Healer changes

It's been brought to my attention by many a healer main over in the DPS roles part of the forum that it's up to SAM players and DPS mains to somehow save the healer role and throw our kabutos into the ring with the people who stop us from dying when we stand in poo. So allow me to extend the olive branch here and make the gesture, lemme hear you out and let's stop stepping on each other's toes. We all play the same game, we want it to be fun so let's not fight.

Let's talk about what's wrong with healing, and let's get some coherent and specific suggestions for what needs to change and why it needs to change. There seems to be no clear consensus on whether you should be DPSing more or not - should be devs be expanding your DPS toolkits and pushing the "Green DPS" to its limit, or should the devs be increasing damage from all sources so the green party member has something to do besides spam "2 - 1 - 1..." I genuinely want to know because it doesn't seem like any healers can actually come to an agreement on this.

Maybe it's not healers that are actually the problem, maybe it's that tanks are doing too much healing? I don't heal much myself, but I do know that if I queue up as heals and I get a WAR tank (pretty much a certainty these days because it's broken) then I'm in for one hell of a boring run but is that a problem with healing or is that just bad job design on a tank? I'd argue the latter, but then I might as well be taking this to the tank roles subforum.

Consensus will be the main thing that forces change, specificity will be the main thing in telling them *what* to change. Simply saying "Healing is no fun anymore" is a nice way of saying there's a problem, but what do the healer mains think is the solution? Pretend I'm YoshiP and I'm asking you personally how to fix all 4 jobs within the 1 role, and let's be civil about it. In return, if the healer mains could stop hijacking SAM threads because we're not supporting you, that'd be super.

At this point, the developers have stated that they have no plans to increase the amount of healing that healers have to do. By this logic, the only option left to us is to develop our DPS rotations. It’s redundant that they keep increasing the amount of shiny healy tools we get, but then don’t give us ample opportunity to actually use them due to incoming damage being so low and nonthreatening in most content. We spend the majority of our time dealing damage—even in Savage and Ultimate—so why not capitalize more on that.

The reason agreements aren’t being reached is because of the same ol’ divide within the role. There are still people who unironically think that healers should only heal and rarely do damage when, at this point, it is griefing to not DPS as a healer. There’s simply not enough healing uptime to defend it, and it’s not like healers so piddly amounts of damage either. The developers no longer have the mindset of “we don’t design encounters with healer DPS in mind” because it’s highly likely that you will not clear high-end fights with enrage timers if you have two healers dealing zero damage. Even with the rest of the party at peak performance. Two good healers did more damage combined than the highest parsing DPS in Patch 6.0, and such will likely be the case after the 6.1 changes. There’s still data to be gathered on this since the patch is so new, but it’s unlikely to have changed much.

It has very little to do with tank healing. Content simply isn’t threatening enough. People can meme on Bloodwhetting all they want, but healers weren’t doing all that much healing before it or even Nascent Flash in ShB were a thing outside of a handful of leveling dungeon pulls. Single-target encounters are primarily DPS uptime and have been since HW.

There’s already two huge threads about the issues with healers that go into far much detail than I will in this response (the “Just go do Ultimate” thread and the “Has anyone quit healing” thread). There are also several other smaller ones on the healer subforum that reiterate the issues. You could write an entire dissertation on the problems with healers at this point.

It all boils down to the dev team actually looking at their design philosophy for healers and then at how they are actually played. And to stop balancing them around the lowest common denominator healers. They should be balanced more with the average healer in mind, not one that struggles to do the bare minimum. That they balance around bad healers who have no idea what to do only exacerbates the boredom skilled healers feel and the issues with current healer design (low healing uptime with a bloated healing toolkit, high damage uptime with boring “rotation”).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SlickPaws

Pretend I'm YoshiP and I'm asking you personally how to fix all 4 jobs within the 1 role, and let's be civil about it. In return, if the healer mains could stop hijacking SAM threads because we're not supporting you, that'd be super.

---

Knowing how a lot of the dev philosophy of healers is to have the dps as the reward for doing good healing, treating it like if it were something that does not always happen and its not what we do the most, I would show you this

https://i.gyazo.com/3361c571a1f420a7...35bdbb4915.png

and this

https://i.gyazo.com/e326e474b21ec1c4...206433f736.png
(Savage btw)

And ask you if you think its working as intended, if you think those two jobs play different enough and if you think that looks fun

This thread also does pretty well Summary of Healer Issues

There are absolutely places where veteran healers disagree about the direction things should go, but the largest divide isn't among vets. It's between vets/perceptive newer players and non-healers/the devs/a variety of people from lower-skilled healers to people who just have a frankly outdated hard trinity view on how healers should play.

