Why don't we have more DPS abilities ?

[Shurrikhan]

Nothing forbid the DPS abilities to boost the healing spells.

Forbid? No. But nothing "forbids" anything outside of unlockable actions being unable to be accessed until unlocked.

But there are some reasons why one wouldn't want their damage tied to healing. If the bonuses were enough to be relevant, after all, it would mean there are occasions where you'd have to delay the use of those damage abilities outside of raid windows in order to boost heals instead.

/cue complaints for lost aDPS (which is also others' lost rDPS, and together, net lost party damage for taking the more complex job). >.>

__________

To be clear, I would very much like more offensive actions (be they spells or abilities, so long as none are outright bloat) and more interaction between (sets of) actions. But yes, it's not just by some arbitrary self-stricture that {damage dealt -> increased healing potential} interactions haven't happened so far.

[PyurBlue]

I means, if ~40% of our DPS came from spells and ~60% from short CD abilities (4 or 5 sec cooldown), we would prioritize healing spells over healing abilities when healing are required.

Abilities take priority when healing because they have no cost. Adding DPS abilities won't change this. It's only when you run out of abilities that spells are given a second look.

But there are some reasons why one wouldn't want their damage tied to healing.

Very true. I'm hesitant in going in that direction because to me it doesn't seem like a good idea. I've seen a lot of comments, especially about SGE, asking why healing from damage isn't utilized more. That sounds like it would make for a terrible healer experience because SGE would no longer be a healer, but a DPS. It also makes things like Assize on WHM boring. You press it on cooldown, that's it. One of the upsides to healing vs dealing damage, at least on paper, is that you can optimize outside of maintaining uptime. That goes away when damage and healing are connected because damage is all about maximizing uptime.

Were these balanced? Not in the slightest. Were they fun? Hell yeah!

We shouldn't be trading one of the other. Balance is a good thing because it allows for a wide range of party compositions and lets players focus on the classes that they find fun. The balance tightrope in FF14 comes from encounter design. You can memorize everything and even calculate how a class will perform without being in a battle in the first place. If encounter design was less straight forward classes could be built around strengths and weaknesses that would all be important consideration in party composition.