Cure v. Cure 2

[KisaiTenshi]

For the sake of preventing this thread from devolving further from it's original point, I will not be commenting further and I suggest you do the same because it's not helpful.

I will not shut up because you want me to.

If you are playing content where the trash dies before the Holy cast even goes off, then there is no point casting it. Especially when you have a tank that keeps dragging the mobs around. You're supposed to use instant-casts after cast-times because it conserves the GCD recast time. So holy then assize, not assize then holy. Plus you recover the MP of that initial Holy. Spamming Holy before the stun wears off is just a waste, and if you do it on monsters that have interruptable mechanics before they telegraph those mechanics, then they become immune to it faster.

Expert can be done pretty easily with 1 tank + 3dps if the tank pulls 1 group at a time. In other words, there is no reason to take a healer if the tank is pulling that small.

I would argue that the only time the developers explicitly designed for single group pulls is when walls exist between groups.

While larger pulls may not be great for free cure, they are great for DPS cooldowns and mp/tp efficiency of AoE dmg.

No, they put the walls there to discourage people running all the mobs straight into the boss room, or skipping them entirely. Brayflox, Haukke and Stone Vigil are different versions of the "throw roadcones in the way." Brayflox has no walls after the second boss, so you can quite literately gather up over 20 mobs and take them into the boss room. Haukke has a few locked rooms, but you can still get overwhelmed by the mobs before and after the first boss. Stone Vigil you can just train all the mobs straight into the boss room, except the last boss room which you can't open the door with being hit 10 times per second. If you run any content unsynced you'll notice how small every dungeon really is, and it only feels like it takes forever because you stop and fight one or two group of mobs.

Post ARR dungeons, the dungeons are more linearly designed and they put walls in so you can't just skip groups of monsters. Otherwise all it takes is a tank to attract all the mobs, run into the boss room, die, and the party hangs off to the side as the mobs run back to their origins and defeats the boss without the tank, then the tank takes the shortcut and repeat. That is explicitly why the walls exist.

In other games they usually invoke the "locked door and key" mechanic, where you only need to kill the mob with the key, you just don't know which one. In FFXIV it's always the last mob of a certain type.

Anyway, the point is, cure 2 does not replace cure 1. The dungeon layout is designed that if you take it as laid out, you can use Cure 1 at minimum ilevels. If you only use cure 2 and never use cure 1, then you need to be able make your MP last. So on trash, that is easily done, even on larger pulls because you are still limited by the cast time. So the tank can't pull bigger and take more damage than you the healer can heal for without them using their cooldowns. If they use all their cooldowns and the trash isn't dead, then that pull was too big. Hence strategic use of Holy and Assize buys more time for a larger pull. Benediction and Tetra can save one big pull but can't save consecutive pulls nor retries of the same big pull.