There's a predictable set of ideas Sylphies put forward that's in line with healer design decisions and sound remarkably like the devs' opinions, and they fly in the face of how the game is designed. The thing is, Several of them aren't technically incorrect; they just completely lack context or misunderstand the approach skilled healers take to encounters. You hear a lot of unhelpful and silly things said around here.

"Your primary responsibility is to heal! You should be healing!" We are. It may sound counterintuitive to someone who doesn't spend a lot of time playing healers, but the goal of a skilled healer is to minimize healing while keeping everyone alive; you don't get a gold star for finishing an encounter with everyone at full HP with mega-shields on top.

"But you should get your fun from healing!" ...what healing? We can run Expert roulette dungeons with no healers. FFXIV's design leans into making most damage avoidable as a reward for doing mechanics correctly. This is an excellent way to do things. It's a reward that's easy to see, and it's not role-specific as far as making you feel good for executing properly. Tiiiiiiiiny problem, if everyone's constantly avoiding damage, what are you healing? You can't add a ton of unavoidable damage on top of the avoidable damage. Square doesn't want content being so punishing and difficult that everyone dies unless the healer is really on top of it all the time. The other solution is improving downtime activity, but Square has balked at that. It could "scare" new players! Having more to do in downtime than cast Glare, how frightening. :rolleyes:

One of the issues with offering specific suggestions is that the healer role is beyond restoring one ability or tweaking one potency to make them actually fun to play. The philosophy behind their design direction is the cause of the boring choices that keep getting made here. "Oh healers are pissed? I dunno, give 'em a new healing spell or something, they like healing right?" Think of it like defaulting to bath bombs as a gift for a girl you don't know, when she's got a whole shelf full of them. Not only didn't she need it, but it's also a sign that you've got a fairly one-dimensional view on her personality.

I've done a touch of hijacking over on the DPS forums, and it's mostly because I'm sick to death of non-healer mains saying "eh whatever, healers haven't been fixed because you guys must not be wording your objections right".

There's about 6+ years worth of telling the devs their healer design philosophy is incompatible with fun in this game in hundreds of different ways. Hundreds of suggestions for job tweaks. Hundreds of suggestions for overhauls. Many of them require just an update to the healer role without needing to upend how they design the rest of the game. None of them have worked. They still send us gift baskets with bath bombs every year. "But you're a girl. You like those. Why are you looking at me like that? Oh I get it, maybe you don't like the scent on this one."

EDIT:
Those screenshots above from the Website That Shall Not Be Named? Those aren't just numbers you'll see from a rank-chasing ultra optimized high skilled healer. That's what average players look like. I had a grey clear of UWU that essentially looked like that.

What you Samurai players just suffered in the unfortunate loss of Kaiten is a perfect example of what healers have suffered through for 6 years- losing core pieces of identity and job design for no return and with yoshida going "just try it first" and then in all likelihood not reverting it. Or maybe he will as you are a dps.

Lets go through the most important concepts in healing.

1. The goal of healers is to minimise healing and maximise dps uptime and contribute to clearing the encounter.
As you get better at your job as a dps player, you deal more damage. Likewise for tanks as you get better, you deal more damage. For some inexplicable reason the developers and some sylphies/curebots seem to think that "Better healing=More healing" when in fact "Better healing=more efficient healing"

2. Incoming damage is so low and tank/dps restoration is so high, content is constantly cleared without healers
You have all seen how tanks (bar drk) can do current savage content, e4s at level, ucob and more without healers. The problem is Yoshida refuses to up the amount of healing required by the party in spite of this increasing amount of duties that dont require healers
Thus: healers have very little healing, but they still want to contribute. So they deal dps like the tanks and dps.Because healing is so low, almost every duty does not require GCD healing and so 70-100% of gcds are dps

3. They have taken away all our damage options and Kaiten equivalents- buttons that make the jobs feel unique and fun to use. Remember how much gcd we use on dps but we only have glare/broil/malefic/dosis to use for most of it
Selene and nocturnal sect were removed with nothing to replace them. This is like removing Ice phase from blm or midare from samurai.
Astro's cards, Scholars dots+bane+shadowflare. eye for an eye, aero 3, all gone
Imagine if yoshida removed all your buttons except Hakaze, Higenbaten and Fuga for ALL of your gameplay. Thats what healers have suffered through for years. Then imagine you brought this up with yoshida and he told you to "Go play ultimate". You'd be furious. Thats why healers are furious.
4. Healing has an upper limit to how much can be done. Dps can always go higher. So all these extra heals we keep being given are worthless.

