Quote Originally Posted by AnakhaSilver View Post
Probably because most people wanted SCH to be a glorified DPS with some powerful heals on standby. I'm sorry, but you're a healer. DPS when you can but it shouldn't be you being a healer just so you can be DPS with short healer queues.
And tanks are tanks, not dps. It's high time SE removed all tank damage abilities except for 3-5 and let them focus on "pure tanking". We'll give them a bunch of non-damaging emnity skills and defensive cooldowns. After all, you shouldn't be a tank just so you can DPS with short tank queues.

The above is ridiculous, but I hope you can see the point I'm trying to make. Being healers means our primary focus should be healing, yes, but that doesn't mean we can't have dps options, too. You might respond that tanks are different because dealing damage generates emnity, but that's a design choice. You could easily design a tank that could tank without dealing damage, you could easily design a system in which dealing damage did not significantly help tanks to tank, and you could easily design a healer that needed to do damage to be effective. For example, you could have a healing resource meter (like the WHM lily system) that was charged by doing damage. Or you could have a damage transfer healer that did damage by removing it from allies. Etc.

So, here's why healer's should have more damage options than the mind-numbing spam we've got now:

1) Solo content. Right now solo content for a healer involves only 4 buttons: an AoE, a DoT, a nuke, and whatever heal you feel like using to top yourself off. This is mind-numbingly boring.

2) The better the party (healer included), the more bored the healer. Ultimately, there's a limit to how well you can heal: if everyone survives the fight, the healer has done their job as optimally as possible. The more practiced the healer is, the more geared the party is, and the better people are at avoiding damage, the less healing the healer has to do. That leaves ever widening windows where the healer has nothing to do but 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 ... Healing should always come first, but when there's no healing left to be done, give us something interesting to do. Especially since if getting better at healing that means spamming the same two buttons all the time, what motivation is there to actually get better at your job?

I don't care about queue times. I play almost exclusively with a group of friends anyway, several of whom are happy to heal if I don't want to. I heal because I find it more engaging than dpsing... until the point where I get to that broil spam.