Quote Originally Posted by Hazama999 View Post
I feel that, as far as the DPS role is concerned, what makes any given job within it interesting is the HOW they arrive at the damage number. I feel like with healers, there's an added layer, where what is interesting has to come from both the HOW damage is healed, and WHAT TYPE of damage you're dealing with. Only way for the devs to make healing truly interesting, from my perspective at least, would require and upending/overhaul of how damage is dealt/received in this game... And I think that's most likely why they'll never do it. It is a fundamental change which would require a ridiculous amount of content retuning and outright restructuring in a good number of cases.

I think it's pretty sad that a lot of the arguments made towards "fixing" healers have to do with adding damage options. It really drives the point that roles in this game are, at their root "DPS + [something else]." At the same time, I can't outright dismiss said arguments because with the way things currently work, they're entirely logical considerations to make. It's in the line of thought that goes "healing is boring, so GIVE THEM MORE STUFF TO DO" and that [STUFF] could just well be more buttons with which to deal damage.
It stems from how much more difficult and unrealistic it is to transform the environment for healing into one that allows healer gameplay to thrive in all types of environments while still having basically no real attack options. Because you need healing to take the spotlight for most of the entire fight, which is so drastically unlike how FFXIV is that we'd basically be changing the game entirely. And given how much they want to keep the game very easy for anyone to get through at least the MSQ and other story related forms of content, it just doesn't seem possible to make healers shine on their healing and nothing else. Because even if we can accomplish such a monumental shift to make the healing the star of the show almost always, what do we do about the 10 years of content we already have that doesn't accomplish that?

A part of the reason why DPS tools are discussed is because having a more dynamic set of attacks to cycle through ensures that no matter how easy the content gets, there's always something for you to interact with rather than be stuck glaring things to death for such long periods of time.