Has anyone quit healing?

[Renathras]

At this point, it doesn't matter what their intent is.

The game is objectively not designed to have one (1) healer use all of their healing tools in content let alone 2.

That needs to be fix. Period. That the devs refuse to do so is their own folly. Look at how you design battle content and make healers match it. Because they don't. Its been two expansions. Your vision for healers HAVE FAILED.

Agreed.

The one thing that's clear is the encounter design and Healing kits are dissonant with each other. There are several solutions to this - changing encounter design, changing Healer kits, changing the Healer paradigm to Healer/Support - but they really need to pick one and start designing around it instead of sticking with a weird hybrid thing that conflicts with itself.

[Teno]

snip

Yes the game was built like that (which as I've said, they probably didn't want) because what would you otherwise ? Twiddle your thumbs when nothing happened, even though damage came at more regular intervals ? Healing will never be reactive in this game, the closest to it is probably a bunch of tight timings in encounters like P3S and DSR more recently. So healers started dpsing and it dates back to ARR, and that was a community standard from the start, just with the occasional GCD adlo crit from time to time. If anything some disliked cleric stance but it didn't change the outcome. Cleric stance was changed due to how clunky and disruptive it was to people.

As for toxikon the point is to make it an interesting combo/interaction, which it would be, and there's no carpal issue at all lol, since you won't be spamming it. You'll still be using dosis most of the time, which makes timing when a shield can break interesting.
Sage not being a gcd healer is also not the point (nobody has ever been one). The key here is gameplay and choice, as I've mentioned just above. The mobility is just a side consequence that is probably part of the reason why it's not ogcd, since suddenly you have potentially infinite mobility, overshadowing other healers.

Healers and tanks are not build with damage in mind but that's how they've been feeling for 2+ expansions, referring again to what I said about Yoshida and his rebuttal. Sage being the outlier since it's definitely built with both in mind so they're acknowledging the dmg aspect at least (although it's not the focus), but it lacks in execution with what I mentioned before and eukrasia being a dot refresher as well as toxikon being only refreshed during downtime (pretty sure they didn't exactly plan it out to be like that).

And talking about solo content, healers have struggled so much in deep dungeons, for so long now. Sage is only marginally better. With the added bloat from 70 to 90, I doubt it'll change much with the new one.

[ForsakenRoe]

Surely the fact that SCH was super DPS heavy in ARR, while WHM was left to 'healbot' in stuff like First/Second coils (Final was where people started DPSing a lot more I think), proves that 'healers should DPS' WAS always the accepted paradigm the community ran by? Consider it from another angle: we use our OGCDs to minimize how much GCD healing we have to do, as that costs our damage. But back then, could it not be argued that the reason WHM was defaulted to 'healbot' was not 'because the fights were designed for it', but because it was perceived to be the 'optimal DPS setup', allowing the SCH to maintain almost 100% Cleric Stance uptime, while minimizing the risk to the party (because the WHM was never going to be caught out in Cleric at a bad time)? It's no coincidence to me that the moment HW launched and healers got more OGCDs to work with, the push for 'more DPS' got stronger even in casual content.

My first account I started in 2.5, and I remember hearing how different healing was in FFXIV, how we were actually encouraged to throw rocks or DOTs at enemies if we were safe to. Contrast to WOW at the time, where I got yelled at for Flame Shocking stuff in WOD, I thought 'hey this sounds cool' and would throw Aeros on whatever I could, when it was safe to. Never got to 50, came back in 3.2 and played SCH and DOT'd the hell out of everything, great time would recommend. But yes, the whole thing about 'people weren't optimized' is actually 100% accurate. How can I know? Look at Classic WOW. EVERY raid, cleared in the first day. Even Naxxramas, the infamous guild killer, fell over in sub-24 hours, because it turns out people back then were just suboptimal as hell. If we had an 'ARR Classic', knowing what we do now, every raid would fall over. Second Coil 'Savage' wouldn't even have to exist, as people would have been good enough to do the original pre-nerfed versions.

