Is it fun?

[Rilifane]

I have my moments when I'm in the mood to play healer for a little bit they're rare and it's usually either trying to speedrun 80s dungeons or doing a bit of PF hopping with some people from my static. I had joined my current static on healer because that was what they desperately needed back then and it was kind of fun at first but lost its appeal within a few weeks when it left me wondering if that was truly all there is to healers.
And other players make it even worse. Wether it's DF or PF, people are really skilled at dodging aoe heals at all costs, not getting raid buffs/ mitigation and misaligning their own raid buffs.
It makes healer gameplay feel even more messy and disruptive than it already does because all you're doing is pressing 11111 while chasing people with heals to babysit them after they outranged all previous aoe heals yet again. Optimising with randoms is rarely possible so even what little there is usually falls flat.
In contrast, playing dps is always fun. Each has its own appeal. DNC is comfy, NIN is fast-paced, DRG has animation locks to consider, BLM has a lot of room for optimisation. Nothing feels more satisfying than barely getting that one more cast out and almost getting my leg burned off when sliding into a safe zone.
It can be frustrating to have other players constantly bait aoes into my Leylines or have me take positions that require the most movement because they have never played a certain position and are completely unwilling to adjust, but at least there's still a lot left I can optimise all by myself. It can even be fun to play around with the rotation to adjust for that poor position I just got. I fight against bosses and their mechanics while on healer I feel like I have to fight against a bunch of particulary stupid headless chicken deadset on making my life as hard as possible.
The former is a nice challenge, the latter is just plain annoying.
And there is no fluent gameplay to make up for it either.

[jlewiss]

When the party is a struggle bus sure. I'm not the best healer, I would say I'm above average/good. I just find the job boring, most of these healing jobs have been out for like what 6+ years? DPSing on healers was only really fun when cleric stance existed since then it's become progressively more boring. If the healing ticked up more that would be fun. At this point I'm ready for every mob to inflict infirmary so at least I have a reason to spam heals.

[SieyaM]

I am a bit late in responding to some people, been doing other things. What I am kind of hoping for, which probably will never happen here, is to recapture the immersion I felt when I played Everquest way back when it was at it's height. The class I enjoyed most was Enchanter, which is the most indirect spellcasting class you could possibly play. I enjoyed that my class had a lore that it adhered to and no the raw numbers werent the most important aspect of it, it was how it fit into the world and how it played with the party. I think what would really help the healing jobs is to roll more support elements into them rather than continue stacking them with healing skills and amping up their DPS numbers. Support skills are incredibly hard to balance though and so it is unlikely that SE will add any more of those.

[Side-Eye]

I am a bit late in responding to some people, been doing other things. What I am kind of hoping for, which probably will never happen here, is to recapture the immersion I felt when I played Everquest way back when it was at it's height. The class I enjoyed most was Enchanter, which is the most indirect spellcasting class you could possibly play. I enjoyed that my class had a lore that it adhered to and no the raw numbers werent the most important aspect of it, it was how it fit into the world and how it played with the party. I think what would really help the healing jobs is to roll more support elements into them rather than continue stacking them with healing skills and amping up their DPS numbers. Support skills are incredibly hard to balance though and so it is unlikely that SE will add any more of those.

I too am a relic of the past, having played EQ from a few months after its release in '99 until 2010. I have a great appreciation for what developers did to make "crowd control" classes like chanter feel needed without worrying too much about their place in the overall picture of DPS. It seems FFXIV players are very one-track-minded when it comes to DPS -- regardless of role, people have a great need for DPS above all else, because that is the only metric by which they are judged by their peers. I long for the day when Squeenix bucks the trend, and creates the need for support classes without fear that a lower damage output would make them undesirable.

[Semirhage]

I too am a relic of the past, having played EQ from a few months after its release in '99 until 2010. I have a great appreciation for what developers did to make "crowd control" classes like chanter feel needed without worrying too much about their place in the overall picture of DPS. It seems FFXIV players are very one-track-minded when it comes to DPS -- regardless of role, people have a great need for DPS above all else, because that is the only metric by which they are judged by their peers. I long for the day when Squeenix bucks the trend, and creates the need for support classes without fear that a lower damage output would make them undesirable.

This is a natural consequence of Squeenix's job design philosophy. If all party comps are supposed to be viable, then nobody's exclusive capabilities are mandatory. If you make specific mitigation, debuffs, or what-have-you points of distinction between jobs, then those things will never be required/make clearing an encounter significantly easier due to point number one. The only thing that everyone can do is DPS. It's the only metric that ends the encounter faster, and the only metric that (with the occasional exception of weird boss behavior when you phase early) doesn't have a cap on its usefulness. You're basically always rewarded for doing more damage in FFXIV. That's why the community values DPS. It's the only metric that makes a difference after you've covered your bases.

Edit:
To be fair, this is also a common design problem in other single player Final Fantasy games. There comes a point where...why would you Silence or Slow an enemy? Just kill them. You can one or two shot them anyway. Don't waste MP on crowd control, etc etc.

