Things that can fix the main issue in healer & healing without nerfing other roles
I play every single jobs decently on both casual & hardcore contents, and I agree with a lot of things mentioned in the #FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE protest.
My concern is that SE would go "No more tank heals, no more DPS raise" way, which is the lazy & bad way to fix it. My suggestions:
1. Make any healing tasks the nonhealer can do, the healers can do better
Let's start from raising. Every healers have one raise spell that never gets upgraded since lvl 12 with long 8s cast time. We're at lvl 100 now, its about time to get healers raises upgrades. The complaints on the DPS forum about SMN & RDM having raises wouldn't even arise if healers could raise better than them.
Solution: Make healers raise cast time 1GCD (2.5s) long + 50% HP heal. There's no good reason to keep them 8s long.
Now parties might still choose RDM & SMN over BLM & PCT because they want to have a backup raise whenever both healers are down.
Solution: Make the healers their own backup raise when they die by giving them Reraise spell, so the need of having RDM & SMN in a party will be minimized. Make it a costly ~60s buff with 8s cast time.
Also make the single target GCD heal heals for ~75% HP with only 1.5s cast time, so the efficiency would be GCD heal>raise>reraise.
For healing, healers can already heal better than WAR. The problem is, having a more powerful healing kit than other roles means nothing when the incoming damage is either not big/frequent enough, or is too deadly that our healing kit is useless anyway, like those one-mistake-wipe & body count mechs.
2. Improve incoming attacks toward party members
Healers are supposed to be busy healing, and yet now healers have nothing much to do but press that one DPS button all the time and heal occasionally, no wonder healers ask for more DPS buttons instead.
Solution: make raidwides come more often, like every 15s, with more single target damage to non tanks party members.
3. Fix healers' healing kit
(Note: whenever I say 'oGCD' read it as 'lily GCD' for WHM)
Healers should be healing, but the majority believes that a GCD spent healing instead of DPSing is bad, hence forcing the healers to use GCD heal more often might be problematic.
Solution: Give healers more oGCD heal resources so they can deal with the more frequent damage with their oGCDs instead of GCD heals; GCD heals are strictly for emergency.
(E.g. double up the oGCD heals like this:
WHM: Lily timer 10s
AST: E. Star & C.U. CD 30s
SCH: AF CD 30s, Indom & S. Soil CD 15s
SGE: Gauge timer 10s, Ixo & Kera CD 15s)
Remove Cure/Benefic/Physick. Merge Cure2, Benefic2, Medica, Helios with their regen counterparts.
This way healers GCD kits won't be bloated by barely used spells. Only 4 DPS-loss emergency GCDs: single target heal, raidwide heal, raise & reraise.
Add 2 DPS GCD buttons, so healer gameplay will be doing simple GCD rotation while frequently weaving healing oGCDs.
