Quote Originally Posted by Colt47 View Post
I mean... is the "heal slave" thing a problem of the job, or the people that are running around getting hit by AOEs, get vuln stacks, and then fall over dead and complain about how we are not saving our instant cast for resurrecting them when they decided they would go kill themselves?
The "heal slave" concept is a job that does little to no DPS and instead only exists to support others. So this wold mean that you remove the Glare equivalents and Dia equivalents of every healer job and your only task is to sit there and heal people as needed, and/or increasing incoming damage so that you are healing more often than currently. I don't find this playstyle fun and never have since I started gaming in 1994, and was always a large criticism I had on early MMORPGs I played such as MapleStory and Ragnarok Online. I am of a strong proponent for every job contributing significantly to damage, no matter the role. I think the total amount of damage healers currently contribute is good, but rather than 50%~ of their GCDs being spent on a single button, I would like to see them press a variety of DPS buttons just like every other job in the other two roles do. I think it would also be beneficial for healers to have less healing based oGCDs and instead have more damage based oGCDs, just like tanks do.

I do not think this game could ever support a healing system where over 50% of the healer's GCDs being spent on healer actions that would be fun, especially in older content which is what the vast majority of this game is. This game is all about up time, down time, and burst windows. Healers need things to do between heals, which is why DPS is the natural fit. Having more complex DPS rotations and actions, and thus fewer healer oGCDs and GCDs, would make healers a lot more busy but also those fewer heal actions become infinitely more valuable and impactful. I think this would make a lot more of an interesting dynamic between healing and DPS than we have currently.

I'm also a big fan of HW Cleric Stance and still miss it to this day, because I felt like it provided very interesting DPS balance between heals and damage without needing many different damage buttons, though I doubt it will ever return. Cleric Stance dancing (and tank stance dancing with NIN Shadewalker and other non-tank jobs managing aggro) was some of the most fun I've ever had in any video game ever.