Agreed.

The one thing that's clear is the encounter design and Healing kits are dissonant with each other. There are several solutions to this - changing encounter design, changing Healer kits, changing the Healer paradigm to Healer/Support - but they really need to pick one and start designing around it instead of sticking with a weird hybrid thing that conflicts with itself.

Yeh, and of the three of these solutions, 'change healer kits' is by far the best solution, both in terms of ease of implementation, and effect caused by the change. Problem is people asking not for 'change healer kits', but 'change healer kits, except for WHM who should remain left behind to fester in the current design, which is, by the very fact we're trying to move away from it with the majority of the healers (75%), accepted to be flawed in some way'. SE already has enough things to half-arse, we don't need to give them an excuse to half-arse a role rework thank you

[ty_taurus]

Oh my god, you're...frustrating. >_<

Dude, just no.

You CANNOT use one questline to insist it was some message to the playerbase but ignore one that completely negates that argument. You said one healer questline tells you, in effect, that Raising people is bad and damage is more important than Raising - as that would be the message from "don't use Raise without using Stone, Aero, and Fluid Aura first" - which is you completely misunderstanding it wasn't even Raise, it was Transfusion. You can't appeal to that then turn around and ignore contradictory evidence because it suits you.

You're taking it too literally. The way games set up storytelling and lore is naturally meant to guide the player. The Conjurer questline is not saying "If you combo Raise out of Stone, it won't reduce your HP to 1." It's saying "stop trying to run before you can walk" and trying to deliver the point that you can't just ignore your DPS spells. If you were to play a game where your character enters a cave, and your companion character spots bandits, or soldiers, or something, and says "Oh-no, if we get caught here, we're screwed. We have to get passed them without them noticing." What does that imply about the gameplay you're going to encounter? Conjurer is the beginning of the White Mage. The questline is teaching you the basics of your jobs future gameplay: learn to balancing healing with your attacks and protection abilities (White Mage had Protect and Stoneskin back then of course). Inversely, Arcanist taught the Scholar to use their different pets (Never did NG+ for those so I have no idea what they tell you now), and taught you how to use your offensive tools already. Scholar gained all of their healing late and taught you how to use your newfound healing abilities that you haven't had the chance to practice yet.

The videos were to show you how people played at the time, which disagrees with how you are saying Healers were played at the time. It disproves your position that Healers have always been played as Green DPS. And note that those encounters, on release, were very difficult with high damage output. That's probably why they brought three healers to a Titan fight. And as I've said, there are plenty more. How many do I have to link before you admit that?

What does that have to do with developer intent? Your argument is that how some players played is indicative of what the designers wanted from the playerbase, or what the combat encounters would allow you to do, but that doesn't make sense. My original post was about what the game was built for and what the design team tried to create when designing fights. There were Black Mage players back then that just used their blizzard spells because they wanted to be ice mages like in WoW. Does that immediately mean this was the intended way to play Black Mage just because some players did this?

Except it doesn't:

- No tight enrage timers.

- No slate of oGCD heals for Healers to use to weave in between damage abilities.

- Few DPS spells for Healers compared to damage dealers of the era.

Note I said "The combat didn't say it". Past tense, not present tense. You're using present tense to argue that ARR fight design did a thing that ARR fight design didn't do. P8S was not in ARR. Ex4 was not in ARR. Healers that have more oGCDs than GCDs were not in ARR

What part of those examples prevents you from DPSing? Are you telling me if something isn't absolutely required in order to complete an objective in a game, that that can only mean it was not intended for the player to use? If that's true than I'd like to redirect some interesting examples to you...

