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