[SieyaM]

This is a natural consequence of Squeenix's job design philosophy. If all party comps are supposed to be viable, then nobody's exclusive capabilities are mandatory. If you make specific mitigation, debuffs, or what-have-you points of distinction between jobs, then those things will never be required/make clearing an encounter significantly easier due to point number one. The only thing that everyone can do is DPS. It's the only metric that ends the encounter faster, and the only metric that (with the occasional exception of weird boss behavior when you phase early) doesn't have a cap on its usefulness. You're basically always rewarded for doing more damage in FFXIV. That's why the community values DPS. It's the only metric that makes a difference after you've covered your bases.

Edit:
To be fair, this is also a common design problem in other single player Final Fantasy games. There comes a point where...why would you Silence or Slow an enemy? Just kill them. You can one or two shot them anyway. Don't waste MP on crowd control, etc etc.

That is what makes balancing a support class much more difficult then just raw DPS numbers, you need to make their abilities do enough to warrant their inclusion. EQ was a very different game itself, I don't remember combat following such a rigid script. Enchanters were also desired for things outside of active combat. They had mana regeneration buffs that were sought after and since they lasted at least 30 min you could get one before setting out with your group. The reality of this situation even as it is now though is that there will always be a composition that is better than others no matter how slight, and that will be what people end up trying to use. If any composition of jobs can clear content then that should be the only goal. Players will try to enforce a meta comp even if it only nets them 100 or so more DPS.

[ItMe]

The reality of this situation even as it is now though is that there will always be a composition that is better than others no matter how slight, and that will be what people end up trying to use. If any composition of jobs can clear content then that should be the only goal. Players will try to enforce a meta comp even if it only nets them 100 or so more DPS.

Thus far though, with FF14 we've only seen that with world's first runs.
Anything beyond that... not really. That 100 DPS isn't gonna make or break a run (and if it does your team had much larger issues to worry about), so outside of racing for a clear (the only time where light parties are more directly competing with each other) players are just playing whatever jobs they like the other 99.9% of the time.

[TaleraRistain]

I am a bit late in responding to some people, been doing other things. What I am kind of hoping for, which probably will never happen here, is to recapture the immersion I felt when I played Everquest way back when it was at it's height. The class I enjoyed most was Enchanter, which is the most indirect spellcasting class you could possibly play. I enjoyed that my class had a lore that it adhered to and no the raw numbers werent the most important aspect of it, it was how it fit into the world and how it played with the party. I think what would really help the healing jobs is to roll more support elements into them rather than continue stacking them with healing skills and amping up their DPS numbers. Support skills are incredibly hard to balance though and so it is unlikely that SE will add any more of those.

I was a Human Enchanter for over 10 years, but to be fair, support and crowd control were baked into that game and absolutely necessary. Even in places like Kael where we couldn't mez, we could charm. Our DDs were almost never touched.

Support and crowd control have never really been a factor in this game. Maybe way early Brayflox days with Repose or Sleep on the second dragon, or a handful of other places. But now and for a while now it's just been zerg everything to death. Which as a former EQ player is kind of funny to me, because we used to make fun of that mentality. Like when those guilds "downed" The Sleeper by continuously zerg rushing it.

Unfortunately, support and CC seem to not really be much of a factor in any MMOs anymore. I was hoping we would move to more of a support role and gain skills along those lines, but they instead focused us on dps when there isn't anything the heal.

[Anhra]

I am a bit late in responding to some people, been doing other things. What I am kind of hoping for, which probably will never happen here, is to recapture the immersion I felt when I played Everquest way back when it was at it's height. The class I enjoyed most was Enchanter, which is the most indirect spellcasting class you could possibly play. I enjoyed that my class had a lore that it adhered to and no the raw numbers werent the most important aspect of it, it was how it fit into the world and how it played with the party. I think what would really help the healing jobs is to roll more support elements into them rather than continue stacking them with healing skills and amping up their DPS numbers. Support skills are incredibly hard to balance though and so it is unlikely that SE will add any more of those.

I am hoping for this as well, but unfortunately, there are way too many casuals arround in this game, which never played another MMO aside from FFXIV which have more attitude than clue, that would state otherwise and simply say "Numbers are everything and balance is important".

[SieyaM]

I am hoping for this as well, but unfortunately, there are way too many casuals arround in this game, which never played another MMO aside from FFXIV which have more attitude than clue, that would state otherwise and simply say "Numbers are everything and balance is important".

I'm not going to get into casuals or anything but it does seem like a lot of people who are very vocal about the balance and the numbers game haven't played much else in the way of MMOs, at most they have play Wow. It could be nostalgia or some other bias but I really feel that older MMOs were much more focused on world building and immersion of the player than making sure all classes could play within a few hundred DPS of each other. There was also much more attention spent on detail and play style of classes, they all felt different and did very different things.