Quote Originally Posted by Mithron View Post
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Actually the case put forward was that 'mains' don't exist, because everyone 'plays everything'. I personally don't agree with this, as there's not enough time to equally gear and maintain your skillset on every job, but you can't have it both ways.

Pandering aside, there are few issues worth considering here. There has been a progressive shift in design philosophy away from a classical 'trinity' setup, in favor of a more modern action MMO format where everyone is DPS with varying degrees of support functionality.

This naturally erodes the value of a healer, because everyone brings their own shields and heals (the only thing missing are 'potion' and 'phoenix down' role actions with a fixed number of charges available to every job). Then you throw in some tanks, like PLD and WAR, which have built in healer functionality simply by executing their rotation, and then you're left questioning what your healer's function is in the first place.

There is a lot of redundancy in support gameplay. If your tank dies, you have a spare. If your healer dies, your DPS puts out the raise. The boss positions and orientates itself on behalf of the tank. The tank self-regens, self-heals, and mitigates raidwide damage on behalf of the healer. There are so many safeguards here that it really doesn't matter who your supports are.

A lot of this redundancy is apparent in your toolkits as well. Do you really need so many support and defensive options, when everyone else in the team is packing their own self heals and shields? You're stuffed full of so many 'just in case' GCD heals and defensives, that you don't have room for an actual rotation. And even if you did have a rotation, you can't hold a candle to a real DPS in terms of value.

DPS is relatively well preserved, by contrast. If anything, there's no longer an overlap between the damage output that a support is capable of doing relative to a pure DPS, like there was in Heavensward. And I think that's where a lot of the frustration comes from. You've lost a lot of your support value, but gained next to nothing in terms of DPS impact.

When you put this all together, you can see the design direction. I don't agree with it personally, but we've been going full steam ahead on this since Stormblood. It would be great if you manage to change it. But in the interim, you need to make your own mind about whether you want to be valued more for your talents as a player.