Quote Originally Posted by ty_taurus View Post
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How I'd handle it is you'd still be doing DPS, it's just that the DPS would generate as you place buffs on allies and is a resource you'd need to manage. You could either pass off stacks of that damage for someone else to use, though that damage would still technically come from you and be treated as your own selfish DPS, or you could grant yourself the effect that detonates those stacks and manually trigger them with Malefic.

However you spin it, we have multiple different jobs under one role. Why aren't they taking different approaches to achieving the same thing? If someone wants to play a direct DPS healer, we can have a direct DPS healer, but not everyone wants that. So why don't we create an indirect DPS healer? We do ultimately need to have every healer contribute to DPS because if one just doesn't, then that healer's going to be thrown out of the meta entirely. But if you can generate DPS indirectly, you can have a healer who focuses on support while still having contribution.

One thing we have to accept is that things need to change if we want the healing role to not be the disaster it currently is. Jobs need to change. Excessive healing buttons should be cut even if they feel good to use and are great tools because we have way too much free healing and its sapping all the value out of our GCD heals. If we want the healing role to change and get fixed, but don't want anything to change or get removed, then it's no wonder healers are in the state they are.
I appreciate your additional comments, once again, I may be mistaken, however it sounds a lot like AST would become a lot like a bard- which doesn't appeal to me.

By comparison- - I did very much enjoy a support job in another game which had a lot of utility, heals and DPS.
In that job design, it had a number of buffs to pick from that were basically toggles that could be set at any time. That was more effective and enjoyable than tracking and managing when a buff was going to run out. I could concentrate instead on heals and DPS, depending upon the circumstances.