Quote Originally Posted by Jojoya View Post
Healer numbers rarely budge in any MMO because most players are more interested in seeing huge damage numbers splashed across the screen over having to watch health bars and debuffs/buffs on party members. No matter what's been tried, it's hard to get players to try out the role that's perceived as having more responsibility. Tanks also have frequently suffered from this, though to a lesser degree.

Perhaps the real solution is to give DPS additional responsibility beyond watch the boss and move out of mechanics as they DPS. Tanks have the added responsibility of handling their mitigation as they DPS. Healer have the additional responsible of keeping party HP at accepting levels and then DPSing if they have the free GCD (or oGCD if available). What additional responsibility has been given to DPS?
While I don't disagree the Healer role is generally unpopular comparatively speaking, this only highlights my original point: the dev's approach has been flawed since Shadowbringers. The whole reason they dumbed down healers and seemingly refuse to give them a meaningfully engaging rotation is due to the perceived difficulty being too daunting for new players. Therefore, making them easier should attract players to the role. It didn't. All they accomplished was making the healer community incredibly divisive. If the numbers were never going to budge, or even deplete because of player backlash, then they were better off never changing their gameplay design in the first place.

Giving DPS greater responsibility is fine, though the devs have said they won't due to it being unfair for those playing specific roles. I recall Yoshida specifically mentioning the Gorilla mechanic from A5. Furthermore, the issue with mechanics like that is with how rigid jobs have become nowadays. Take a job like Dragoon. If forced to engage for any long periods, it's rotation is entirely destroyed in terms of damage output. Hence why any DPS mechanic will largely be thrown onto whichever job does the least damage.