Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
...at WORST, it just makes the role into worse DPS and alienates people that genuinely like healing into quitting the game or leaving those classes. If someone likes healing - and I mean "filling up people's HP bars - and not DPS rotations, then all "more dots" will do is encourage them to play RDM or possibly SMN or DNC instead, maybe WAR or PLD, or quit the game, neither of which is great for the game. Groups will start dropping Healers, as why take a Green Job that has the rotation of a Tank but does even less damage and brings nothing useful to the table when you could just bring an extra WAR and an extra DPS instead and clear the encounter just fine, and faster?

I do think there's some design space in making the Healer JOBS more distinct - SCH having DoTs and SGE having a combo rotation, for example, leaving AST and WHM basically how they are now; that might work - but "more dots" won't actually fix the problem, and even giving just SCH more and SGE a combo rotation won't really fix anything, it'll just steal some of the hyperbole from the people who want to be "dps-lite Support" and want to coopt the Healer role into being that when the Tanks are already that and they don't want to play those because they don't want "the responsibility" or...something.

If you're going to remove Healing from the game, you'd be better off just deleting the four Jobs instead of trying to change them into "dps-lite Support". You'd also need to make Jobs for the people that play them now that they might vaguely enjoy, meaning you'd need some DPS Jobs that have an automatic DPS rotation for the people that don't really care for DPS rotations, and that would just be stupid.
I say let them quit.
The game is not designed to need to be constantly filling Health bars. In fact, it's so far in the opposite direction that 0-1 Healer runs are even a thing, even in Ultimate content. Fight design actively discourages the usage of GCD heals, not only because of enrage times but because of how movement heavy some fights are. Couple that with the fact that multiple mechanics go off back to back and that most GCD heals are either too slow to hit in time or don't provide enough of a heal to matter if someone screws up and there is just no fundamental way a traditional healer would work in the game. Everything nowadays boils down to either mitigation checks or body checks that healing in and of itself has very little value outside the bare minimum required to clear the content, which is something several non-healer jobs are capable of meeting, leaving the actual role of Healer to be questionable at best. You're already a worse DPS regardless if you're hitting 1 button or 30, it makes no difference.

As far as I'm concerned, SE already started to delete Healers in SB and nothing they've done in the past few years has really instilled any confidence that they'll be changing course any time soon.