I hate to, but I think I put down healing for now. Please make it engaging again, SE.

[Shurrikhan]

I certainly think they're better off just embracing the green DPS. Nothing square does, outside of massive rework to both classes and encounter design, will change how healers play now.

It'd require only something as simple as increasing damage intake and it's 'impossible' to change?

Changing it is the easy path; they've got to significant difficulties not to change it from this one very narrow scope of play.

I'm all for making healers' damage-dealing more interesting, and perhaps far more integral, but that's an almost entirely separate issue, and it's not like we can't have both more healing to do and our damage-dealing to be less brain-dead.

One has to go out of their way not to require significantly more healing be done than we have of late. One also has to place incredible limitations on the healer toolkit to keep damage-dealing so barebones. The damage-dealing can improve itself with a single expansion or hefty role-wide patch. The healing can improve itself with a single encounter.

[GrimGale]

We live in a healing burst model MMO as opposed to a healing sustain model MMO (Such as WoW). Our healing spells are simple, potent and efficient and the damage comes in quick and scripted bursts.

In a sustain model, damage is lighter with some spikes but occurs at random. That forces healers to use their efficient healing spells on single targets, while saving their expensive blanket (which often do not heal the whole group, rather are limited to a fraction) heal aoes for party sustain, all the while keeping an eye on Mana (which last longer but also regenerates much slower) and resources. Bosses autos also hit hard and fill the healer's time with tank sustain.

Meanwhile, here we focus on specific moments of aoe healing burst during scripted raid damage and mitigation/shielding for the occasional tank buster. We then have long strerches of healing downtime where we are free to do anything else. We also have very potent MP regen abilities, very potent (and often free of cost) AoE healing abilities. Party damage taken is very low as often it needs to be avoided altogether, since taking damage from encounter mechanics will either oneshot you or kill the whole group.

If healers were able to heal through mechanics and actually "save" people you'd see a lot more healing in this game.

[Punslinger]

It'd require only something as simple as increasing damage intake and it's 'impossible' to change?

Changing it is the easy path; they've got to significant difficulties not to change it from this one very narrow scope of play.

No, it would require much more work than you think.

There are a lot of fights that rely heavily on one-shots or ring-outs. You can't heal through those. So existing and future fights would need to be redesigned to reduce reliance on these things.

All damage is scripted, and healers not needing to worry about random incoming damage is a big reason why we're able to spend most of our time DPSing. So you'd need to redesign all future and existing fights to include some randomly-targeted unavoidable attacks.

It's not as simple as just cranking a knob and making numbers go up. Our healing kits are almost as boring as our DPS kits, because they consist almost exclusively of oGCD cooldowns. Cranking boss auto-attacks up only means that now we're spamming Cure 2/Adlo/Benefic 2 instead of Glare/Broil/Malefic. Not only would most healing oGCDs need to be nuked from orbit, you'd also need to add more GCD healing tools, and probably overhaul how MP works in the process, to make GCD-heavy healing engaging. Besides which, there are too many situations in this game where healing just doesn't matter, usually because a failed mechanic will wipe the party anyway.

As others have stated, FF14 has designed itself into a corner with a reliance on burst healing. Breaking out of that corner means completely overhauling the role to match the sustain healing that you see in other MMOs. It would be far easier for Square to just make healer DPS more engaging or give healers some active support to do (though the latter is less likely, because support keeps going to Ranged DPS instead).

And as I keep saying, there is precedent with tanks. Most other MMOs focus on sustained threat management and sustained active mitigation. FF14's threat management is a button you push to turn on tank stance, and mitigation is all oGCD cooldowns, because tankbusters are the only things that need to be mitigated, and they're on a script. In 5.0, Square bit the bullet and turned tanks into Blue DPS, recognizing that the community was already playing them that way anyway.

Did they really just spend more time talking about butts than all the time they talked about the combined healers across all the combined 5.0 live letters?

At least with butts, one can claim that the forums were melting down over the issue.

I'd be more worried why Yoshida felt that revamping FSH, of all things, was more critical than fixing healers.

[Shurrikhan]

No, it would require much more work than you think.

There are a lot of fights that rely heavily on one-shots or ring-outs. You can't heal through those. So existing and future fights would need to be redesigned to reduce reliance on these things.

Your evidence that fights cannot be changed to allow for greater impact from healing are... fights that have been changed to allow for greater impact from healing?

you'd need to redesign all future and existing fights to include some randomly-targeted unavoidable attacks.

No, you don't. Fights don't have to all be the same. We didn't have to redesign all previous fights just because our toolkits changed with the new expansion. Likewise, new fights that might see more use of our GCD toolkit beyond our Glare and Dia equivalents would not require that we change all other fights. Things can create new precedents or return to old ones without having to copy verbatim the tendencies of recent fights.

It's not as simple as just cranking a knob and making numbers go up.

I never said it was. I said they're free to make new precedents in fight design (in this case, as relevant to healing) whenever they want. Things change when and only when they don't do the same thing each time. They've gone out of their way to keep them the same. The haven't introduced a single unique healing or healable mechanic since HW. White Hole? We've had that Doom effect since WP HM in ARR. Split damage? ARR. Stacking DoT stacks? ARR. Nullifying knockbacks via shielding? HW.

FF14's threat management is a button you push to turn on tank stance, and mitigation is all oGCD cooldowns, because tankbusters are the only things that need to be mitigated, and they're on a script.

Leaving one role as a shallow excuse of what it easily could be does not excuse leaving a second role in the same state. At best, this is a red herring.