Make healers DPS with four or five healing actions

And give DPS and tanks massively buffed self healing

It would be way easier + cheaper to just inc the damage output of the bosses.
=> just add a x% inc to autoatk + skill dmg on bosses on every content, make raidwides go off more often..ect..

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Originally Posted by Zeastria

It would be way easier + cheaper to just inc the damage output of the bosses.
=> just add a x% inc to autoatk + skill dmg on bosses on every content, make raidwides go off more often..ect..

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200% increase to auto attacks in Euphrosyne will require exactly zero more healing GCDs even from the average player.

Increasing the damage output from bosses is not going to change how boring healing is now. Having to use a Regen once in a while doesn't make the Glare spam any less tiring.

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Originally Posted by Noumenon

And give DPS and tanks massively buffed self healing

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No, fix "healing" to be fun, not to be DPS jobs.

Self sustain should slightly go down if anything while sustained damage should be upped more and more, healing should be about balancing damage and healing spells, not spamming on or the other constantly.

also removing some resource healing would actually be good, for some more damage buttons, such as procs or whatever would fit a healer.

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Originally Posted by Zeastria

It would be way easier + cheaper to just inc the damage output of the bosses.
=> just add a x% inc to autoatk + skill dmg on bosses on every content, make raidwides go off more often..ect..

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In what world a rework of all the bosses this game has is cheaper than fixing the kit of 4 jobs? (Besides this actually wouldn't solve anything since normal mode needs to stay easy, solo instances exists, the healing kit of healer is extremely basic and many more reasons)

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Originally Posted by Noumenon

200% increase to auto attacks in Euphrosyne will require exactly zero more healing GCDs even from the average player.

Increasing the damage output from bosses is not going to change how boring healing is now. Having to use a Regen once in a while doesn't make the Glare spam any less tiring.

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Thats why i said raide wide should happen more often,
Higher auto atk dmg means you have to heal the tank more often, 100% uptime on hots.
Even better would be to randomize dmg also.
Every fight is scripted --> every heal can be planned.
By adding RNG and unavoidable damage into the mix --> you can make healing more reactive.
But we all know SE will never do that, inc the overall dmg output would be more realistic goal to wish for.

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Originally Posted by WaxSw

In what world a rework of all the bosses this game has is cheaper than fixing the kit of 4 jobs? (Besides this actually wouldn't solve anything since normal mode needs to stay easy, solo instances exists, the healing kit of healer is extremely basic and many more reasons)

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Chepest way : edit the values ..it will just be same but everything hit harder.
Healing isn't hard, it has no rotation and you have few skills to choose from (pressing heals more often - does not make game harder).

FFXIV difficulty boils down to remembering: patterns, safespots, orders, and look for clues in animation/castbars/text/surroundings.. Not so much in damage output or heal reqs...
You only take dmg in this game; if you fail at tactics/stand in stuff and get hit by raid wides...When you know the fight well you barely get hit, let alone lose any hp..

"Give us more to heal" has been asked for since the launch of ShB when healer kits got gutted, The result of that request has led to Abyssos where we ended up with a healer shortage (I'd argue since ShB started, I used to have to wait in queue as healer back in SB, not so since then). We should be careful what we ask for when we say we want more healing, specifically, we should be asking for more frequent damage rather than just harder attacks, else we end up with mitigation checks rather than heal checks.

However, that also doesn't change that healing is ultimately a binary decision; you either need a heal to not die, or you don't, and no matter how much damage they add, there's going to be downtime where healing isn't needed at that time. 100% healing uptime wouldn't be possible without massively increasing the skill floor and driving away too many less skilled players. For those moments where healing isn't needed, we need a better DPS kit than what we've got, at least 4-5 spells that we actively rotate between and an oGCD or two, that's it.

If we still want to die on the hill of having to heal more and justify our current DPS kit, you'd have to redesign 10 years worth of content that actually pushes our kit, instead of redesigning the jobs to fit the content that already exists. We used to have healers that complemented the content, now we have kits with overbloated healing abilities that "reward" us with spamming our 1 key several hundred times in an instance. What sounds easier for the developers; redesign 4 healers, or redesign 4 expansions + base game content?

