mage.
I do not want to play a job that spends 90% of its time pressing a single button, and another 9% of the time keeping up a single DoT. Well too bad, you WILL bring two healers. This is not optional.

So. Remove the healing role and improve the defensive toolkits of the remaining jobs to allow them to do without. It wouldn't even take a drastic redesign of the game systems or content.

[TabrisOmbrelame]

You are not being forced to include Ninjas in your groups to be able to play the game. You are, however, forced to bring a healer. What if I want to play the game with my friends, but none of us want to play a healer? Should we just have to give in and knowingly subject one another to mental torture?
Other people do not like the things you do. Get over it.
This is a problem here because the healing role is so absurdly homogenised to the point that there might as well be only a single job within it - To further elaborate on that:

I want to put together a group for a raid.

I do not want to play a job that has frantic, high APM weaving windows every minute. I do not have to bring a Gunbreaker.
I do not want to play a job that has a rotation that is almost entirely expressed through powerful GCDs, with very infrequent usage of oGCD attacks. I do not have to bring a Warrior.
I do not want to play a job that is exclusively melee-ranged, with no way of keeping active at a distance. I do not have to bring a Monk.
I do not want to play a job that has a large amount of reliance on RNG to determine the flow of its rotation. I do not have to bring a Dancer.
I do not want to play a job with long cast times and little freeform mobility. I do not have to bring a Black Mage.
I do not want to play a job that spends 90% of its time pressing a single button, and another 9% of the time keeping up a single DoT. Well too bad, you WILL bring two healers. This is not optional.

So. Remove the healing role and improve the defensive toolkits of the remaining jobs to allow them to do without. It wouldn't even take a drastic redesign of the game systems or content.

Only thing I see there is : "I do not want to play a job...."

You could have said : "I do not want to play." this would be the exact same.

Your personnal opinion on a job is a thing, every people should accept that other don't want to play a thing or not. But to just remove a class from the game because you don't like it ? I think people who like it will have much more weight over you. And even if those people keep complaining about healers, it's because they actually care of the Healer's role.

Silverbane put a good exemple with Melee DPS. It's not his playstyle, he don't like melee, maybe for various reason, who knows ? But he didn't advocate for removing Melee DPS, even by "having experience" with them.

If you want a game where healer isn't necessary, change game. What do you expect us to say aside from that, honestly ?

EDIT : Ransu, that's a sick burn. You made me laugh so hard. Thank you for making my day, mate

[TabrisOmbrelame]

It would take minor changes to the defensive toolkits of DPS jobs to facilitate the removal of healers - But to facilitate the removal of tanks, you'd have to rebuild almost all of the game's content.

As I already stated, the encounter design of the game does not necessitate the existence of a dedicated healer. With very minor changes to the defensive toolkits of DPS jobs, healers would become entirely obsolete.

Ok, let's talk about "cleanse mecanics", Healer check from 1 Hp to full in order to avoid the "Doom" killing you, or just Raid busters following them. P3S as exemple with the 1-2-4 doom kill WITH healing debuff that will most likely kill you because of the huge AoE Damage you'll get right after it, or even fountain of fire where you take 99% HP three time in a row ? But yeah, you don't need healer to go through all of this. P4S is the same when you have 4 double share to do with a huge Raid buster a few second later, you don't heal... And you can find more of those mecanics, even on lower level content. (Saying you only do that unsync because you're 90 isn't an argument, because those mecanics existed before and will probably come again). And like you said for tanks, if you wish the removal of healers you'll need to rework the entire game, which will not happen. And just doing some minor defensive change on DPS will not make healer obsolete. Second winds doesn't even heal for 10k no crit (almost 15% heal) with 2 minute CD and Bloodbath, even if it's effective in some way, got a 90 sec CD, which is clearly not enough...

I never advocated the removal of any one job, but the role in its entirety. You can keep playing White Mage, Scholar, Astrologian, Sage... they just won't be healers that are forced into parties that do not want them.

That's even worse than removing a class. You are just going to relinquish them into Caster DPS, and then what ? Did you solve anything ? Instead you create even more trouble. Healer's are asking for changes, not removal.

