Why don't we have more DPS abilities ?

[Connor]

It's funny how much the overfocus on balance in numbers in raids has reduced healer design space in particular. Back in older MMORPGs you had a single game that had these four healers:

* A pure healer, with a cleric stance like thing they had to go into or out of to even be able to deal any damage at all really.
* A buffer, who could actually heal a fair bit but... indirectly. Like you could give someone very short buffs to their absorption or so, like external 40% DRs. In return, weaker heals and damage was also indirect via buffing people. Since all your buffs were casted + short, you were quite busy.
* One healer that gave their own health away via a mix of heals and HoTs, and then constantly had DoTs on enemies to drain health back to fuel this. High overall output, but fragile if there's ever a gap.
* Lastly a healer that designated a target and then went melee, causing healing around them and on that target.

Were these balanced? Not in the slightest. Were they fun? Hell yeah!

I mean we arguably already have the foundations of these ‘healer styles’ with the jobs too, they’ve just been so undeveloped or homogenised that it’s purely superficial.

WHM could easy have been the first one, a ‘pure’ healer with direct healing and high potency attacks, cleric stance type deal, whatever.

Second one could easily be either Astrologian or Scholar. Though, while Astrologian is more damage buff-oriented job with extremely high healing power, Scholar (conceptually) is more of a balance between tactical use of both buffs debuffs and mitigations in place of healing (and it also has extremely high healing power lol). Interestingly though at their respective releases both Astrologian and Scholar were fairly weak in healing output compared to White Mage because they were supposed to use buffs/debuffs and the like to compensate. But Astrologian was too weak so they were like ‘hey let’s just make this busted strong at healing and just make the buff system super boring!’ lol.

Third one we don’t really have on healers but ironically this very much describes tanks, particularly Warrior (which tbh is probably the best healer in the game rn lol…).

Last one, of course, would be Sage. I mean, they even have the vestiges of ‘melee style’ with Phlegma being mid-ranged and Icarus allowing rapid repositioning for easily moving between melee/range.

Ironically despite each job only having like 1 healing spell I’d say these ideas come through so much more clearly from their PvP design than PvE. White Mage being an offensive leaning ‘pure healer’ with some crowd control, Astrologian is the straightforward party buffer (and super op lol, laughs in Macrocosmos), Scholar is the more convoluted buffer/debuffer spreading effects across party/enemies, placing fairy for shields, etc. Sage idk I haven’t played as much but the Kardia effects are actually dependant on the spell rather than the exact same thing every time, which is already an improvement lol