Higher auto attacks would need to be on the level of a ultimate to make healers use anything that is not oGCD and the majority of people can't handle that also hot effects are already up nearly 100% of the time with sge and sch either way (kardia and fairy)

Randomized damage is simply bad with high damage because the kits are not designed for reactive gameplay and most of the time it wouldn't encourage gameplay mastery, just mindless mashing of heal buttons

For an scenario of high healing to work the healer kit AND the fights would need to be reworked and by that time you're just doing something more expensive that would gatekeep a lot of players more than engage the experienced ones (look at what happened in abyssos)

Man, every other mmo that exists at this point just has everyone being a dps. This is actually one of the few games with a trinity system and people are constantly clamoring for them to homogenize it even further. How about instead of making healers blur into the samefaced fog of existing jobs, they actually make healers necessary for encounters???? It wouldn't even be hard, literally just toss a cleansable Doom mechanic into a fight and have it affect multiple people and suddenly wow, you need healers to esuna it. This is like, the most boring basic example ever but it's just to demonstrate how easy it'd be to make this role "necessary" in a fight but they can't even be bothered to do that. It's so sad how if you want a trinity mmo system and you wanna heal as a dedicated role, your only modern options are ... what, WoW and THIS? Christ, man. What's crazy too, is they used to have a semi-engaging system for healers but they actively removed it in favor of this garbage we have today, because they thought pressing 1 button for 90% of your time would make the role more appealing to a broader audience. And every expansion, it gets worse. They keep giving healers these gigaheals for outgoing damage that basically doesn't exist outside of niche content that only a portion of the population even does, and even in those circles, there are even more niche groups that'll just do it without a healer anyway just to show that it can be done.

Honestly if they refuse to do anything else, I wish they'd just take all the dps damage mitigation skills and copy them over to healers as well. Random people barely use this shit anyway, at least let me have fun doing SOMETHING because holy crap this role offers basically nothing nowadays unless you play AST I guess, but they're coming for you in Dawntrail so enjoy the watered down remains of your job while you still have it.

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Originally Posted by Avoidy

Man, every other mmo that exists at this point just has everyone being a dps. This is actually one of the few games with a trinity system and people are constantly clamoring for them to homogenize it even further. How about instead of making healers blur into the samefaced fog of existing jobs, they actually make healers necessary for encounters???? It wouldn't even be hard, literally just toss a cleansable Doom mechanic into a fight and have it affect multiple people and suddenly wow, you need healers to esuna it. This is like, the most boring basic example ever but it's just to demonstrate how easy it'd be to make this role "necessary" in a fight but they can't even be bothered to do that. It's so sad how if you want a trinity mmo system and you wanna heal as a dedicated role, your only modern options are ... what, WoW and THIS? Christ, man. What's crazy too, is they used to have a semi-engaging system for healers but they actively removed it in favor of this garbage we have today, because they thought pressing 1 button for 90% of your time would make the role more appealing to a broader audience. And every expansion, it gets worse. They keep giving healers these gigaheals for outgoing damage that basically doesn't exist outside of niche content that only a portion of the population even does, and even in those circles, there are even more niche groups that'll just do it without a healer anyway just to show that it can be done.

Honestly if they refuse to do anything else, I wish they'd just take all the dps damage mitigation skills and copy them over to healers as well. Random people barely use this shit anyway, at least let me have fun doing SOMETHING because holy crap this role offers basically nothing nowadays unless you play AST I guess, but they're coming for you in Dawntrail so enjoy the watered down remains of your job while you still have it.

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That's pretty much how I see it. The fact that they can't even use debuffs anymore is just... sad?
I'm also not a fan of people standing in AoEs to continue DPSing since the damage in most content is negligible. I'd rather you get (either instead or on top of) a DPS down by X%. That way players would start to avoid that stuff again since it prolongs fights and maybe some bosses would now have time to finish their beginning monologue before dying. lol Could give all healers a skill with a CD that removes the DPS down aspect or something. I dunno. I'm happy with anything that forces me to pay at least a little bit of attention when I'm doing DR.

It makes absolutely no sense why healers can’t have more things to do during the insane amounts of downtime the game gives them. If not direct dps, then at least like, gcd buffs, debuffs, abilities that indirectly contribute to dps, w/e.

Current design is extremely (maybe an over exaggeration but it is quite bad) antagonistic towards newer/struggling healers. With so much of their potency thrown into a single skill there’s a massive amount of pressure on them to be hitting it as much as humanly possible.

They can’t DoT the enemy and focus on healing because of how much potency they’d lose from not spamming Glare etc, and they can’t buff the party in any meaningful non-cool-down way so they’re still doing ‘something’ contribute damage wise.