And Parties who don't want healer ? Excuse me but that's must be a minority of player (And by that I mean that the numbers must be near insignificant considering the number of player on the game). If you don't want to accept healer in your party, that's your problem, don't try to make people accept unrealistic idea based on nothing more than a poor experience (Because just saying that you don't feel the "damage" doesn't mean it's not there). And as I said, If you wish to play a game without healers, you can just go try another game, some Korean P2W game have those design.

[Renathras]

You are not being forced to include Ninjas in your groups to be able to play the game. You are, however, forced to bring a healer. What if I want to play the game with my friends, but none of us want to play a healer? Should we just have to give in and knowingly subject one another to mental torture?

What if none of you wanted to play tank? What if none of your friend group wanted to play DPS?

After trying all of the melee DPSers, I dislike them all. I've yet to find ONE that I like. For casters, I dislike BLM and am neutral on RDM. SMN is the only one I like. For Ranged, I don't care for DNC or really BRD. I'm neutral on MCH. So out of all the DPS in the game, I like SMN and find MCH and RDM tolerable. Should we remove DPS from the game because I dislike them?

Most of the people in my friends group play healers and tanks. We all have a DPS alt because we "have to" for when we want to do things and the tank/heal slots are full. Tanks are also far more often AIN than healers and the hardest slots to fill in most parties. When I look through PF for Ex and Sav, healers tend to fill before tanks, so CLEARLY many people like playing them and the slots aren't hard to fill. Just because you and your friends don't like them doesn't mean the rest of the community doesn't.

This is a problem here because the healing role is so absurdly homogenised

I hate this argument.

The healing ROLE is not homogenized. The healer DPS kits are MOSTLY homogenized. The healer healing kits aren't AT ALL homogenized. They all have different tools to confront various situations, and they all feel different to play when you actually need to heal. The issue is the game doesn't require enough healing, so people get stuck with the dps rotation. And they could fix that just by something as simple as one having a 1-2-3 combo like MCH, one having 1-3 DoTs, another having a DoT and spam spell, and another having some kind of combo point generator and spender system. They've made them the same because, for whatever reason, they decided they wanted that.

EDIT:

I want to put together a group for a raid.

Good thing you are not playing ALL EIGHT POSITIONS AT ONCE, then, isn't it? Because there ARE people that like those other spots. And that will play those other spots. And that may not like the things YOU like. So we all work together.

Imagine if there was a raid where all you did was heal. Where there was a lot of AOE damage and there a weakened Dragon and the goal was to heal it before the time ran out and its Doom ticked down, killing it and wiping since it couldn't power up to defeat the big bad. Now all those Jobs YOU want to play are USELESS. Shall we design the game that way, to actively exclude you and your preferred playstyle?

No, of course not. That would be absurd.

The game is designed to where everyone just about can play it.

I do agree that they could mix up the healer DPS kits a bit AND/OR make healing matter so they actually have to lean on their GCD heals, breaking up Glarespam. But remove healers? No.

So. Remove the healing role and improve the defensive toolkits of the remaining jobs to allow them to do without.

Hard.
No.

Besides, you'd also have to redesign ALL PAST FIGHTS/CONTENT since people are still leveling through the game, new players joining all the time, people clearing old content synced or at level, and so on. And you know the VERY FIRST thing that would happen if you ever removed healers?

...people would be complaining about no healers and asking for them to be added to the game.

.

Any dungeon content? Liberal use of Clemency on big hits kept DPS alive, on top of any utility/mitigation I could throw up to supplement was more than adequate.
Normal Raids? Cleared every single Eden Raid with my PLD playing healer after both healers died on more than 1 occasion.
Alliance Raid? Unless a fight has an enrage mechanic, not really a problem there either.

You're using the ONE Tank with a (rather powerful) spamable heal talking about content with no enrage mechanics (that effectively doesn't need DPSers, either). Not sure that's a good general statement. To be fair, at this point, you can all-tank almost any content in the game. That doesn't mean we should remove DPS as a role.

