Make healers DPS with four or five healing actions

[Connor]

I'm fine with AST doing more with a sort of Synastry-esque general mechanic. That's fine by me. I just don't see anything more interesting in "I reload my turret-buff that makes me auto-Ruin when YOU punch (but I can't use this on hybrids)" than just using my attacks myself.

Of course, I meant that the ‘turret-buff’ in that situation could act as a vehicle for further interactions, synergies and interesting effects that can be leveraged in some way. Extra dps, buffs, debuffs, whatever. Not that it would work by itself in a vacuum.

Again, I'm all for for buffs/debuffs. I just don't get why we're treating things like %Damage buff as if they had no skill ceiling or were super basic/banal... only to then suggest flat, unscaling potency with shallower, if any, available optimizations. We have low-hanging fruit dangling in front of us already. We needn't search a refuse pile for oddball novelty, especially if we're not going to be interested in its effect in practice.

I’m a bit confused on what you’re saying here. Who is treating %damage buffs as banal or boring? I thought the point was about moving healer dps from being so heavily personal focused to more rDPS oriented (i.e % damage boosts, fundamentally).

I don’t think it’s fair to call support effects ‘low-dangling fruit’ or ‘oddball novelty’ when nobody is actually asking for such things (besides maybe me lol). I always assumed when 90% of people say ‘support’ in ffxiv they’re specifically referring to rDPS type % buffs. I find using mitigation buffs fun too personally, but they’re not exactly the most needed thing right now, so I wouldn’t imagine anyone would want healers to be full of defensive oriented buffs either.

The hype of complexity that is purely on paper only lasts for a few uses, while complexity in practice has actual longevity despite typically being the more intuitive. We want a gaming exercise, I would imagine, not merely a reading (tooltip-deciphering) exercise.

Right, but isn’t that why different jobs offer different playstyle? (or at least they’re meant to). Personally I’d prefer a playstyle that revolves more around understanding of how to tactically leverage a toolkit contextually as opposed to simply maximising personal dps relative to party performance. But I don’t see why that has to preclude another healer from being more about a consistently aggressive and/or reactionary playstyle that revolves around maximising dps rather than pre-planning and managing things like buffs or debuffs