Then there’s things like Scholar’s Energy Drain where it’s like, they constantly go on about how they don’t want healing and damage to coexist but then there’s this skill that literally makes you choose between one or the other. Its only 100 potency and only makes a small difference overall, but at the same time with how much importance it’s given for being one of the only optimisations left on the job, surely it’s just going to pressure newer healers into being like ‘need to use this for damage like everyone says!’

Giving healers more than literally one button to contribute isn’t going to make them suddenly become unplayable; if anything it would just alleviate the pressure new healers feel to keep spamming the same button. And giving healers more varied ways to contribute with actual gcds beyond ‘deals direct damage’ is only going to draw more people to the role because it’d be offering options that otherwise simply don’t exist right now

Or just make healers useful in the game so people actually you know

Need to heal.

Stop trying to ruin the game already lmao healers are already as bad as they can be at this point and you're trying to make it even worse

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Originally Posted by Connor

It makes absolutely no sense why healers can’t have more things to do during the insane amounts of downtime the game gives them. If not direct dps, then at least like, gcd buffs, debuffs, abilities that indirectly contribute to dps, w/e.

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I’m not a healer main by any means, but I do think they should have more than 3 dps buttons to spam over and over. For me, AST is the most fun to play because it still has some variety to it with the cards, even though those were stripped down long ago. I had just barely finished my AST quests before they did the card rework, so I hardly even got to play it the old way! But at least it’s something to build towards during a fight, even if it’s only a little buff here and there… I tend to like the jobs that have a build up towards their special damage move; it just feels more satisfying. I’m probably one of the few who misses diurnal/nocturnal sect too. lol Not sure what to expect for AST with Dawntrail, but I really hope they don’t gut it too much.

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Originally Posted by Connor

It makes absolutely no sense why healers can’t have more things to do during the insane amounts of downtime the game gives them. If not direct dps, then at least like, gcd buffs, debuffs, abilities that indirectly contribute to dps, w/e.

Current design is extremely (maybe an over exaggeration but it is quite bad) antagonistic towards newer/struggling healers. With so much of their potency thrown into a single skill there’s a massive amount of pressure on them to be hitting it as much as humanly possible.

They can’t DoT the enemy and focus on healing because of how much potency they’d lose from not spamming Glare etc, and they can’t buff the party in any meaningful non-cool-down way so they’re still doing ‘something’ contribute damage wise.

Then there’s things like Scholar’s Energy Drain where it’s like, they constantly go on about how they don’t want healing and damage to coexist but then there’s this skill that literally makes you choose between one or the other. Its only 100 potency and only makes a small difference overall, but at the same time with how much importance it’s given for being one of the only optimisations left on the job, surely it’s just going to pressure newer healers into being like ‘need to use this for damage like everyone says!’

Giving healers more than literally one button to contribute isn’t going to make them suddenly become unplayable; if anything it would just alleviate the pressure new healers feel to keep spamming the same button. And giving healers more varied ways to contribute with actual gcds beyond ‘deals direct damage’ is only going to draw more people to the role because it’d be offering options that otherwise simply don’t exist right now

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After playing in DF and PF with most scholars I would rather they just remove that button so they don't have the option to blow all their aetherflow on damage, eat their fairy and blow that on damage too, leaving me to heal everything.

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Originally Posted by VerdeLuck

After playing in DF and PF with most scholars I would rather they just remove that button so they don't have the option to blow all their aetherflow on damage, eat their fairy and blow that on damage too, leaving me to heal everything.

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I'd rather they just remove White Mage because everyone who plays it is either incredibly greedy and uses their Lilies solely for movement or constantly whines that "I'm doing all the healing!!" because they spam Medica II when it's not needed

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Originally Posted by Noumenon

And give DPS and tanks massively buffed self healing

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then u force healers to dps. it should be a choice. not saying i dont dps just saying its off putting for new healers

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Originally Posted by sindriiisgaming

then u force healers to dps. it should be a choice. not saying i dont dps just saying its off putting for new healers

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Whether the healers have 3 attack spells or 30 doesn't actually have any influence on how frequently healers are obligated to deal damage. What does influence that is how frequently the party sustains damage. We have an opportunity to cast a spell every 2.5 seconds. If fights aren't dealing damage every few seconds, healers are naturally going to have large windows of downtime between healing, leaving them with nothing else to do but attack. But in most cases, even that isn't actually required. DPS is only required when there are enrage timers, which only exist in Extreme content and beyond. And in those environments, healer DPS already is required because a minimum ilvl party cannot clear without the healer helping.