Overhealing is a waste of resources. Damage always contributes

5. None of the dev team plays healers. The one tester for healers they had they kicked out of the testing group because he was starting to heal extremes and normal raids, which I remind you, can be cleared without healers.
This means none of the healers are tested by average players who deal damage during the long stretches they don't need to heal.
Back in stormblood, Yoshida put out a statement saying nobody was taking white mage because they were left to do all the healing. Not only was this factually incorrect and proved with data, he ignored the real reason Whm was never played was because they took away 12 of its buttons and had to cross class 7 back

6. Healers have been demanding change for 6 years and questions are either ignored or dismissed repeatedly

Healers ultimately want the same thing as everyone else: They want to have fun with their own unique playstyles and identities and contribute to damage while assuming their other responsibility.

But healing is so low and our damage options have been watered down to the barest neccessity that healers are constantly upset. New players enter the role and leave out of boredom while veterans are driven away. Those that remain are the rare 1% or tend to be very low skilled.

Astrologians want their cards and time magic back. Scholars want Selene back and their dots. White mage wants for too much to be written here and Sage wants better toxikon and more dps options since ironically they have the least for the supposed dps healer.

and ALL healers want more healing to be required so they actually have a place in duties.
AND YOSHIDA REFUSES TO GIVE ANY OF IT

- Healing is boring and unintuitive.

In other MMORPGs mana and cool down management was a game we had when we healed. Our stronger heals cost high amounts of MP and were on a long cool down so they couldn't be spammed. In FFXIV our strong heals cost 0 mana, are on the off global cooldown (oGCD), and are on short enough CDs that the low amounts of damage that go out we can use the same ones to cover it.

Wall to wall pulls are more what we healers are looking for: there's enough frequent damage that we cycle through our vast amount of healing tools. Bosses in this game just do not do that and they should.

Also because our healing is free piety is a worthless stat.

- All healers play essentially the same

AST is a better WHM when it could be a Regen/time based healer. SGE is a straight up clone of SCH without the fairy instead of a healer that actually heals by doing damage. The four of them in PvP have better clear defined styles of game play than their PvE counter parts.

- Healer mains and veteran healers are not the focus of healing design

I am not saying that new and beginning healers should not be considered but I am saying they should not be 100% the focus of how the healing role should be played. At some point the new healer is going to get better at their job and they're going to be bored like the rest of us.

This is also where I'd like to point out that catering to them has pushed away the original mains of the role. The SB designs of SCH and AST had a player base that was mostly happy and then Shb came in with changes they did not like and SE did not listen to any of the feedback.

- Most importantly we have nothing to do in our down time. And we have LARGE AMOUNTS of down time.

Down time = when we are not healing.

Because of point 1 this point right here = us using our DPS spells. A lot. We do not have that many. And it is boring. AST cards have 0 thought. Addersting can't be used as a minigame because we do not GCD heal (because of again point 1) to proc Toxicon often enough. ...About the same can be said for SCH and their fairies are glorified reskins. And... well Misery for WHM just got to be dps neutral so...

We're bored. Healing isn't engaging. Dps isn't engaging. And only AST has a true support system and that is also unengaging.


Also SE ignores us when we give feedback. And has been for a long time. We're tired and fed up with it. We are repeatedly told to wait, and they repeatedly fail to address concerns. They make it even more obnoxious by addressing other roles concerns faster than ours. (AST not getting their MP problems fixed until 5.3 when RDM got theirs fixed in 5.08? for example)

I feel as if FFXIV is progressing toward a more action-y combat model. It's moved away from "traditional" RPG elements such as debuffs, crowd control, MP management, item usage, etc. More toward simplified rotations in between dodges like an action combat game. Setting aside my utter dislike for most action combat games, this is a model that works (more or less) for DPS jobs. Keep your rotation up, dodge, and keep attacking the enemy. That's pretty much the action combat model in a nutshell. What it doesn't work for is tank and healer jobs. Action combat tends to cut things like positioning, in-combat healing, buff spells, etc down to the minimum the developer can get away with. Every class wants to keep up the rotation and dodge most of the time.