The Legend of Zelda BoTW completed without climbing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK6ub-Z7snI
Pokemon Crystal defeated using only a Sunkern (Including the battle with Red at the end): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TQXBvsgQnU
Final Fantasy X Final Boss (the last one you can game over with) beaten on a no sphere grid run [spoilers]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvHHdgy4Hxs
Cyperpunk beaten without killing any enemies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZqvZVHT3Ts

If it was true that the intent of game design is defined by the barest of minimums necessary to complete that content, then sure, your argument holds water. But that also means that from the above examples, BoTW is intended for you to never use climbing, Pokemon is an RPG intended to be defeated with just a Sunkern, the sphere grid is not intended to be used in FFX, and Cyberpunk is intended for you to let AI companions defeat enemies for you.

My point is, sure, DPSing as a healer was slower and more methodical back during ARR. And I would actually love to get back to that. I want healing to be about making choices between offense and healing rather than just use offense and weave healing as needed most of the time. It was more fun having to decide when it was okay to attack and when I'd need to cast Adloquium. Imagine casting Adloquium or Succor outside of savage. What a novel concept. But that is not the omission of the player's ability to DPS, pointed out by your video examples where the WHM players literally stand still more than they even heal, or just cast Cure on tank with full HP or near-full HP.

No, I don't think the designers were intending that you'd have maximum DPS uptime, but the structure of fight design in FFXIV very clearly establishes that Healers are meant to contribute when they can, I think there was just a much greater emphasis on the "when they can" part.

And secondary question:

Why is it so important to you that you're right about this thing you're wrong about?

Couldn't I say the same to you? What's stopping you from moving on? I'm trying to explain that you're misunderstanding what my point was. If the game design didn't want you to DPS, you wouldn't be able to. Instead, you had a selection of offensive tools and time to use them. Whether or not the player was willing to take advantage of that doesn't matter because that couldn't possibly have influenced how the game was created, especially since there were no healers playing that way back when ARR was in development, unless someone at SE can see into the future.

[Connor]

Sorry but I have to point it out; we’re all being very disingenuous with our arguments.


Firstly, lore clearly has absolutely no bearing on how they’ve designed jobs lol. Otherwise Dragoons would fly, White Mages would give life to literal nothing, Scholars would have a chance for Eos to not listen to them (ghosting? Lol). Summoner would only ever be allowed to summon 3 Egis (Ifrit, Titan, Garuda). Black Mages would could destroy the entire planet (or spontaneously combust), the list goes on lol. The ‘Sylphie’ storyline was literally just trying to clarify to players how Conjurers ‘work’, drawing aether from nature instead of themselves. It has absolutely no bearing on whether the devs intended green dps or not, and I highly doubt they wrote that lore with any kind of combat-related message in mind, since that’s two separate teams lol (as far as im aware).

Scholar was never a ‘heavy dps job’, Arcanist was a ‘heavy dps job’ lol. It literally learns 0 dps skills between 30 - 50. Arcanist does, but then that was clearly supposed to Summoner considering Scholar is no longer linked to Arcanist (evidenced by which books they equip). But since they kept all the base stuff then slapped some healing on top it, perception of the job shifted to ‘basically a dps’ instead of ‘a healer that somehow came from a dps’.

It’s also pretty disingenuous to say ‘if they didn’t want healers to heal they would have 0 dps skills’, because that would then lock an entire role out of all solo content.

If you ask me the question we should be asking isn’t ‘should we dps’ it’s ‘how should healers contribute to the party when healing is so devoid of value or engagement’. It’s kind of no wonder the devs get so exasperated when the question comes up, since literally anything they say is going to be met with a tidal wave of backlash. I want to believe that this argument is more nuanced than just two sides arguing over which is better, but everything I’ve seen in this thread is suggesting otherwise. Maybe the truth is that neither is better than the other?

If healers were designed fully contingent on player feedback there’d be two outcomes. Either we’d have like 80 abilities, full of unnecessary dps fluffing that doesn’t actually add any sort of engagement to the job but gives the impression of ‘moar damage’ (*cough* energy drain *cough*); or, we’d have even more of what we have now with an overabundance of healing, next to nothing else to do, and content that barely tickles players at low ilvls lol

[ty_taurus]

Firstly, lore clearly has absolutely no bearing on how they’ve designed jobs lol.