Just here as long-time Healer main in MMOs (Cleric EQ1, Templar EQ2, Cleric Aion). I really dislike the trend towards no one needing healing or support and everyone becoming a DPS with their own heal skill. I generally avoid games like this.

What I miss about older Trinity MMOs was monster damage being very aggressive, and it could easily overwhelm tanks after a bit who couldn't self-sustain a boss by themselves if the rest of the party is dead, unlike what we see in XIV when a tank sits and solos something for a boring 15 minutes if the rest of the party is dead. Regular healing was needed, and healers had a variety of types of heals, heals with varying cast-times vs. potency, and defensive buffs and debuffs. We get some of this but the danger is simply lacking given how OP tanks are right now. We can literally ignore them for long periods of time in normal content, and as a former raid MT-Healer, it's ridiculous.

There is very little opportunity to stand out as a great healer IMO. Especially in normal content where we might as well be afk.

Honestly, it feels like 99% of the complaints about 'healing boring' are coming from White Mage mains who spend 99% of their time spamming Glare because their co-healer's pulling most of the actual healing weight.

You can just say "I think White Mage is a boring job to play in casual content", it's not some sort of 'forbidden truth' that must be redacted.

So you're saying make this Guild Wars 2.

Look healing is boring as hell it's primarily Glare Mage + occasional heal with most dungeons. I never liked how they gutted the healing classes ever since Shadowbringers, EXPECIALLY Scholar who got the worst of it. I never liked the shadowbringers changes and wish they'd just stop trying to force an unpopular choice and do what they did to tanks and give an even split between DPS and healing abilities. Tanking was way more fun with Endwalker and the changes they made expecially Warrior.

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Originally Posted by ElysiumDragon

Honestly, it feels like 99% of the complaints about 'healing boring' are coming from White Mage mains who spend 99% of their time spamming Glare because their co-healer's pulling most of the actual healing weight.

You can just say "I think White Mage is a boring job to play in casual content", it's not some sort of 'forbidden truth' that must be redacted.

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I made a very dedicated effort to try and love Sage from 6.0 to 6.2 as someone who was a long-time healer exclusive player up until Shadowbringers.

In dungeons, I heal with 2 buttons: Kerachole and Ixochole during bosses, and Kerachole and Taurochole during trash pulls. That's it. Very occasionally will something go 'wrong' and I'll use an extra button or maybe two, but otherwise I have 100% DPS uptime and use a fraction of my healing cooldowns. This is largely true for everything up to Extreme and beyond. And I both progged and recleared the tier 1 of savage fights in PF as a Sage. Granted tier 1 was mostly gentle on healing, but P3S particularly had a pretty decent amount of healer pressure, and even there I still would be Dosising my fingers off for the majority of the fight. It's still more involved than the dungeon experience of course, as I was managing my cooldowns and relying on at least most of my heals throughout the tier. I would parse blue-purple in PF and still outheal my cohealers most of the time. These experiences taught me something:

I hate the bug zapper.

I am sick and tired of spamming Dosis. I abandoned the entire healing role in Shadowbringers because of that problem, and Sage did nothing to fix it. I enjoy PVP Sage, where I get to cast Eukrasian Dosis and Phlegma twice as often, Toxikon isn't hot trash, and Pneuma is actually a DPS button, not a burst heal disguised as a DPS button. So as someone who only healed prior to Shadowbringers, who actively tried to heal again at the start of Endwalker, I think all healers are boring in all content because I don't have enough to attack with, and I don't have enough reasons to heal instead of attack.

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Originally Posted by ElysiumDragon

Honestly, it feels like 99% of the complaints about 'healing boring' are coming from White Mage mains who spend 99% of their time spamming Glare because their co-healer's pulling most of the actual healing weight.

You can just say "I think White Mage is a boring job to play in casual content", it's not some sort of 'forbidden truth' that must be redacted.

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No, I actually like healing and am usually the one doing most of the healing.

Also funny you say WHMs get carried on healing and others say WHM overheal....can't win here.

Gotta love the "other player do X badly please dev remove [X]!!"-sentiment because that is very likely the same one that came into the job dev's minds, then from that very sentiment we have now been given the 5th Healer known as WAR and absurd amount of collective sustenance that's not originating from Healer role.

Probably create PF and start blocking SCHs from joining then, if playing with suboptimal/bad SCHs is really that bothersome.

Increasing DPS variety is far more beneficial then adjusting all encounters to require more healing.

