Has anyone quit healing?

[Renathras]

I suppose it makes it rather difficult for us to converse when we aren't even using the same sets of definitions for the terminology.

Ty originated the spicy talk with a discussion on difficulty, not optimization.

The problem is, they end up being the same thing in a meta of "damage >>>>> everything else". No one cares, for example, that you have the most MP and HPS efficient healing. People who DO care only care that you did that for the sake of optimizing DPS. If you have the perfect healing CD plan and then sit on your hands when not using your oGCDs, no one is going to praise you as a fantastic healer. So the only optimization, in a practical sense, that matters is damage.

And with a meta of damage beats everything, that means that the harder damage is to optimize, in a very real sense (and for all practical purposes), that is the Job's difficulty. Even when healing needs to be optimized to achieve that, as you're fond of pointing out, that is only another way of saying "optimizing DPS".

So I think we're still talking about difficulty, you're just using a different word for it.

Your dish argument seems to be more akin to aesthetics than to spice or difficulty, and so not...directly relevant.

I think the "four meats" in this case are "Tank, Healer, Melee, Ranged/Caster", not the four Healers themselves. But regardless, even if we look at it that way, consider the opposite: You're saying if people love Chicken (WHM) and hate Beef (SCH), Pork (AST?), or Fish (Sage), that you're only going to make Chicken that is medium or hotter. And if they don't like spicy, you're telling them they have to go eat one of the other three dishes. Then you tell them all of those dishes, too, are only served as medium or hotter, and if they want something mild, they have to leave the restaurant and go eat somewhere else because you don't cater to them.

I feel that's far more detrimental.

EDIT:

Now, if you were arguing for each Job to have specs, and the specs offer different difficulties - but the exact same output, so doing a harder difficulty is you just intentionally taking on more work knowing you will not in any way be rewarded for doing so - then I'd be fine with that. But I can't imagine they'll EVER actually do that.

FF11 arguably does because of the SubJob system, and WoW does within a Spec due to the way the Talent system works (e.g. you can pick all actives or you can pick all passives or you can pick a combination of the two - but this is also horribly unbalanced as there's almost always a "best" option; they are not all equally viable)...but FF14 does not, and I can't imagine them making it do so.

The closest we've ever really had to that was dAST/nAST, since it let you actively swap between effectively two specs.