Why healing is broken and terrible, and how to fix it...

[Cenerae]

If your sole reasoning for wanting change is 'I don't like getting chastised by people when they think I should have done it differently', I can assure you with confidence that people will always find something to whine at the healer for. Even if the damage model was changed so that healers became turrets like the WoW model, and they were literally doing nothing but casting heals to keep patching up the incoming damage, there would be people that would complain.

As someone who's healed on that more 'standard' healing model at the highest tiers of content, I find the FF14 model to be a breath of fresh air. I get to use more of my toolkit than the things that make health bars go back up. And it involves some decision making on my part of what kind of heal I should be using and when; as well as deciding how much of my mana I want to use up dealing damage. As opposed to just mashing the big single target healing button or the big aoe healing button depending on what sort of damage is going out.

Sure the way it's set up also encourages poor play from people who have the misconception that healers are only supposed to heal and never do damage (as well as poor play from people who have decided that they don't need to heal and the tanks can magically do all the work themselves), but there would still be poor play from healers even in a 'spam your healing buttons' model. Trust me, I've seen enough healers come and go from my old WoW mythic team to understand that there's still room for mistakes and valid reasons to chew healers out in that healing model as well as here.