AST (and DRG) had their improvements pushed to 7.0 PLD are getting theirs in 6.3

[ty_taurus]

No, it isn't. And never will be.

That's like saying mastering being a gunslinging police officer and mastering being a surgeon treating gunshot victims is "the same thing".

I don't understand your analogy. The way the game mechanically functions dictates that optimizing your healing does in fact have a direct impact on your ability to optimize your DPS. The two are intrinsically linked. By choosing the best healing tool for any given scenario, you are extending your ability to continue DPSing, so I'm not sure what it is you're trying to talk about. In a given example, imagine you have a SCH who needs to heal the party after a light raidwide. Using Fey Blessing may be the most optimal heal, whereas opting for Succor instead, the less valuable heal, will take away from your ability to contribute DPS. In practice, though, I suppose we can say there's a fair amount of room for error, particularly in casual content, where choosing certain unnecessarily powerful heals that result in overhealing both don't take away from your DPS and aren't going to stress your resources later. Using Pneuma on a dungeon raidwide, for example, is highly unnecessary, but it's not going to leave you wanting for a Pnuema later in the fight where it will be on cooldown.

I will contest that and say you're wrong. Now, here it really DOES depend on who we're talking about, but first we have to do a quick and dirty parsing of the community. At the top end (99%ers) you have the 1% of the community. Bleeding edge, theorycraft in their sleep, you know, the actual best of the best. Then we have the 9%ers, these are the 90-99% who AREN'T the elite, but want to be. These are also the people that most complain about things like balance and want to exclude people less skilled/dedicated/whatever than them from content. They see themselves as part of the 1%, but they aren't actually quite there. Then you have the Mid-core, which is the 50-90% types that still do hard content, still clear it, but do it more as a social thing with friends for fun and good times. They derive general joy from doing the stuff together, but they don't derive joy from min-maxing everything or making the game into a job. (I largely fit into this group, personally, and have since at least the middle of SB.) Then you have the "casuals(?)" which are the 0-50% that many times don't even step into hard content at all, and on the rare occasion they do, either do so with a group of friends or are doing old content for glamour or the like. These people generally don't know what weaving is, the difference between a GCD and an oGCD, etc. (I was one of these up until probably mid-SB when I started looking into SCH guide videos and happened across one from Momo or Wesk Alber or someone that explained the difference.)

The Mid-core would be destroyed by changes like that, and so they would, in fact, not be content if the roles were completely changed. The hyper-casuals wouldn't care IF it doesn't come to bother them - the issue with Cleric Stance type stuff is that it DID, in fact, come to bother them with people getting yelled at in Dungeon runs if they were never using Cleric or weren't DPSing, which resulted in Cleric being removed ("This is why we can't have nice things"). Whenever stuff like this has bled out into the common player/casual content, the result is always that it was removed/nerfed. If the Healer rotations were made harder and it WAS a significant part of clear times so that 9%ers running 4 man roulettes started complaining about them, it would run into the same problem Cleric did.

The 1% wouldn't care. The 9% would be gleefully smirking at the mid-core no longer being able to clear "their" content and relishing having more exclusivity.

So I contest that they wouldn't care. The 50-90 would care because they aren't able to clear content, and the 0-50 would care because the 9% would now be complaining about every dungeon run taking longer than they want.

Let's correct that: It happened in SB once HW era healing was arguably gutted with the Cleric removal BECAUSE that was going on. It forced Cleric's removal and a stricter hand with TOS for people to be "far happier". Not only that, you say "the community was far happier". What evidence do you have of this? I would wager the 9% was far happier, but was the community AS A WHOLE? As much as the 9% complain, I feel the community AS A WHOLE is far happier with ShB healing than SB and certainly than HW.

I mean I wouldn't exactly toss around any numbers or percentages as I haven't polled the playerbase or anything, but I've been here since ARR and I've seen how people have reacted to job changes both good and bad--a lot of people. I've been on these forums since ARR days, and I've talked with many players over the years whether in FCs, linkshells, or shout chats. Most people just don't have strong opinions on job changes. They tend to pick the jobs that they like visually or thematically and just stick with those with a small caveat that overly complex jobs do tend to drive people away, hence AST or ShB SMN. What most players care about is the MSQ, glamour, and the aesthetic of their job.

I'll elaborate that when I said "community" I should've specified "dedicated community" as in the types of players who do engage with job discussion whether here, on Reddit, or on YouTube discussions. With that in mind, what I've seen is that during ARR, there was very little negative that anyone had to say about the healers. FFXIV's healers were regularly praised, actually, for not being curebots in contrast to WoW at the time. During HW, there was some amount of bickering that started as more WoW players started getting into HW, and WoW healers were not expecting FFXIV's healers to have to DPS or stance dance. I won't say it was exclusively WoW healers, of course, but they were the ones who kinda started the fire. SB was more mixed as WHM was very poorly thought out, SCH was initially missing several core tools at launch, but also had good elements as well. I'd argue it was great for Cleric Stance to be removed, actually. It was too much of an all-or-nothing ultimatum that left no room for error and was heavily punishing. So yeah I would argue that the at least dedicated healer community was much happier prior to Shadowbringers given how little issues people had with healing overall. It wasn't really until feedback was being outright ignored that things started to heat up. And as mentioned earlier, those not heavily invested in healing were and still are largely indifferent.

Agreed, but in the opposite direction you likely mean.

The people that want more DPS buttons on healers likely fit that mold. They want more DPS buttons because they'd really rather be playing a DPS Job but are on a Healer either for ques or for a raid spot.

People that DO main healers - as in have only one Job at level 90 and it's a Healer - are likely more the casuals or "Sylphies" who don't want that.

I find this statement quite callous to be honest with you. If I wanted to play as a DPS, then I'd play a DPS, and I do as it stands because healers are so poorly designed that it angers me how much I dislike playing as a healer. I love playing a support role in every other game out there. When I played league a couple years ago, my favorite role was specifically enchanters--characters like Bard, Rakan, and Nami. I recently played through Xenoblade 3 where I'd actively control healers, my favorite of which could spread debuffs, create evasion fields, and could heal the party, all while still dealing moderate damage. I also played Wakfu a long time ago where my favorite class was the Eniripsa who was the dedicated healer, but also had the ability Unnatural Remedies that would zombify enemies and cause healing to hurt them. You could even heal allies while also injuring zombified enemies with your AoE heal. All that said, I still want each FFXIV healer to have a wider library of GCD options, not just healing mind you. I've said before that I feel SCH and SGE should be the DPS heavy healers, AST the support heavy healer who replaces GCD DPS with GCD support that passively contributes to their DPS numbers, and WHM who's more balanced.

I find it kind of rude that you are writing off those of us who fight for more DPS options on healers as effectively 'not real healers,' because the true healer mains are apparently the casuals who don't want DPS at all. That's a really narrow minded perspective to have. There are many different types of healer players, and all of them are valid. That said, this game does not support heal-only healers on any level and there's no way around that without quite literally redoing the game's encounter design from scratch which is just not reasonable. It's like playing Super Smash Bros and complaining about its platforming elements. That's a part of the package, just as DPSing is a part of the package with FFXIV's healer design. I would love to see one of the healers fulfill a gameplay style that could better satisfy people who want a healer that only heals or supports, but it will still realistically need to rely on some amount of DPS.

At the end of the day, if you are content with the healers as they are, then that's your right. But they are still terribly designed for this game. You can like something that is poorly designed just like how you can like food that's bad for you, like clothes that don't match, or like a movie with bad acting.