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

[Halfgeeek]

The healer player base is definitely smaller than it ever has been youncan see this just by looking at the AIN in roulettes. 2.0 3.0 4.0 nearly always tanks. Known as the insta queue jobs. Where healers would often be queuing alongside dps.

5.0 its not uncommon to queue expert or something on your tank and be told your 15th in the queue. Because so many people have dropped healers since 5.0. They've become the insta queue job because noone wants to play them since they got butchered to hell.

On my datacenter at least, it has been TANKs as the AIN consistently. Sometimes healers, very rarely DPS (only for raids). So one can't assume that the playerbase is uniform in their preferences. (I play on JP servers).

I'm probably the perfect candidate for these class changes as I am new to the game, I play tanks & healers as I like to see both sides of the coin.. When healing, the simple dps "rotation" is great as it makes it easy to contribute dmg while still healing everyone. I can see how it would be very boring end-game as you spend less time healing and more time dpsing though, but this is a flaw of the encounter design. They could easily change it to require more constant healing but then I'd imagine many players will then complain they can't dps anymore as healers.

[Duskane]

Sure. The fact that they butchered every single healer had nothing to do with it. It's not like the forums and balance discord was on fire or something. Or that healers have been non-stop complaing ever since ShB release. And nobody ever admitted to quitting healing because of their terrible design choices for ShB.
Nah.
It was just because there was a new tank and it was only healer mains suddenly interested in tanking.
Man, how come I never realised this?

when is the balance not on fire.

[Rollout]

I do hope they bring some semblance of a rotation to healers in Endwalker. While I do agree that a healer's priority SHOULD be healing, making their rotation just upkeeping a DoT and spamming the same spell over and over again is quite, quite boring.

[Rilifane]

when is the balance not on fire.

Rarely.
Healer channels are very civilised. People ask questions, people get answers. On some rare occasions a feelycrafter pops up and gives bad advice, gets corrected by more knowledgable people and that's that. I don't read other channels too often but they're pretty much the same.
Only time Balance is on fire is when they make changes to pander to people that don't care about something while angering people that do, e.g. ShB healer change overall, initial removal of ED, SD change etc.
So no, Balance is not constantly on fire. When it is, it has a very good reason to be.

[Deceptus]

The main issue is, as always, The Developers vs The Players.

The developers want healers to be as the traditional Healer role. Maximize healing, minimize damage with JUST enough personal damage (DPS) to do complete the MSQ. The problem with this, as has been stated NUMEROUS times, is that they're not developing the game that justifies what they want to achieve. Mobs don't hit hard enough to warrant the kind of healing they're advocating for so good healers are DPSing 85+ percent of the time weaving in OGCD heals.

The players want healers to be more of a Support role and I think it would be healthy for the game to actually embrace that.

Support means buffing allies when they're healed. Support means debuffing enemies.

If a healer was allowed to spend GCDs on buffing allies instead of personal DPS they wouldn't need to be spending 85% of their time spamming a filler spell.

[Ftail]

We shouldn’t complain about only having 1 DPS button, if SE catches wind of our complaints instead of giving us more buttons to use they’ll think they need to take it away instead. I’m scared guys.

[Ayche]

So what is the desired state truly? Hypothetically if there is extra dps that can only be attained by "doing healer role well", I will leave that definition to all whom it concerns, that gets snitched from [The basic damage spell of each healer job] right? Because I doubt Unit 3 was healers as a role to do more dps than they are currently doing, taking away "damage market share" from the rest in the full party, dps checks staying zero sum. Overhealing leads to lack of slack, lack of slack leads to no time to dps. That would be like reallocation of dps behind a skill barrier. You could throw dice to predict if that would boost healing popularity or snub it further.

And considering the party sizes that are inherent to FFXIV, healers (just like tanks and DPS) are forever meant to be super interchangeable with each other so truly decisive unique specializations are not going to happen anymore, especially with Sage bringing the count to four.

[Aluja89]

How embarrassing does it get for these class designers? A month+ old player already sees the flaw yet these veteran designers can't seem to figure it out.

[Lyth]

...

There's tends to be a fairly narrow perception of what 'buffs' and 'utility' entail. Buffs are really only interesting when there's some element of prioritization to them. Systematically clicking on players and applying 'damage up' is about as interesting as throwing rocks at the boss.

I think that buffs are most interesting when you're dealing with mutually exclusive ones which cannot directly be compared in terms of effectiveness (i.e. movement speed vs. regen). This works especially well with an aura or totem system, but none of the present healers have anything resembling this. It doesn't have to be particularly complex or involve lots of choices, as long as you're constantly required to re-evaluate what you have up.

[BrokentoothMarch]

The state of healers has been incredibly depressing since Heavensward, if we count hindsight. The overabundance and attention the other two classes get, especially DPS, in favor over healer could be advocated on the mere fact that there has been two major and paid expansions without a healer in sight while the promised "balancing concerns" turned out to be little more than gutting and homogenization of an already tenuous class.

I actually used to be a dedicated AST. As in, aside from DoH/DoL, I would exclusively play Astrologian as it was the only class I found fun, let alone out of the healer pool. After the ripping out of our identity (the cards) and a complete purge of any time magic, I can safely say I'm far more of a tank main, though even then that's during the rare times I'm not just plain crafting. WHM seemed unappealing and SCH felt like a crawl, many an expectation of mine let down because it turns out the fairies mean bugger all when it comes to strategic intrigue.

I honestly hate the notion of a "healer" class anyways. I've always advocated taking more of a "support" stance on it as that is what'll give us more options. With the introduction of Sage, however, it's becoming pretty apparent that healers are once again pigeonholed to healing and token DPSing, despite the fact that the introduction of Viera's made me hopeful that we would eventually see Green Mages that could shake up the healer role. However, it's just plain not going to happen. Despite the healing community regularly being on fire with obvious rejection (If anyone remembers the "Class Rework Satisfaction" poll from Stormblood days) of these decisions from the devs, the latter seem content to shove what they think is right down our throats. It's hard not to feel like there's just constant contempt for us, or at least me, when I identified strongly with the healing niche. Of course this results in further dwindling populations for healers. Who wants to play the class that feels like the devs hate anyone who tries to be more than a healbot.

The trust system, in my opinion really only asserted this further. They'd rather fix the queue times by just replacing players by what's essentially just legal bots instead of fixing the core issue which is the large majority disagreeing with how balancing is being done for healers and even tanks. DPS' simply run the show in their eyes and they get all the focus, yet even DPS mains aren't thrilled considering the poor queue times this results and, let's be real, I don't play an MMO to play with bots. I can't imagine they do either.

More of a rant than a tackling of the actual question, but the point is that: In my opinion, the devs simply don't care about healers. Sage exists because it's been since Heavensward since we've received a healer and even by neglectful standards, that's utterly ridiculous.

God bless those who still enjoy healing. They're better people than I.