There are two factors to consider with video game storytelling: suspension of disbelief and ludonarrative dissonance. Suspension of disbelief is recognizing that gameplay is not a direct representation of realistic storytelling, such as being able to take gunfire in a shooting game and heal it off by not getting hit for 3 seconds. Ludonarrative dissonance is when the gameplay contradicts the storytelling and often results in an experience that takes you out of the immersion.

It's suspension of disbelief that playing as a DRG that you can't actually fly around due to the restrictions of gameplay, but it's ludonarrative dissonance to tell players throughout the story the importance of your offensive element spells and then punish players for using them outside of the story.

It’s also pretty disingenuous to say ‘if they didn’t want healers to heal they would have 0 dps skills’, because that would then lock an entire role out of all solo content.

If they didn't want healers to DPS in group content, then solo content would've been designed in a way that doesn't require healers to DPS. I gave an example earlier of how you don't need SCH to have any offensive spells because they can go level and complete story content as SMN. WHM could've been joined with BLM in the same fashion. Or they could've allowed healers to hire NPCs to defeat things in solo content. Or they could've just not given you attack spells and have just your auto-attack be charged with magic and enough to defeat enemies out in the overworld. But they didn't do any of that.

Rule #1, if you don't want a monkey to fire a gun, then don't give a monkey a gun.

Edit: Actually, all they had to do if DPS buttons were truly meant for solo only and not meant for group content at all was have Cleric Stance work a little differently. Give healers exclusively 1 button. WHM just has Stone. SCH just has Ruin. Both scale off INT. While active, Cleric Stance increases your INT by your current MND while you are not in a party. This effect fails if you're in a group. Done. If healers were never meant to contribute DPS, that is how ARR would've looked. That is design indicative of the intent for healers to never attack in group content.

The only thing I was saying initially was that the gameplay and toolkits very clearly showcase that the game was designed for healers to be able to attack on some level even in group content, but now the role is held in stasis to try and prevent the role from choosing sides. Regardless, it is fight design that dictates the pace of healer gameplay, not kits. All this spun out because I needed to be corrected apparently with an argument that has nothing to do with my original post.

[Renathras]

Sorry but I have to point it out; we’re all being very disingenuous with our arguments.

I agree with most of what you said.

I don't think we're all being disingenuous with our arguments (much less very so), but I agree with much of the rest.

No playable class (in a game that doesn't allow control of multiple characters) is going to have no capacity to clear solo content. Lore was not used for the purposes of commentary on the meta topic of healing (and, as I pointed out, this is contradicted by other lore; the WHM quests make no bones about you attacking, something they wouldn't do if the CNJ quests taught players that, and if the reason the SCH quests weren't about attacking "because you learned that as ACN", sure, the WHM quests wouldn't need to teach you that after the CNJ ones did, right?). Also agree that SCH ending up with more damage tools was because of the shared class with SMN, and this was, as I said, a happy accident, not original intended gameplay. And I agree that it's clear the Devs are exasperated with the whole thing because they thought they made their intentions clear multiple times, but the Green DPS players won't take no for an answer, yet the Devs saw that embracing their desire led to a healer shortage once before and don't wish to repeat that.

At the end of the day - and why I asked Ty why this mattered so much to him - it doesn't exactly matter. All it means is the "Green DPS" crowd cannot appeal to tradition or history for their arguments. They can (and rationally should) appeal to the game as it is today. But attempting to preempt the discussion with a sort of "I was hear first" argument doesn't work when actual facts negate it.

.

Finally, I agree with your final paragraph...to a point. I think a lot of people are actually content with the status quo. Probably a much higher amount than most everyone realizes. Thus the idea solution would be one that splits the pie three ways, for those content with the current game, those who prefer a more old school and ARR healing approach, and those who want a more SB damage approach. At the very least, a two-pronged approach would probably appeal to most people, and already worked in ARR between WHM's healing focus and SCH's support/damage focus.