-Solo content that requires DPS would be improved
-Healing downtime interaction would be improved
-Situations where your party is overgeared, better skilled or both would be improved
-Healer combinations that reduce the need to heal as much (or in some cases not at all *cough24mancough*) would be improved

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

No, fix "healing" to be fun, not to be DPS jobs.

Self sustain should slightly go down if anything while sustained damage should be upped more and more, healing should be about balancing damage and healing spells, not spamming on or the other constantly.

also removing some resource healing would actually be good, for some more damage buttons, such as procs or whatever would fit a healer.

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Unless they redesign combat from the ground up, DPS focus is the only thing that works in FFXIV. Tanks are already simply DPS with a couple damage mitigation actions and an aggro mode toggle.
Healer design is hot trash because they keep trying to give them excessive healing actions in a game that THEY turned into something that will never need it as far back as 2.0.

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Originally Posted by ReynTime

Unless they redesign combat from the ground up, DPS focus is the only thing that works in FFXIV. Tanks are already simply DPS with a couple damage mitigation actions and an aggro mode toggle.
Healer design is hot trash because they keep trying to give them excessive healing actions in a game that THEY turned into something that will never need it as far back as 2.0.

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Exactly. The way they design fights and neutered everything that isn't a DPS race in this game means that healing is utterly irrelevant.

By reducing the number of healing actions you actually will make the healing part of healers more fun.

We don't need junk like Macrocosmos or Aquaveil or Haima. It's too much.

Neuter healing, make healers into DPS with 4-5 healing actions and 4-5 support actions. It'll suddenly be 500% more engaging and you actually need to think about healing again, plus you now have a fun rotation in casual content where none of that matters.

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Originally Posted by Noumenon

Exactly. The way they design fights and neutered everything that isn't a DPS race in this game means that healing is utterly irrelevant.

By reducing the number of healing actions you actually will make the healing part of healers more fun.

We don't need junk like Macrocosmos or Aquaveil or Haima. It's too much.

Neuter healing, make healers into DPS with 4-5 healing actions and 4-5 support actions. It'll suddenly be 500% more engaging and you actually need to think about healing again, plus you now have a fun rotation in casual content where none of that matters.

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I mean, I'd say Macrocosmos and Haima/Panhaima are far more interesting ways to heal than just Helios or Eukrasian Prognosis. I like the ideas of new heals, but I'd want them to just replace the old boring ones instead.

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Originally Posted by Darkobra

So you're saying make this Guild Wars 2.

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Kind of depends, I played GW2 for a bit at launch I remember healing boiling down to personal responsibility? I have it in my head they changed direction with that later though?

Blade and Soul's early Summoner would probably be a better reference point.

You're a DPS, but you also have team healing and support elements baked into your kit.

My own personal take is that SE need to:

A) Hire more job design staff urgently or at the very least take on someone like Mythic in a consultancy level and effectively buy whiteboards of design ideas from them

and then B) Go play Warhammer Online's community server coupled with some SWOTR.

Both did an incredible job with their healers, Warrior Priest might be the most enjoyable healer in any MMO ever in my book, whilst SWOTR also did an excellent job of delivering varied and engaging healers that weren't dependent on unga bunga aoes to have something to do.

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Originally Posted by Noumenon

And give DPS and tanks massively buffed self healing

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hard pass on your "hot take"

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Originally Posted by Noumenon

Exactly. The way they design fights and neutered everything that isn't a DPS race in this game means that healing is utterly irrelevant.

By reducing the number of healing actions you actually will make the healing part of healers more fun.

We don't need junk like Macrocosmos or Aquaveil or Haima. It's too much.

Neuter healing, make healers into DPS with 4-5 healing actions and 4-5 support actions. It'll suddenly be 500% more engaging and you actually need to think about healing again, plus you now have a fun rotation in casual content where none of that matters.

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To be fair its not that some skills should be removed but that they should be reworked into upgraded versions of earlier abilies adding more effects as you reach higher levels and engage stronger enemies. Ill give some examples for WHM where there should be some reworking.

To take Aquaveil as an example this should be an upgrade of stoneskin where the base Stoneskin merely adds a barrier Aquaveil adds a damage mitigation effect.

Medica should be just a strait upgrade to Medica 2. Same for Cure to Cure 2.

Aero III should be brought back and should be Upgraded to Dia 2 with higher potency.

