Why is the healer class basically a one spell dps class?

[Beddict]

5x8 yeah. KB+M has the benefit of more flexibility though. Since mouse buttons exists and there’s usually enough keyboard room to be met with comfort, whereas with controller it’s moreso trying to jumble up everything together between the bumpers, but irregardless i don’t see how you could run out of room on a keyboard and mouse for skills since healers don’t really have that much to begin with. Mostly because you can take out a few like cure 1,benefic 1 etc.

Mouse buttons is a huge one. I'm using a Logitech G600 and I got 12 side buttons where my thumb is. A hotbar can hold 12 abilities. Slap on Ctrl and Alt as my modifiers and I'm able to access 36 abilities with nothing more than 12 side buttons and two modifier keys. Toss in Shift as another modifier, as well as other easy to reach keys on my keyboard and yeah, KB+M can have a super easy time accessing a ton of buttons at once. Not everyone has an MMO mouse though, but even just a mouse with two side buttons is still offering another eight abilities between base with Ctrl, Alt, and Shift modifiers.

[Absurdity]

Good MMO mice with 12+ buttons are also becoming increasingly rare. I actually had to import my G600 because the only ones locally available were either mice with 6 buttons at best or flat out bad.

No offense to Corsair, I love their mechanical keyboards, but the Scimitar is probably the flimsiest "brand" mouse I've ever had, the scroll wheel broke in 6 months with just nomal use.


So yes, MMO mice make your life a lot easier in XIV but good luck finding a quality one when most of the reputable manufacturers stopped making them because the MMO market has been in decline for years.

[Imora]

It would be extremely hard to do this without removing a significant amount of oGCD healing. This may not be a terrible idea (GCD heals take up a lot of 'job identity' but in fact barely matter at all, which is why SCH is in a big way way more a regen healer than shield!) and could be used to help differentiate healers more (part of SCH's identity, for example, is modifying their GCD heals and having lots of fairly weak oGCDs, and if they had more exclusive access to oGCD healing that could help them out a bit) but it would be such a radical shift to do.

More likely is pulling a Blood Lilly and making GCD heals 'more worth it' for healers, something they actively want to do at some point in the rotation. But even that is hard because healing resources are extremely plentiful so unless oGCDs, again, got nerfed you are looking at it either not being used because a regular cast is better, or people 'burning' a GCD heal they don't need for no reason without thinking because the DPS is higher.

XIV is in a weird spot because the entire concept of a healer is weird and it chose to implement them very differently than other MMOs due to how scripted damage is and how plentiful healing resources are. Could you imagine tank swapping so the WHM could save mana by just applying a regen rather than cure 2 to the tank? So the various 'styles' of healing lose a lot of meaning, because they are mostly various ways to efficiently maintain HP, which doesn't matter when damage is less random (party members generally only take damage to raidwides or mistakes, the boss never randomly decides to swipe at your DPS for 40% of their health just for fun to keep the healer on their toes and make letting people sit at half a bad idea) and the efficiency of various GCDs doesn't matter because the idea of running out of mana spamming even your strongest AOE heals is a bit unrealistic in XIV.

So I am not surprised they have struggled to make healing engaging, the main 'challenge' of it as opposed to other games basically doesn't exist at all, but they also don't want to give it DPS rotations either. Its hard to make 'healer feel like a healer' when healing is so ridiculously de-emphasized in the design and that is unlikely to change. Especially when only one of the healers is 'allowed' the identity of being a buffer as well.

Thing is, if they made it so you need more GCD heals, you won't be spamming Glare so much. >.>

I get it. I really do. But I'm struggling trying to level AST between cards, heals and DPS it's so busy I'm going nuts. I want to like this class but at 40 I just do not have the time to DPS.

[Allegor]

Tbh considering how AST is the busiest healer, I'd say it's the most likely one to align with the "pure healer" mentality the devs want to keep, specially since their buff spam already compensate for their weak damage, whereas SCH and WHM (specially WHM) have more than enough time to go for a green dps style. Who knows, maybe sage will be to healers what GNB is to tanks /shrug