[ty_taurus]

At the end of the day - and why I asked Ty why this mattered so much to him - it doesn't exactly matter. All it means is the "Green DPS" crowd cannot appeal to tradition or history for their arguments. They can (and rationally should) appeal to the game as it is today. But attempting to preempt the discussion with a sort of "I was hear first" argument doesn't work when actual facts negate it.

I mean, the first thing I posted that started the spiral was not meant to be an appeal to tradition. All I said was what seemed to be how the train of thought regarding healer DPS changed from how it started to where we are now--that I think the design team is traumatized by the schism created by old Cleric Stance. If the history isn't important as you say, then why bother trying to correct it anyway regardless of who's right or who's wrong?

That said, the reason why I do think it's important to recognize that healer DPS gameplay was a part of ARR and HW is because the way fights are paced is relatively the same. There are different mechanics now, and things are generally less quirky or weird, but the pacing of outgoing damage, mechanics, and break periods between hasn't really changed. It doesn't matter what a community of fresh-faced players largely assumed would be the way to play the role due to former experience with other 2000s-early 2010s MMOs like WoW and FFXI. That had no bearing on the design and development of ARR fights and job design.

And the thing is, while I do want to see healer DPS made engaging and given the respect it deserves like every other job, that doesn't mean I don't like the idea of non-attacking or minimally attacking healers as long as they're fun. I loved HW and SB AST for example. I didn't mind that your rotation was just Malefic and Combust because the card system made up for it. As has been pointed out previously, this doesn't exactly resolve the issues of AST's very dull and slow solo experience from that era regardless of its card system. It would be nice if AST was a job that wasn't a self-inflicted punishment in solo Deep Dungeons as well. But regardless, my point is a job doesn't need specifically DPS to be fun. It just needs a solid gameplay loop that is always applicable regardless of whether or not healing is needed.

DPS is the most straightforward and easiest to balance solution for this but there are no shortage of posts I've made on the forums about wanting a healer whos DPS contributions are disguised as support. Would you as someone who gains no pleasure from attacking enemies not appreciate a healer who sets up healing and buffs for future use while passively generating damage that other players activate for you?

[Renathras]

Yes the game was built like that

The game wasn't. That's kind of the point.

As for Toxicon - they could both be GCDs and it would be a combo/interaction system though, yes? Just with a lower APM.

(nobody has ever been one)

...okay, when did you join the game? BOTH WHM and SCH were GCD healers in ARR. WHM (and I think dAST and possibly nAST, but I didn't dabble with them at the time) were in HW. WHM was in SB. WHM was in ShB. WHM is in EW. WHM has never had enough oGCDs to heal high end content effectively via their use alone. Lilies are GCDs, and a goodly chunk of WHM's healing. The top WHM I found on the Abacus fr P5S did ~38% of his/her healing with Rapture. And presumably that's a player that has learned to minimize unneeded healing. P8S-2 is interesting, in the top team and top WHM (WHM/SGE comp) did 25% with Rapture...and 20.5% + 8.5% with Medica 2 and its HoT, oh, and 1% with Regen, a GCD, for a total of 55% of his/her total healing with GCD heals.

CLEARLY some Healers - including top teams - have been GCD Healers. WHM has never not functioned on a GCD healing paradigm, and SCH and AST did in the past). I get sticking to your guns, but you have to admit that your absolutionist position isn't correct. If you said "Several have not been", you would right, though. SCH has had a heavy oGCD focus since HW, and probably since late ARR, and AST since SB, and SGE its entire existence.

...but that's how they've been feeling for 2+ expansions,...

Not ALL of them. That's my point. As for Deep Dungeon; from what I understand several aren't terrible, they just take some thought. AST is the worst in the game for DD though, apparently. Low personal DPS (WHM and SGE have higher), no passive healing (SCH and SGE have), and its buffs don't boost its own damage enough. Doable, people have done it, but the least desirable. This is why WHM and SGE are considered functional at it, SCH meh, and AST pretty terrible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ab-zwGUL__0

...but when talking about solo content, people are talking about MSQ and solo instances, not DD.

