A summary of healer issues

[ty_taurus]

I disagree.

If you are playing as a non-healer support in a game, your focus is maximizing the value of the utility you offer. You are playing a class or a character with limited offensive potential. While dealing damage is still a part of your responsibility, whether you are a healing support or a non healing-support, if you are not taking advantage of your utility, you're doing a disservice to the rest of your party. Obviously, what's important is that you're doing your best, but if you're playing a character like Thresh in League of Legends, your focus is not specifically attacking--it's snaring and trapping opponents. You want to do as much damage as you can while doing that, but the objective of your gameplay is to lock other players down so your team can land kills. The same is true for a healing support character. Nami is not only trying to top people off with her heal, she's trying to also poke and harass enemies and lock them down. This also applies to Final Fantasy.

While we don't have a designated support role, we have jobs like Red Mage who are capable of providing a small amount of situational utility that you should be prepared to take advantage of when needed. As a Dancer, I communicate with my raid group's to establish where my healing cooldowns best help them conserve resources. I don't want my Curing Waltz and Improvisation to go to waste if a healer is just going to overheal around my cooldowns anyway, so I try to establish when I can take extra weight off their shoulders. And if you're playing as a healer, you need to ensure the safety of the party, and that takes priority over attacking. Most of the time these days, that doesn't mean you stop attacking because 90% of all healing actions are OGCD, but you need to be ready to stop and hard cast a heal if it's needed.

[Banriikku]

...le snipp...
While we don't have a designated support role, we have jobs like Red Mage who are capable of providing a small amount of situational utility that you should be prepared to take advantage of when needed. As a Dancer, I communicate with my raid group's to establish where my healing cooldowns best help them conserve resources. I don't want my Curing Waltz and Improvisation to go to waste if a healer is just going to overheal around my cooldowns anyway, so I try to establish when I can take extra weight off their shoulders. And if you're playing as a healer, you need to ensure the safety of the party, and that takes priority over attacking. Most of the time these days, that doesn't mean you stop attacking because 90% of all healing actions are OGCD, but you need to be ready to stop and hard cast a heal if it's needed.

But there is no weight and this why we are discussing what can be done. What you discribe is the ideal but not the reality. Besides the very rare moments there is no need to "support" from anyone. Support is not limited to "the healer" job in FF14 and can be done by many jobs, you are right at that, but here we are discussing the healer jobs (WHM, SGE, AST, SCH).

Most encounter need DPS and almost only DPS, very rare you get the dispel or the extra Feint. Most of the time it is do the dance (mechanic) correct and DPS the Boss down. The healer job is an afterthought. In my opinion give the DPS a little more selfsustain and you could delete all healers and still play all content. We are "full healers" but healing in this order of magnitude that all healers provide is not needed.
So most of the time in an extreme or savage fight, i sit there and torture my keyboard every 1.5 seconds the same button and every 30 seconds the extra buttons for "tha allmighty DOT" ( i did Bab EX for the mount and got an 80% dosis spam at the end. I think if i would focus more i could push this even more).

So what i would like to see is, make the healer job a "Supporter" with an actual DPS-Rotation plus utility and reduce the healing of these jobs.
The other way i can see is double down on the "you are a healer" is to make it necessity to heal so GCD healing dont feel so bad.
In all cases give the healer job in genral more Utility to work with. But no matter what change would come the encounter design needs a change to allow (the need for it) for that much utility or healing.