I think Square's balancing and design teams, as a group overwhelmingly represented by DPS mains, see the fun they want in an action combat model, but they don't understand how this craps all over the trinity in favor of DPS. I think different roles could work in a system like this, but not shoehorned into their old RPG style combat roles while the game is asking them to do something completely different most of the time.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Recon1o6

6. Healers have been demanding change for 6 years and questions are either ignored or dismissed repeatedly

Healers ultimately want the same thing as everyone else: They want to have fun with their own unique playstyles and identities and contribute to damage while assuming their other responsibility.

But healing is so low and our damage options have been watered down to the barest neccessity that healers are constantly upset. New players enter the role and leave out of boredom while veterans are driven away. Those that remain are the rare 1% or tend to be very low skilled.

Astrologians want their cards and time magic back. Scholars want Selene back and their dots. White mage wants for too much to be written here and Sage wants better toxikon and more dps options since ironically they have the least for the supposed dps healer.

and ALL healers want more healing to be required so they actually have a place in duties.
AND YOSHIDA REFUSES TO GIVE ANY OF IT

---

To drive home how little the devs talk about Healers in Live Letters and Interviews, it's best to look at this thread. Here's one line in particular that sticks out to me:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Shalan

The post-media tour interviews weren't much different. I spent a bit scouring the four major interviews with YoshiP following the media tour and release of role-action information, and out of roughly 223 questions there were 92 question related to roles/classes.

Of those 92 questions, only 3 were focused on healers. And they all came from a single interview.

---

The devs barely talk about the Role, and I believe the ShB Fan Fest Live Letter had them outright skip the Healer slide. Compare that to how much care and attention is given to DPS Jobs and it's kinda nutty. Hell, the recent SAM change had Yoshi-P going in depth talking about it during the recent Patch Notes coverage. Healers don't get that though. They largely get ignored, told to try it first and then ignored, or told to play Ultimate and then ignored. End result is still the same, the devs aren't listening, and haven't been for years.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Semirhage

I feel as if FFXIV is progressing toward a more action-y combat model. It's moved away from "traditional" RPG elements such as debuffs, crowd control, MP management, item usage, etc. More toward simplified rotations in between dodges like an action combat game. Setting aside my utter dislike for most action combat games, this is a model that works (more or less) for DPS jobs. Keep your rotation up, dodge, and keep attacking the enemy. That's pretty much the action combat model in a nutshell. What it doesn't work for is tank and healer jobs. Action combat tends to cut things like positioning, in-combat healing, buff spells, etc down to the minimum the developer can get away with. Every class wants to keep up the rotation and dodge most of the time.

I think Square's balancing and design teams, as a group overwhelmingly represented by DPS mains, see the fun they want in an action combat model, but they don't understand how this craps all over the trinity in favor of DPS. I think different roles could work in a system like this, but not shoehorned into their old RPG style combat roles while the game is asking them to do something completely different most of the time.

---

At this point it'd be nice if they committed and went one way or another but i'm afraid they might be stuck in this limbo for much longer because it works and the general player base seems to be fine with it.
What you say is absolutely true based on the games I've played so far. It seems PvP already made that jump into everyone being a DPS and there being a complete lack of tanking and healing so maybe that is imminent on PvE as well but i doubt they'd wanna overhaul 10 years of content to accommodate these fundamental changes.
If they wanted to go the other way around and strengthen the Trinity system they'd have to improve a lot of other things too. Role actions like Repose & Sleep have no purpose because the only CC that matters is Stun & Slow. Esuna collects way too much dust. Interject is the most cruel role action collecting dust thought since they overhauled the UI not 2 years ago to more easily display interject-able attacks only for them to not exist in endgame content. Class fantasy for healers is also in shambles due to the bloated healing kits which could've been made more concise if they build it around a core healing system rather than keep piling ogcds on top of each other. Yeah managing cooldown can be fun but i'd rather have buttons that interact with each other. Double Cast on PvP AST only has like 3 abilities to combo with but it already provides much more exciting and thoughtful gameplay than just pressing 2-1-1-1-1 and waiting for oGCD windows.

I think healers need more kit interactivity (both for heal and dps) and rewards.
Just increasing incomming damage and making curebots instead of glarebots would be pointless.