Surely the fact that SCH was super DPS heavy in ARR, while WHM was left to 'healbot' in stuff like First/Second coils (Final was where people started DPSing a lot more I think), proves that 'healers should DPS' WAS always the accepted paradigm the community ran by?

Couple things here:

We're talking about the Dev design intentions at the outset of 2.0, not the community standard. Moreover, WHM being "healbot" would prove that "Healers should DPS" was not the paradigm. If it was, there'd be no "healbot". WHM and SCH would both have been going balls to the wall DPS, which wasn't the case. This indicates, at best, the community paradigm was that SCHOLAR should DPS/support heal while WHITE MAGE should be a strict healer. Basically, it means more or less the opposite of your take, and at best, means a nuanced hybrid of it, which I've presented before.

But that wasn't the community standard until late in ARR, not in 2.0. Moreover, it wasn't the Dev design intent based on how encounters ran (no tight Enrages, no required Healer damage), a position they went on the record with in HW (even if it didn't fit the actual encounters).

And given that groups were doing things like three healer WHM/WHM/SCH runs, it's not at all clear "optimizing damage" was the accepted community standard at the time. The push for "more DPS" didn't get stronger in casual content. It was actually a huge point of contention that it was being pushed by a small segment of the community, so much so Cleric was eventually removed entirely.

I started in 2.3 and I never heard that healers were "supposed to DPS" or "how different healing was in FFXIV" until mid-HW. That's when people were actually talking about it across the community. Before then, it seems to have been a somewhat niche conversation among the raid community that no one else was in on. Now, I personally used DPS spells if my MP allowed for it and healing wasn't needing to be done (unless MP is tight, I've never been a fan of taking no actions, which is also why I thought WoW doing the "healer damage spam spell costs no mana" was such a great move, since you could fill dead time with it without compromising your healing - something FFXIV did NOT do, which is what you would do if you were designing a game for Healers to do damage...). I even remember running a dungeon lateish in HW as a PLD (leveling my 4th and last Job I'd get to 60 before SB came out) and running into a dungeon with a SCH, SMN, and BRD, and none of then knew what DoTs were. The SCH didn't cast any DPS spells or enter Cleric. Of course, back then, people actually talked in dungeons. They said they were new, so I went super gentle. I also explained to the SMN and BRD how their DoTs worked (and I had ARCher at like level 20 at the time, so my knowledge was limited; I did have WHM, SCH, and SMN at 60 though), and to the SCH that they could use Bio without needing to cast or go into Cleric and they could plop down Shadow Flare and I would drag the enemies into it. ...got 3 comms for that run and some thank yous. But the point is, it was hardly universal in the community that this was "the way to play".

Yeh, and of the three solutions,...

Debatable. Again, the status quo is widely accepted by the bulk of the community, and it's not at all clear what such a change would have. You also don't understand the premise. Me saying change 3 and leave 1 isn't an agreement that the current design is flawed. It's me believing that some people aren't satisfied with the current design and an attempt to appeal to them while also appealing to the people who are satisfied with the current design - in other words, to please everyone.

The alternative is to change none of them - not to change all of them. You mistake what the alternative/status quo is.

[Renathras]

You're taking it too literally.

I think I've figured out why it's so frustrating to talk to you about things.

You think vaguely like I do, which isn't inherently a problem, but then you put an odd "spin" on your logic in the 11th hour. You also tend to compromise your own logic with technicalities that likely aren't true but aren't directly disprovable. But instead of saying that means what you suggest is possible, you tend to insist it makes what you suggest factual. When I present your same logic to you in a way that defeats your argument, instead of accepting that or adapting your argument, you attempt to escape on a technicality of some sort in this way, even if it doesn't hold up under further scrutiny (an example being you say the SCH quests were about healing and not damage since you would have learned to damage on ACN, but if this was consistent, the WHM quests would have been as well, and the WHM quests are as much about attacking things and fighting as the CNJ ones; by your logic, they shouldn't be because the player would already have learned that lesson as CNJ just as the SCH did as ACN...)

