Latest Official Developer Statements About Healer DPS?

[ty_taurus]

I'm not sure why player feelings should factor into job design?

I would hope that people who queue up for content on a healer would actually want to play a healer. If they're going to whine about losing damage because a DPS eats the orange ground candy, maybe they shouldn't be playing the very role that's meant to be fixing those mistakes?

To bounce off that, I think it's important to establish a few things:

1. There are a fair amount of players unhappy with the state of healers in FFXIV, and of those, many find the lack of DPS abilities to be a major flaw. FFXIV's combat design is and has always featured large windows of healing downtime, and the belief is that a good healer should be rewarded with fun, active DPS during that downtime, not mindlessly spamming a single attack for nearly off of it.

2. These same players are not asking for more DPS for the purpose of wanting to do more and more damage or effectively play a DPS in the guise of a healer. Good healing results in a higher amount of time one can spend on DPS. They simply want that to feel fun and rewarding rather than a boring punishment.

3. At the same time, these players are fully content engaging with the healing side of healers. In fact, the lack of DPS is not the only element criticized about modern healer design, but also the diminishing need to heal due to less frequent damage taken in combat, less spontaneous damage encountered in combat (such as boss auto attack crits), increased tank and DPS sustain tools, and the ever-expanding powercreep of each expansions new, free, DPS neutral healing resources that encounter design fails to scale with.

4. For the players who agree with the above points, good healer design is about striking a balance between the need to heal and the opportunity to attack, and neither side of that equation should feel lacking, yet currently, both sides are lacking. With almost no DPS tools at our disposal, the reward of skillful healing is boring, slow, and ruins the experience of playing healer. With a severely overtuned and bloated healing kit and a lack of actual healing to engage with, we cannot appreciate the healing abilities we have because many of them are excessive and unnecessary.