Look at DPS casters : spells procs for instant casts/upgraded versions ; dots procs ; more complex/interesting job specific ressource and use. Even SMN with it's 2 button gameplay has a kind on "stance rotation" that could be made into something.

Just copy/paste :
-blm kit on whm with cure/glare instead of ice/fire
-rdm gauge on sge sith shield/dps instead of light/dark
-smn summon rotation on sch (with fairies with regen/shield/dpsbuff/mitig specs)
-ast is already busy, so possibly rdm dualcast could help them

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Calysto

I think healers need more kit interactivity (both for heal and dps) and rewards.
Just increasing incomming damage and making curebots instead of glarebots would be pointless.

Look at DPS casters : spells procs for instant casts/upgraded versions ; dots procs ; more complex/interesting job specific ressource and use. Even SMN with it's 2 button gameplay has a kind on "stance rotation" that could be made into something.

Just copy/paste :
-blm kit on whm with cure/glare instead of ice/fire
-rdm gauge on sge sith shield/dps instead of light/dark
-smn summon rotation on sch (with fairies with regen/shield/dpsbuff/mitig specs)
-ast is already busy, so possibly rdm dualcast could help them

---

If anything I would much rather draw inspiration from the PVP actions, some of them are somewhat similar to your idea- but they are better- as Rina just said in the post above you for example, AST has some really nice design changes, double cast is very powerful and applies to gravity, malefic, aspected benefic, and unless I'm wrong macrocosmos.

Ultimately it'll boil down to two options:
- Increase healing uptime
- Improve healing downtime

Given performance in this game is measured by rDPS, improving the healing downtime ultimately is a DPS goal. Increasing healing uptime means we can make full use of our healing kit more, because the content doesn't match our kit. Increasing healing uptime in a meaningful way would be a massive undertaking IMO, because it's not just a case of potency adjustment but one of mechanics.

I favour a combination of the two options. They can increase healing uptime in content where it's sensible to have a higher difficulty spike and healers should have to react to healer-specific mechanics. But, it's not viable to do this for all content, especially if you want it to be accessible. That's where having better DPS options comes in, because experiencec healers can break up the monotony and it's a reward mechanic for being a good healer. But it is a secondary objective that's not needed for the vast majority of content so your newbie healers and less skilled healers don't have to focus on it. And in a way, it helps resolve the "we should heal more" and "we should have better DPS options" debate, whilst I would like to use my full healing toolkit in all content I do, I know a compromise is needed for accessibility, but we need a compromise coming the other way of "give experienced healers something to do" and DPS is the way of doing that whilst respecting the game's existing design. Alternative options technically exist, like SW:TOR has, such as different forms of crowd control or like FFXI has and that's have a variety of buffs and debuffs, but these don't have much use in FFXIV's design unless those buffs and debuffs affect DPS, like AST's.

I also feel there is another problem in understanding exactly how the healer balance affects things. One perception I've seen and I think perhaps the devs share (judging by their choices) and that's "more healing actions and fewer DPS actions means less DPS focus, more healing focus" when it's actually the opposite unless the content is adjusted to match, which it isn't. There is also the complaint people have of "healers who don't heal", however, I am convinced current healer design makes that problem worse, not better. It used to be we could blame Cleric Stance and then it seems it was perceived maybe the DPS toolkit gives too much to focus on. And now with a barebones DPS kit I think I am seeing the complaint more. And I attribute this to tunnel vision, because I know I've experienced it and found other healers who have experienced it, it's those moments where people go "oh shit, I forgot I was the healer". There's two culprits for tunnel-visioning, one is the monotony of a mostly single-button spam, because repetition does that and the other is a low healing uptime.

With regards to tank healing, although my natural response as an exasperated healer main was "really? So I heal even less now?" But I don't think we should scapegoat the tank changes, especially as I know WAR's love Bloodwhetting and I actually thought of Living Dead's changes as positive ones, because a) it makes it more viable for DRK to use more and b) it removes Living Dead from the equation in healer discussions (as an advocate for more shield healing and less pure healing on shield healers, this was an issue). And it's not the real problem or the core of the problem here.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Saefinn

Ultimately it'll boil down to two options:
- Increase healing uptime
- Improve healing downtime

---

There will never be more demand for healing. The Devs view the job of the healer to facilitate everyone else playing. Therefore, nothing can be so hard that most healers cannot enable everyone else to play.

