T/H/D/D vs T/3DPS - By the numbers

[Sebazy]

I'm not sure the latter part is true. Healers are kind of like having an insurance policy, not everyone wants them, but a lot of people like having them around, even if they don't actually need them.

IMO you're actually rather incorrect on this one, but the reason why is a little complex.

Go back to early ARR when the go to method for tomes was grinding WP. My FC would run PLD/BLM/WHM/WHM teams as they were the fastest way to chew through the dungeon up until the trick of walling off trash with boss barriers was discovered. In various trials it was also common place to ignore the recommended comp and simply go with a single tank or healer as required.

For dungeons, this stopped being a regular thing outside of speed runs because frankly, there's very little reason to grind dungeons like that anymore. Have a look through recent uploads for a specific dungeon and you won't find people grinding them, you'll just see people doing their daily roulettes because that's all anyone really needs. It's not the safety blanket of having a healer along for the ride that keeps the average static member bringing their healer along, it's the bonus times from that roulette entry point.

It was the same thing with single healer savage and coil clears. Once my teams had Coil/Savage on farm is was pretty common for my co healer to switch to a DPS for the earlier floors to speed things up. Even in the dread Gordias, we had a raid where my co-healer couldn't make the start of raid, he didn't need the gear so we just started clearing without him. The logs site blocking non 2/2/4 comps from appearing on front page rankings stopped that trend dead.

That's not Healer design, though, that's encounter design......also Tank design, but that's still the same issue, just the other side of it.

A Jet is a beautiful design for soaring through the sky.

Just need to trundle through town though? It's pretty damn terrible for that

Healers as they are don't fit in the context of the game environment they run in for the most part and don't make sense until you hit Savage as a minimum. In that regard, they are badly designed and lacking.

*edit*

Perhaps a better analogy would be having a beautiful set of handcrafted steak knives but all you've got to eat is a pot noodle