What if Support Role was Added to FFXIV?

[Shurrikhan]

You're talking about changing encounter design in order to make these abilities useful.

Sure (though primarily through easily spread undermechanics). Why not? Encounter design, at present, can be unnecessarily restricted and thereby dull.

Moreover, content design and kit design are equal partners in any feedback cycle; content won't have any more to it than what a kit can leverage, and a kit have any more to it than what content allows to the kit feature.

If either is shallowed out until doldrum, though, that doesn't necessitate that the other be, too. And even when both are so shallowed, both ought then to just be reinvigorated together, so long as that state would be seen as better for the game.

That is neither here or there. Again, encounter design is based entirely on damage, making such abilities entirely redundant.

Not letting a game spiral into needless reductions is always here, there, and everywhere. There's a difference between noting what support functions were mere bloat or smoke and mirrors and refusing the whole concept wholesale on the basis that it wouldn't fit the current (more than arguably already problematic) context.

Healers have the strongest ability out of all the roles to erase mistakes and prevent death.

So you're arguing that healers specifically also have "extremely powerful... supportive abilities" just because their healing is strong... in a thread that explicitly differentiates "Support" tools apart from mere healing, and as a reply to a post that likewise clearly separated "healing" from "Support" functionality?

I can't tell if you're just really not reading the room or are making a purposeful conflation in order to move goalposts here...