On top of DPS skills, we could also have things like gcd buffs and debuffs . Maybe? Possibly? I think they’d be fun lol. Not all DPS needs to come from personal damage, after all. Like Bravery or Protect, or Adloquium having a damage buff like in PvP. Cards back to rng form with Draw on gcd. A utopia!

They could design Scholar/Astrologian around maintaining buffs over the duration of fights like Bard/Dancer, independently of 2-min of course. Plus they’d still have Stratagem / Divination for consistent 2-min window buffing. Then White Mage and Sage could go all-in on pure damage? Or maybe White Mage could be a little of everything with Sage as a dps specialist.

Idk I feel like things like that that would just be more interesting than 4 different shades of dps healer. To me anyway. I mostly enjoy supporting / buffing the party…so I don’t really have a job I enjoy in ffxiv yet lol. Phys ranged has many, many issues that leave it very difficult to enjoy lol. Honestly 2-min meta really sucks a lot of the ‘fun’ out of ‘supportive jobs’. Astrologian is more ‘shiny power healer’ than ‘support’ buffer. Honestly I feel like I think more about buffs/support as a Scholar, since it’s primarily utility/defensive so you don’t just throw it at Mach speed at whichever DPS is number #2/3 on enmity list lol. Defensive cards are like, there I guess lol, but for some reason they just feel really lame to use.

Just some of my thoughts on how they could ‘fix healers’. Well, for me anyway lol. It does seem like devs are catering to some bizarre, misguided feedback literally nobody agrees with. Maybe it was me this whole time!