Notice how I wrote that - the healer isn't there to have fun, its there to make sure everyone else can have fun.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by deadman1204

There will never be more demand for healing. The Devs view the job of the healer to facilitate everyone else playing. Therefore, nothing can be so hard that most healers cannot enable everyone else to play.

Notice how I wrote that - the healer isn't there to have fun, its there to make sure everyone else can have fun.

---

I doubt they will either, nor improve healing downtime, because they've pretty much said as such. And we are pretty much at an impasse, so unless the devs give leeway on this, then we're stuck where we are. If there's any optimism to be found, they eventually listened on MNK and MCH, however, as it stands, it's not hopeful. Which is frustrating, because giving better DPS options could alleviate a lot of the complaints about boredom because a) less experienced/confident/skilled healers don't have to do it and b) it gives something experienced healers to do when they have low healing uptime. It's a remarkably simply solution that offers so many benefits, but it seems they refuse because they don't want people to pressure said people into DPSing and that being too complicated, yet the current ToS and their clarifications would pretty much make people who try to enforce certain playstyles (like that) reportable anyway. And heck, they could do a hall of the intermediate to help teach healers more, including their philosophy, like "DPS is optional, but here's how you can practice managing it if you have the opportunity".

I'm going to just post a quickie

The best and most trusted players you know require minimal healing to no healing, which leads to extreme boredom. Especially past progression stages in high-end content. Duty Roulette is a wild card with older dungeons regularly have players that will not use CDs and literally run AV in lv1 glamour gear, which leads to random frustration and difficulty spikes between levels 41-50. AV is still on of the hardest dungeons because of this. Sitting still for six minute during a boss fight with zero incoming damage isn't hard to find in several EW, and more of them should have been like the Magus Sisters, IMO

Other notes: WHM is uncomplicated to an extreme since 2.0, AST is only engaging by being the most busy, SCH is the least tactical, and SGE just looks interesting from far away. The removal of nature based spells leaves WHM aesthetically boring and ignores it's lore too. AST lost so much of it's lore, potential, and nuance in favor of simple balance fishing, which was not helpful in AV or salvaging runs. And, since AV absolutely loves me: Balance was the second worst card to draw in the first room and for under-geared or DPS-geared tanks, which DPS are usually just not aware of at all. Basically, everything about healers feels like they're designed for non-support DPS numbers and low-skilled or new player carrying. 5.0 was just the worst, and most healers need to be completely remade at this point

It's hard not to be frustrated about HLR design, and the shortage of healers for two expansions is the result of the dev team's design philosophy. The early warning signs were literally the Physical-ranged classes, and the design calls for literally a negative skill-ceiling

Glare spam is boring. It doesn't help that Glare/III looks really bad. Stone IV was legit was one of my favorite animations in the whole game. I wish we would've kept it, because not only this doesn't feel powerful when the potency is, but it looks, and feels very boring as well. Honestly, going from impactful stone crushing to a feeble light wasn't a good idea at all.

DoT uptime and Pet management was fun. Alongside old cards,it gave me a sense of accomplishment that no other game ever did. Using Silence on Ultros during o7s felt really engaging to me. Being able to Esuna everyone, outside of GCD/oGCDs. It was something to keep you engaged outside of DPS and heals, and it was incredible. Bane during dungeon was so good.

Despite their problems, I was rather satisfied about the state of the jobs in HW and SB. They all played differently. You could stat them differently as well, and more importantly, they felt distinct from eachother. Noct. AST was very different from SCH. if you didn't like how one played, you had an alternative.

Now they all feel the same. One nuke. That's really about it. And it's boring for every healer job. The coat of paint really doesn't matter.

That was a terrible decision. People that weren't using the DPS tools at the time, still aren't using them, if they're in the same playstyle. Therefore, there could be 30 DoTs to keep track of, or none at all, and these players would not care one bit. I do, though. People playing these jobs the most do care as well. I'm not saying that they should force 100% DPS uptime on healers with big kits, however they need to give us better gameplay than one button spam.
And I'm not asking for much personally. SB was good enough for me. I would like them to return to a similarly sized kit. 2-3 dots, bane, pets, real card management. And maybe a real job mechanic for White Mage. They're the most played, and frankly they deserve better than Stone/Glare spam anyway.

Well Astro is receiving major adjustments come patch 6.2 so I’m excited to see what they come up with since for now Astro is the least played healer. How are they going to draw us back to the job they destroyed in Shadowbringers/Endwalker. Major adjustments sound spicy. They said the same about summoner and oh wad it completely changed.