It is not possible to play without doing dps as healer? every day i find someone...

[vetch]

I see the thread is back to Standard Sylphie Argument Number 6: "But 900 year old handless arthritic Maasai grannies might play on 5kbps connections! No complexity allowed on healers. Respect the Medica 2 spam as a perfectly valid and skilled gameplay choice!"

Yes, and it's annoying because if they'd just drop pretense and say "DPS doesn't excite me and it isn't what I thought I'd signed up to do 95% of the time when I picked the green job" they'd have a much stronger position. It's a perfectly permissible sentiment to have. One might try to reply with "it more efficiently clears encounters" or "not doing it is disrespectful to your group" but I don't think any reasonable person truly believes that clearing encounters is all there is to the game or that we should abandon expectation of fun and play only for the sake of others... or else we wouldn't writhe so when saddled with healers' dreadfully tedious '1211111' DPS kit.

DPS (in FF14) is at least more involved than that. Not all of them, granted,

It's good that you granted that because it saves me from typing out some really terrible red-DPS kits.

but keeping track of procs. Knowing when to hold back and when to use a stored combo. Knowing where best to use a support ability. I've had WAY more fun rescuing failed runs with chained Verraises than I had trying WHM in Shadowbringers and feeling like I had little to no impact on any encounter beyond GlareHoly spamming. I called them Push Healthbar Rightward spells because that's literally all they are: largely interchangeable, hardly reward or punish you for making a "wrong" choice, and the decision tree is largely down to "is the party healthy enough for the next hit? No? Pick another one and cast it. Or the same one, who cares." DPS (at least the better designed ones) have a touch of decision making that actually noticeably impacts your performance (admittedly this has also been decreasing over time, though not as bad as healers yet). If I flub my casts, or Jolt spam, or freestyle an unenchanted melee combo, my performance takes a huge hit. If I cast Medica 2 instead of Cure 3, who cares? The next raidwide is scheduled to come out in financial quarter 3 next year, and both did the same thing for the same opportunity cost.

Problem being that CBU3 is allergic to skill tests on healers at any level of content. MSQ content, you can bring DPS who favor a 5-second GCD and still get the win. That's fine. But at Savage+ level, where the game demands practiced DPS rotations or you risk enrage, where it's actually possible to fail due to not playing DPS well enough, there's no corresponding check for traditional healer soft-skills like triage, reactive decision-making, managerial overview, or resource conservation. So of course there's so much pressure to green-DPS; healers haven't been given anything else to do! They literally forgot to install a skill ceiling for healers!

The thing is, this isn't new, and I don't mean that just in the context of FF14. The vast majority of RPGs I've played have utterly uninteresting healing "mechanics" slapped onto otherwise entertaining multitasker classes. Ironically 14 fits the oldschool Final Fantasy model of healing quite well! You have a set of boring noninteractive healing spells distinguished only by their potency, MP cost, and whether they hit the whole party or just one person. I'd much rather spend my time wondering whether Protect or Sleep or Poison would be a better choice next turn than thumb through the catalog of healing spells that are only pretending to have different effects. That catalog should be on my table within viewing distance, but the more time I'm called to look at it the more time I have to think about how interchangeable the spells are.

No, it doesn't fit the old model, because older Final Fantasys are turn-based and give you control of a team. So instead of watching my healer execute her long Holy animation for the hundredth time to do 70-80% of the damage of my offensive characters, I probably just ensure Haste is up and then either use a weak-but-quick melee attack or outright pass her turn to save real-world time. There's no capacity to choose that or any other clever little optimization in FF14 healing -- if you decline to GlareGlare your life away to do half the damage of a better-designed job, it doesn't transfer a faster GCD over so the other can take up your slack. Any similarities to older FFs are superficial.

I guess what I'm saying is, I've seen FAR more success stories with making choice-intensive and fun kits with damage, support, CC, and debuffs. I've seen a LOT of attempts at "interesting" healing that land like a whoopee cushion. Ooo, an AoE HoT, nobody will see that one coming. A button that increases your healing spells by 15% for 10 seconds? Stop afore I'm overwhelmed by the interactivity.

I, too, miss Guild Wars 1.