The reason why we're not happy playing a healer is because we remember a time when there was more to do as a Healer. We had multiple DoTs to manage and a small DPS rotation between those DoTs, Cleric Stance and our Nuke. We had to actually manage MP in the past. We had to actually use our GCDs for more than just Filler Spam. We needed to shield prey mechanics. We needed to rotate Virus/Disable between Healers to make sure the party didn't die to a massive raid wide. Nothing of that has been retained so we went from having a solid workload that actually felt rewarding to pull off to having our job outsourced to Tanks/DPS roles and having the bare minimum to do.

WE"RE BORED!!! It's that simple.

A constant problem with modern society is people speaking for themselves claiming that they're speaking for everyone.

"WE" is clearly not talking about all healers, as many of US disagree with you. DoTs aren't challenging or engaging to people like me, for example, they're BORING. And Cleric Stance dancing (I've been playing and healing since 2.3 or so) was tedious as all hells, not fun nor engaging gameplay. The main change to our DPS kit between then and now is we cut out a lot of the tedium and clunk. The only healer that really ever has had an engaging DPS kit was RDM. That's not a typo.

Managing MP (for non-SCHs) was "stop casting damage spells and don't use AOE heals for 10-20 seconds". The other things you mention were mostly oGCDs (Virus, for example), which wouldn't be any different to today's gameplay of you spamming Glare and rotating in some filler oGCDs.

And as I said above, the REASON for all this? Because of a healer shortage because it was "too hard" and because of people complaining about it. Incessantly. SCH would still have 4 DoTs today if SCH's all through SB hadn't complained - incessantly - that they had to do more work than WHM and got only the same damage numbers. Because people that say they're "bored" and "just want more buttons to hit" always end up saying "Okay, I hit more buttons than that other guy, so I should be doing more damage" once they have those buttons.

Imagine if we gave SCH its DoT kit back and SGE got something on par with SMN/RDM level DPS rotation. Both would start complaining almost instantly that they aren't outdamaging WHM and they need potency buffs because they're doing "more work" even though the entire change would have been predicated on "we don't want more damage, just some more buttons so we won't be bored".

.

Are you sure about that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gi05HqdMSs - Ultimate Coil done with 8 tanks

Tanks which have more mitigation than DPS (e.g. can survive without healing what a DPSer could not) and self-healing to augment their mitigation played by top end players that specifically put their team together, likely know the fight VERY to EXTREMELY well, and were willing to endure wipe after wipe to make it happen if need be...is not exactly comparable to the typical experience of running content in this game by the VAST majority of the playerbase.

Also note the words of the person who posted it: "By far the hardest prog I have ever done."

Besides, if anything, this is an argument that we don't need DPS in the game, isn't it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdDxjXMMWgU - E4S (when current) done with 2 tanks and 6 dps

...of which 5 of said DPS were massive healing Phoenix summoning SMNs. And again, the same above about optimizing, highly skilled players, etc etc applies. How is this representative of the game as a whole or 99% of the playerbase who aren't in the top 0.1-1.0% of the playerbase? It's TECHNICALLY possible, but that's hardly saying it's GENERALLY possible. Oh, and...they picked the two tanks with the highest healing in the game, and one of which that can spot-heal party members. That's not exactly making your argument for you.

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1qL4y1J7Mh EX1 (Spoilers EW) done with 2 tanks 6 dps

Again we see WAR/PLD. This time with the - before the later patch nerfing it - broken RPR and 4x DNCs (Healing Samba). This is requiring yet another insanely niche comp. How this is different from the ones above is that Ex1 only requires a single tank swap and your party having a good danger dorito. It's not that hard of a fight, so it again isn't making your case for you.

The idea you don't need healers doesn't seem that nonsensical...

In extremely niche circumstances, with parties explicitly built for it, with high skilled players who have done a piece of content to death and know it inside and out, sure. But again, this same argument could be used to say we can remove DPS from the game.

The idea you don't need healers in general is pretty nonsensical. That you have to find extremely niche cases with extremely high skilled players that are also insanely bored and dedicated to making it work is the exception proving the rule, not disproving it.