Has anyone quit healing?

[ForsakenRoe]

The problem with your "weave" argument is that Tank mitigations aren't GCDs. The closest to that is Passage of Arms. There's no "Press this GCD to do mitigation; it locks you out of dealing damage" button in the game. And the only Tank GCD that isn't damage related is Clemency.

Cleric was removed because some people were harassing Healers for not DPSing, not because "healers were meant to DPS", and because the Devs thought Healing was too taxing of a role driving people away from it and needed to be made more friendly to attract and retain a stable Healer population.

As for Tanks: Agro was the intent in ARR. That's why they had a Tank Stance and Agro combo. It was literally to manage Agro - something that was stripped from THEIR role going into ShB as well.

Except tanks DID have a GCD that would cost them damage. It was called 'tank stance'.

'The reason Cleric was removed was to facilitate healers having less barriers standing in the way of practicing doing damage alongside healing. Cleric would cause issues if mistimed, meaning people did not want to risk even practicing with it. So SE removed the obstacle allowing people to DPS more freely in SB.' That's the explanation I'd give for why Cleric was removed. You say that it was because people were forcing healers to DPS, but if that were the case, removing Cleric wasn't going to suddenly stop the push for more DPS and revert the accepted playstyle towards 'healers shouldn't have to DPS', it'd do the opposite and make people push MORE for healer damage. After all, if the main hurdle of Cleric is gone, what would be stopping a healer in endgame content from pressing damage buttons in the 40s gap where the boss doesn't hit them?

And again, Aggro is binary. You have it, or you don't. Think of Classic WOW. A Warrior would use Sunder Armor to generate threat against a boss. It generates 350ish points of threat, if I remember right. If that tank is at 5000 points of threat, and the next highest player is at only 2500, then what does the Warrior spend the Rage on, more Sunder Armors that don't apply more stacks, don't do damage, just more threat they don't need? Or do they start using Heroic Strike for a while, while everyone's catching up on threat, to do more damage and kill the boss faster? 'Get aggro' was never the intent for tanks, it was 'Keep just enough threat generated to keep aggro, then push damage'. That's why our tankstances were a toggle, rather than a passive buff like in WOW, that's why they had combos that weren't their Aggro combo, that did more damage. PLDs weren't spamming Rage of Halone in HW because it's their role to generate threat, they were using Goring and Royal to push damage. Only in the very scuffed ARR, where they only had ROH, were they using 'just their aggro combo'. And WAR was also scuffed as hell, with Butcher's Block coincidentally being the strongest hitting of the combos. Maybe it was intended by the devs that the tank with aggro at the time was meant to turn on tankstance, and the other to turn it off. Would certainly explain why the enrages were so lax back then.

But the problem is, we got better. Way better than the devs anticipated. We learned how to push more damage as healers, to drop tankstance and use our mitigations to cover the loss in defense. All so we could push more damage, to help improve our group's chances at clearing the fight. When players have a chance to optimize something, they will. And when they do, the devs have to consider that, so they started tuning content around the fact people would be pushing more damage. If they didn't, and just tuned around the idea that at least one tank would always have Tankstance up, and that the healers would do minimal damage, then any groups that went balls-out on damage would beat the enrage by literal minutes, leading to a very unsatisfying raid experience for them. I'm sure you heard about how Yoshi and the devs were surprised groups cleared UCOB, as they expected they'd have to do nerfs to the fight to make it more clearable. But we've seen time and time again, no matter what challenges the devs put in front of players, there's some who will step up, 'break their limits' and improve in skill beyond what was previously imagined possible. Maybe that sounds a bit cringe, but this IS an FF game, it's pretty on brand for the series

Maybe that's why I get in the mood I do about this stuff. To me, 'I don't want to DPS as healer, and SE should make it so healers are focused on healing' reads the same as 'I don't want to improve, and everyone else should be dragged down to my level so I'm not made to look bad'. If SE did make healers super focused on healing, there'd just be players who push the limits, and make a healing plan that covers everything so efficiently, they still find time to push more damage. No matter what happens now, it's too late for this game's design I think. People have the expectation of 'do more damage'. Even if the healing required was doubled, tripled, x10'd, and the DPS output of healers was halved, quartered, the fact remains: If you can do damage, you should do damage. Even if healers were made to do 600dps instead of 6000 because SE shotgunned their kneecaps with nerfs, people would STILL do damage on healers. And since there's a non-zero amount of DPS that would be coming from the healers, the devs would have to design around that. You'd have tougher HPS requirements, with the same expectation of 'do damage btw'.

You can make me 'heal more' all you like. I'm still gonna throw rocks and lasers. And if there's no time to throw rocks and lasers, I'll make time. That's our role as healers.

Diamondback, mighty guard, chelonian gate if poa counts, avail, dragon force.

Chances are they miraculously 'dont count' because BLU isn't really a tank. Or that they don't count because BLU isn't really a job full stop.