I have a 50 CON and 33 THM. I expect to be playing a full-blown healer after the advanced job system comes out. I agree with all of your propositions to improve healing in FFXIV, including your suggestions regarding enmity, spell additions, and buff durations. I only have a few comments I'd like to add:


1)
Quote Originally Posted by Tibian View Post
Aggro reducing abilities: I have both Silhouette and Elemental Shroud, unfortunately they seem to do nothing (like many of the other skills in the game). So unless these skills are made better to actually dump an entire color of aggro -- I probably won't be that impressed with them.
I agree with this completely. I would also suggest the addition of an ability similar to Fade (perhaps it could reduce threat by one color of aggro, or just drop it to green).


2)
Quote Originally Posted by Tibian View Post
I feel MP consumption is nearly where it should be. However -- I do feel it is slightly more expensive than it should be.
I think giving mages more effective means of recovering MP in battle would alleviate some of the problems being caused by the high MP cost of cures. One suggestion I support is strengthening the effectiveness of Radiance and Damnation. As I seen in my post in a Battle Mechanics thread:

Quote Originally Posted by Alyssa View Post
Both Damnation and Radiance are really underwhelming. You say you're getting 5% of your MP back with these abilities? I think the most I've ever gotten (while on my 50 CON) is 30-something MP. Usually it's much more pitiful, like 7 or so.

If they could make these abilities more effective I think we'd see less unhappy mages. I think the return of ~10% would be more than sufficient. For me, that would be around 100 MP - which is what I get, on average, from a successful Siphon MP.