But the worst is, even when you're kind of pinned down, you avoid direct answers, appeal to outside sources that have nothing to do with the situation or argument (what Devs in other games do or did is irrelevant to determining what the motivations of FFXIV's Devs were, especially when FFXIV's Devs are on the record presenting their design, and said on the record statement contradicts what you're insisting they did or thought). Even when I give you an out to where you'd still be partially right, instead of jumping on that, you brush it off and try to turn things around.

Anyway, I'm not saying this is malicious, but it makes conversing with you...difficult.

.

The CNJ questline isn't a commentary on the meta game of healing. It's just not. I'm not the only one saying this, but again, the SCH questline refutes that. Ironically since SCH was the more damage focused of the two. The Dev's stated position on Healer damage not being balanced around further indicates they were not considering Healers as damage dealers. There's nothing in the CNJ questline that says the message is "don't ignore your DPS spells". I know you really really really want this to be true, because you've hung your argument on it, but it never was. Again, why did E-Yumi-San say Sylphie shouldn't cast Raise? Was it "You shouldn't cast Raise until you've learned Stone"? No, the quest conversation makes it clear. He says there's no way she CAN know the Raise spell, and what she would be casting isn't Raise. The questline makes it clear she was trying to heal with her own life force, and that this killed her mother. The message is so blatant, I'm shocked a person with your intelligence somehow missed all of that and thought the take-away was "Healers should cast DPS spells". No where in the conversation was it saying you need to DPS before you can heal. No where.

And again, you appeal to different game types. What does it say if a game tells you to cut down a tree to make a bridge but you go over to the wall and climb across instead? Someone did this in Breath of the Wild in the starter area where that came up. Were they playing wrong? No. Arguably, they understood the game better than the quest design, since the game is far more about climbing than it is about chopping trees to make bridges.

The CNJ quest isn't teaching you to balance offense and defense. It doesn't even make that argument and WHM doesn't have defensive spells like a Tank, and Stoneskin wasn't unlocked until level 34, well after the end of the CNJ questline.

Like...nothing about the way the game was at the time works with your argument. But all that aside, again, the quest text and conversation bubbles made it clear the issue was HOW Sylphie was casting magic, not WHAT spells she was casting, as Connor correctly states:

The ‘Sylphie’ storyline was literally just trying to clarify to players how Conjurers ‘work’, drawing aether from nature instead of themselves. It has absolutely no bearing on whether the devs intended green dps or not, and I highly doubt they wrote that lore with any kind of combat-related message in mind, since that’s two separate teams lol (as far as im aware).

I get you really love this argument...but it just doesn't work. There are even better arguments to use than that, honestly. They're still wrong, but they're not as wrong...

What does that have to do with developer intent?

If the Dev intent was for Healers to DPS, those methods of play and party composition would not be viable. That's what it has to do with developer intent. That they are viable means either the developers intended them to be (or something appreciably near them), or the developers simply didn't make content to match their intent. Both are possible, but neither suggests "Green DPS". The first suggests the opposite, and the second gives us no solid basis. To which I again point to the HW era statement "we don't balance around Healer DPS" to put that issue to bed; surely if they didn't in HW, they weren't doing so in ARR with non-Enrage fights.

My original post was about what the game was built for and what the design team tried to create when designing fights.

Except it wasn't. Your original post was wrong. If the game was built for, and the design team was trying to create, a game of Green DPS, they would have made fights have tight Enrage checks, no healing requirements, and for Healers to be highly incentivized to DPS with either MP free damage spells, more robust DPS kits, DPS leading to healing, or other similar mechanics. All of those things were lacking in ARR. Most of those things were lacking in HW. And you have yet to address the elephant in your argument's room that the HW stated position of the development team was that Healers were not expected to DPS.