Water should brought in at lower levels as an AoE version of Stone Eventually upgrading to Glare 2 (which is missing for some reason it skips to Glare III) at higher levels with Holy Changed to a burst damage ability after a certain amount of uses of Water. This would pace the stunlock better so mobs dont become immune so quickly.

Maybe add in Tornado/Flood/Quake as Special Burst Damage abilitys under certain requirements. It would work better than what we have now and make gameplay more engaging. It would also tie back into Conjurer at lower levels which has become increasingly disconnected from WHM at higher levels as the spells have been more or less replaced by light based spells.

Healers shouldn't DPS.
Tanks shouldn't heal.

Tanks shouldn't DPS either.

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Originally Posted by ZenoDiogenes

Healers shouldn't DPS.

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What do you propose healers do when they don't have anything to heal? Solo content/downtime/casual content etc.

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Originally Posted by Raiya

To be fair its not that some skills should be removed but that they should be reworked into upgraded versions of earlier abilies adding more effects as you reach higher levels and engage stronger enemies. Ill give some examples for WHM where there should be some reworking.

To take Aquaveil as an example this should be an upgrade of stoneskin where the base Stoneskin merely adds a barrier Aquaveil adds a damage mitigation effect.

Medica should be just a strait upgrade to Medica 2. Same for Cure to Cure 2.

Aero III should be brought back and should be Upgraded to Dia 2 with higher potency.

Water should brought in at lower levels as an AoE version of Stone Eventually upgrading to Glare 2 (which is missing for some reason it skips to Glare III) at higher levels with Holy Changed to a burst damage ability after a certain amount of uses of Water. This would pace the stunlock better so mobs dont become immune so quickly.

Maybe add in Tornado/Flood/Quake as Special Burst Damage abilitys under certain requirements. It would work better than what we have now and make gameplay more engaging. It would also tie back into Conjurer at lower levels which has become increasingly disconnected from WHM at higher levels as the spells have been more or less replaced by light based spells.

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I like your ideas, where can I sign up?

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

What do you propose healers do when they don't have anything to heal? Solo content/downtime/casual content etc.

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/beesknees, /mandervilledance, and /playdead between healing moments, what else?

/s

If Healers aren't meant to DPS at least give them filler spells to repeatedly buff other players that you can spam during downtime. How big buff can you build before pressing next oGCD to ignore another raidwide?

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Originally Posted by ThaCa

If Healers aren't meant to DPS at least give them filler spells to repeatedly buff other players that you can spam during downtime. How big buff can you build before pressing next oGCD to ignore another raidwide?

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I’d genuinely love this, even just for one healer. It’s a balance nightmare but plz Yoshi-P let me buff my party with gcds during downtime. Also debuffing enemies with actual gcd spells as well - honestly I don’t even mind if it doesn’t do any actual damage (though I’m aware that really wouldn’t work lol). Maybe if they made the values really low to account for always being available like Bard’s songs it wouldn’t be too impossible to balance huffs support copium

I just had a random idea, and it's probably really dumb, but figured I'd throw it out there. So, healers have their basic hard-cast heal spells, that under most conditions you really don't want to be casting because they're inefficient and waste time. Like Cure I, or Benefic, or Diagnosis. What if there were a way to jazz them up a bit and give them special effects, under certain conditions?

For example, for White Mage -- maybe you could have a mechanic to buff Cure I temporarily so that it increased your target ally's damage briefly. Or you could buff Cure II so that it provided a small shield or increased their max HP temporarily. Something like that, anyway. You could even make use of that awful "Freecure" trait, and say that if it procs, then Cure II also benefits from the damage buff of the enhanced Cure I.

The trigger for such enhanced effects could be something like... you have to cast them while under the effects of Presence of Mind, or you have to use Thin Air to cast them. Or it could be something that is available for a short period directly after using Assize or Afflatus Misery.

I guess the idea is, instead of them being really crappy healing spells, they could become limited-time buff spells with a heal attached. It doesn't increase button bloat, it doesn't make the job harder for players who are struggling or are playing new content. But it gives experienced players something extra to play with and think about on a quasi-regular basis.

Besides the whole DPS vs Healing debate, I'm pretty sure the entire issue with healers is with each expansion is the loss of decision making. DPS benefit from maximizing their rotation, the higher the skill the better the results. Tanks how have the same thing because SE continued to push them on that path. Healing used to require a different skillset. With Cleric Stance you had to juggle between choosing optimal damage or optimal healing, you had to juggle your mp, you had to decide which heals for which party member. Now, we lost a lot of that decision making because healing was made so easy and they reduced our DPS options.