For those who main/semi-main a DPS (e.g. DNC, RDM) but like Healers...

[Shurrikhan]

You know, thinking about it more, if you actually want to enhance the experience for players who want to be more support-y, what you need to change isn't the jobs, it's the encounters.

I mean... it's kinda both. It's always both. A kit can't interact with content that doesn't have any space for it. An encounter can't play on kit that isn't there.

I've been pushing for more avenues of providing and featuring/using (on the sides of kit and encounter) utility since 1.x for that very reason. Undermechanics (something with a label to refer to and with a coded effect that players and/or enemies can trigger in some way -- a la Vulnerability, Heavy, Slow, Draw-ins, etc.) is my broken-record word at this point. v.v

A big problem with support in general is that there are very few ways to actually provide support. Offensively, we have direct damage buffs, critical hit buffs, and direct hit buffs.

Honestly, I don't consider that as "support" (and, like you, certainly not "utility"), so much as just "My dps... through you all (meaning that I can bring more when at lower ilvl than my team but less when at higher ilvl than my team, compared to playing a more direct contributor)."

Granted, I only really consider utility as something (A) not accounted for in or required by the direct tuning of a fight and/or (B) difficult to provide a stable quantitative estimate for in terms of either primary category (damage or sustain) -- i.e., "(other) usefulness".

"How much utility does it have (here)?" = "What use does it amount to that we didn't already account for under the more easily actionable labels of damage and sustain (in the given context)?"

So, if you have more bursty of damage than is strictly needed, which could thereby help to kill a highly damaging add that much quicker, that burstiness has utility because it's saving resources (e.g., oGCD heals that'd otherwise be useful for random damage later and without which the healers have to play far more cautiously and/or might go oom) and/or efficiency (other DPS would otherwise have to sacrifice DPS over the course of the larger fight in order to blow all their shit then, breaking rhythm, in order to burn the add in time).

Similarly, if you can Cover someone who'd otherwise die, that won't always be an available means of value, but when it is applicable, you're saving MP and the rDPS that'd be lost to Weakness. Etc., etc. That utility will still ultimately amount to some value in sustain (tangentially, shorter-term) resources saved which in turn allow for more damage (long-term / uncapped) output, and should be judged accordingly, but we'd just use that vague term of utility (literally, usefulness/resource or action that'd be [eventual] value) instead of just 'damage' or 'sustain' because that exchange is so situational.

I've referred to Red Mage as a support before, and it's regularly referred to as such, but it doesn't actually feel very supporting when you think about it.

To me it's far from 'supportive', since you can't generally extract any meaningful savings in damage or sustain resources from having used the likes of Magic Barrier and Embolden just shuffles your own would-be damage to others (and then back again, on fflogs), leaving it only with the value of Verraise relative to Summoner or Healers' access to that skill (which, Thin Air arguably then outperforms in terms of situational value).

EDIT: That said, I'd love to see more (non-rDPS / not number-circle-jerking, to be clear) utility added to RDM, of course. I've wanted that since its original premise of a caster balancing White Mana and Black Mana that turned out to be... just arbitrary names for two reskinned halves of the exact same thing.