That statement alone indicates the game was likely not designed as you insist, as those were the same people working on it in ARR, and the encounter design of ARR was even more lenient in terms of damage requirements than HW.

What part of those examples prevents you from DPSing?

You're asking the wrong question.

I didn't say any of that prevents people from DPSing.

I'm saying it didn't require people to DPS, from which we can infer the Dev intention was not to require Healers to DPS. It's really that simple.

I'm going to ignore your strawman fallacies (I didn't make any of those other arguments, either; where did I say it was intended for Healers to never use a damage ability? I said it was intended it not be required and there was no design intent that they be expected to do it - at least get my argument correct. God Bless!) and your appeals to other games until you can explain how the Dev's statement of their intentions in HW was somehow them lying and should be ignored. Not "it didn't match the encounter design"; I mean "they contradicted that with another official statement at that same time" or the like. An on the record "word of god" this is what they said.

Because you're trying to infer their intention while ignoring they stated their intention. The only reason to try an inference is if you have evidence or a strong reason to suspect they were lying when they stated their own intent. Without such a reason, then if someone states clearly their intent...you believe them.

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It'd be one thing if you were arguing the game ALLOWED for DPSing Healers - a position I've not taken up against because it clearly didn't forbid it - but your position is an extreme one the other way; that the intention was always for Healers to DPS in a major way, which no part of the game's history prior to SB really seems to suggest in any way unless you take a really reaching and tortured view of quest design that...also ignores the actual quest story and lore in it stating its intentions.

structure of fight design in FFXIV very clearly establishes that Healers are meant to contribute when they can,

Again, conflating time.

Does it in 6.3? Yes. Whether this is intentional or just muddled design isn't clear, but the answer is Yes.

Did it in 2.0? No. Nor 2.1, 2.2, 2.3...really not until Gordias, and that was arguably overtuned content.

Are you saying the Devs intend this now? As we've both agreed, that's unlikely Yoshi P's intent, more just them painting themselves into a corner. But at least you could argue that.

Are you saying the Devs intended this then? Because the data and their own statements clearly disagree with you.

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Couldn't I say the same to you?

No. Because I've actually presented my arguments and offered rebuttals to yours which were not "But the CNJ quest!!!" and "But these other games do this..." or "But the game does this NOW." I actually stuck to the era under discussion, and both the game design, community playstyle, and Dev statements from that era (or even later) confirm my position and contest yours.

If the game design didn't want you to DPS

Where did I ever say the game design didn't what you to DPS?

What, exactly, do you even think my argument here is?

I said the game was not designed around an intent on the Dev's part that Healers would be DPSing (or DPSing meaningfully) during at the time high-end encounters. No where did I say their intent was that Healers never be allowed to hit a single DPS button in their entire gameplay at any point. What is it you think I'm arguing, because you've made this strawman several times.

And as to how healers were played when ARR was in development: I literally showed you. And they were essentially Curebots. That was how Healers in FFXIV (literally; FFXIV 1.X) were being played at the time. And for all that ARR was to revamp the game, it was still supposed to appeal to those loyal players at the same time.

What's stopping you from moving on?

Wanting a fair discussion. Part of that starts by agreement that this was not the original intention of the development team, and you guys stopping using that as a crutch for your position.

I figure if you guys can be stripped of that false appeal to authority/history/status quo fallacy, we can meaningfully talk about what healing in FFXIV has become (because it wasn't always that), and a meaningful conversation about what it should be and how it should appeal to players, recognizing that a lot of Healers came to the game when that was the norm. This would, of course, make your collective position on Healer changes for all the Healers far more difficult, but at least it would be a fair discussion grounded in the facts. That's what I want.

I want an actual solution that appeals to the majority of people, that gives most everyone at least something they want, and that doesn't ruin the game by robbing people of things they love and enjoy. I don't think it should make me a villain to feel this way.