#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[ForsakenRoe]

You can’t out design peoples desire to play classes wrong

As long as there's a way to 'screw up' playing your Job, someone WILL screw up playing the Job. Designing around the lowest common denominator, to try and make it impossible for them to 'fail', is an exercise in futility. If we had one of the healers lose their DOT, so it's literally just one button over and over with nothing else (eg SCH has only Broil, no Bio, no Energy Drain, just broil), there will be players that don't press that button. If we have the reverse, where the Healer only has to put up a DOT once per 30s, and can AFK for the rest of the time (because they don't have a Glare/Broil/etc to use), there will be players who don't refresh the DOT on time. If we had Mortal Flame, a DOT that doesn't have a duration, and just keeps on ticking until the enemy is dead, you guessed it, there will be some players who don't press it, or don't even put it on their hotbars (because 'they are a healer they're not there to do damage')

The number of places where 'the healer shouldn't DPS, they should heal' is true, compared to 'the healer can contribute to damage too', is a serious minority. As games have evolved, the role has evolved and people have realized, both players and devs, that just healing is damn boring when you're in content that doesn't push your kit to the max, and so 'deal damage in downtime' was created to give the role something to occupy that dead-time. 'Healers should only heal' sounds more like a bad habit that people got into in an old version of WOW (or an acceptable habit for Cataclysm, but it is on record as being 'a badly designed healing paradigm' due to encounter and class design teams not communicating). For the true 'healers should only heal' experience, I guess Cataclysm Classic came out recently, so people could go try that and see what 'healers should only heal' results in

SE should design gameplay loops that incentivize dealing damage as a Healer, such as 'by dealing damage, you get access to more healing tools'. Even stuff as simple as 'for every Glare you cast, the cooldown on Tetragrammaton is reduced by 1 second'. It's weird to me that we have 'healing gives you damage' with Misery, but not 'damage gives you healing'. The closest thing I guess is 'Energy Drain gives Faerie Gauge which can then be used on Fey Union' but it feels so 'indirect' that it doesn't really register (plus the healing moves that cost AF grant the same gauge, so it's more a case of 'spending Aetherflow grants Faerie Gauge')