Putting down the magic stick!
Thank you for creating this thread.
Now before I begin, personally I love this game, the story, the world and community are unique and a strong part of what keeps me enthralled.
However, at the same time it is disheartening to read how some players in the community who perhaps main tanks are so swift to dismiss the grievances of a significant portion of the player base and labeling it as "simply having a whine" is unctuous facile.
The issues faced by healers in FFXIV are glaringly obvious even to a novice player such as me. I observed how low the skill floor is when it comes to healing in FFXIV. There is simply too much homogenization between all four healers.
Sure, as a WHM you can pump out high HPS and as a SGE or SCH you can be excellent at proactive mitigation.
The way healers play seems clumsy or hurriedly put together with so much unnecessary button bloat. There is no real rotation - you spam 1 as your basic attack spell, hit 2 for the dot every 30 second and then throw out a heal or barrier.
The toolkit lacks synergy especially when you examine WHM – why is free cure still a thing? Why must we have 3 different buttons for what does a single target heal? Why shouldn’t the same button be updated with II and II with the added benefit as you level up / or to suit content?
Staying with WHM which begins its journey as a conjurer – someone who invokes the powers of the elementals to maim and mend - by the time you level to 90, you notice that your only elemental based spells are a dot, stone and maybe benison if you consider the name and the water animation.
Why not dispense with the pretense of WHM being a “pure healer” and returning it to its elementalist roots?
Another issue is that the level of outgoing damage you need to heal in content is just too low and heavily scripted which means it is completely avoidable.
There seems to be as every run is a mad dash from wall to wall with no thought or no need for crowd control despite "sleep" being in our role action bar. Most mobs stop auto attacking when casting abilities which are completely avoidable and frankly trivialize the risk of mob pulls and leave healers within nothing to do but spam 1 repeatedly.
Healing throughput is too strong (I know this sounds counterintuitive) but that is how it feels to me.
Add to this the potential for non-healers to have some off healing or in the case of certain jobs extremely effective sustained self-healing which is analogous rendering a healer redundant in the party.
TLDR: The Healer strike is entirely justified.