Quote Originally Posted by fogboundturtle View Post
So is the solution to nerf tank so healers spend more time healing and less dpsing ?
It's better than what we have now. If they want us to heal, then they should adjust content to reflect that. The main issue as always is twofold: Healing is extremely powerful and incoming damage is almost always a non-issue. The only time healers are stuck in a pure healing role is when progressing through Raids for the first few times. All the other times, healers have been and still are Green dps classes, with healing utility on the side.

Throw up your regens and shields, combined with the Tank defensive cooldowns and healers have nothing to do for the next 5-10 (sometimes 30) seconds. So, to fill the lull, you dps; the game encourages this. We have so many oGCDs, Cure, Physick, and unaspected Benefic spells aren't used 99% of the time, unless you are new to healing - and I mean new as in early leveling, because you don't have your oGCDs yet. Except for Free Cure and Critical Benefic, all the healers job-oriented mechanics revolve around our oGCDs.

The last thing we needed was more healing if the general content difficulty was going to remain the same. And because we now have less buttons to push during our downtime, things get boring pretty fast. If you're a WHM, you don't even have to worry about the tradeoff of MP management between healing and dps spam. If you're SCH and AST, you have to be slightly more restrictive with your AoE spam; not that it matters too much.

So, we're stuck between worlds here. Does FFXIV want us to focus solely on healing, when the mechanics actively discourages using actual healing spells, but instead wants us to use our myriad oGCD heals? Or do we dps with our 2 button spam, if we're lucky to have 2 buttons to push?

I'd be fine with being solo heals, and perhaps having dps skills restricted to solo play, but the group content needs to reflect that. I originally went into healing because I like healing and support roles, but Healer mains have always been given conflicting signals due to the inherent design philosophy of FFXIV and expectations of their role. Are we heal bots? Or are we dps in disguise? FFXIV wants range as support, so we can't be that.