The Healer Issue isn't the lack of DPS Tools

[Melorie]

Personally, I enjoy healing in FFXIV more than the more difficult rotations of WoW, but I'm also pretty casual these days. I used to play on PC, but have switched over to mouse and keyboard on PS4 Pro, which plays identically. I'm all for anything that makes a job more fun, but I don't think the devs will ever make healing too complex. It's possible that healing is intentionally made to be easier to grasp in order to bring in more healers, though at the cost of interesting interactivity for the more skilled players.

Well, engagement and fun doesn't really mean something hard to understand. For example, the way that astrologian deals (or used to... anyway) with cards is not hard to understand. It's not extremely dynamic either. But it's a decision making and it's fun. It's simple, but fun. Creative systems aren't necessarily hard or complex things.
But even so, I think that healers should be given at least an option. At least one class should be more complex and eventually rewarding to play. It's not wrong to have an acessible and easy class for a role. But if it's the only option, then that's a problem.

[ForteNightshade]

The general idea is that, if Healing was necessary to be spammed anywhere near as much as DPS gets spammed then it would just come down to spamming healing GCD. But given that the only Healing GCD's are: Smol heal (Cure, Benefic, Physick), Big heal (Cure II, Benefic II, Adloquium), HoT (Regen, Aspected Benefic) and AoE Heal(s) (Medica, Medica II, Helios, Aspected Helios, Succor) then making GCD healing a major point would usually devolve into spamming the most efficient heal skill available. This being something like Cure/Benefic/Physick is MP efficiency is required and incoming damage isn't too great or Cure II/Benefic II/Adloquium if MP efficiency is not necessary and/or if incoming damage is very high.

There just doesn't exist alternate GCD healing buttons to spam. The majority of Healers actual healing buttons are oGCD's, which is part of the reason why this notion of spamming DPS 90% of the time is a thing, because like 90% of your healing skills are oGCD anyway. If a shift was made towards GCD healing, it would quickly become just spamming 1 skill a majority of the time, because that's all that exists, 2 spammable ST heals, 1 HoT you use once every X seconds to refresh and then a bunch of AoE heals that you only use during AoE damage (2 of them being HoTs you only use to maintain the HoT and 1 being a wierd shield skill that can only become a normal heal once per 20s with use of a CD)

Except you aren't accounting for the fact DPS spells would still be utilized. Let's saying optimized healing at the Savage level reached a 70/30 split in favor of healing. This means healers have to GCD heal, oGCD and DPS, which gives them better variety simply because they now have to weave in GCD healing on top of everything else they have. The whole idea is an illusion of complexity. If you dissect every job in this game, they are all rather basic in their execution. But how they achieve their goal differs. Tank mitigation is essentially press x button to live; press y button to help the party live. But that combined with their DPS rotation keeps the job interesting. DPS are similar albeit with more flashy combos and damaging abilities. Healers lack in both this regard. Unlike tanks, they don't have super special awesome, flash DPS moves but they still spend the majority of their time DPSing. In that sense, it's no different than tanks spamming their 1-2-3 combo. Which would cause a LOT of complaints if they were every dumbed down that significantly.

But putting all the above aside. Plenty of healers don't necessarily care if they're "spamming" their healing GCDs instead of their DPS kit because that fulfills their job fantasy. The issue many have is they want to feel like healers not glorified DPS with better versions of Vercure.

[Freerider]

I mean in Stormblood I moved over to scholar because it was the more complex healer because I was bored of whm, but in 5.0 I might as well go back since I can weave Assize into my rotation and Holy seems much better than Art of War.

[Ceasaria]

I mean in Stormblood I moved over to scholar because it was the more complex healer because I was bored of whm, but in 5.0 I might as well go back since I can weave Assize into my rotation and Holy seems much better than Art of War.

But WHM still can't move freely while dpsing.
Not sure if it's a good choice (+ look at all the new healing actions/traits gained by SCH despite some nerfs).

[Freerider]

That's true, but honestly I'm just all over the place with the healer changes. It concerns me.

[Shurrikhan]

So basically just replace one spam spell with another? Ok.

The post is basically some five ways of saying "replace spam with... not spam". So... the exact opposite?

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@OP

Agreed on all points, Kalise. I'd still like my full damage spell repertoire, even if healing were so intensive I rarely go to use it, but the trimming of our DPS spells does indeed only scratch the surface of the problem.

I also wonder how much of it (though certainly not all, or likely even half) comes down to how power-creep for healers has been rather one-sided.

mean, consider an ARR SCH. They deal 100 potency of damage or a minimum of 400 potency of healing. That... makes healing look rather enticing by comparison, if it means keeping your tank in DPS stance, which was already about as significant an advantage back then. In T1, 4, and 5 there was actually significant enough damage required, and so GCD healing often felt like a viable choice. Flash forward to Shadowbringers and Physick is still the same 400 potency, but we have Broil III providing so much more relative cost to any given GCD spent not damage-spamming and we have so many more abilities to sequence off and by which to avoid GCD healing... Why, exactly?

[Saefinn]

OP I feel is spot on.

Heck, we had the groundwork for it already with Scholar. In 2.0 their DPS moves had debuffs attached to them, if they evolved and were expanded upon as the game progresses, Scholar’s mitigation tool kit would be interesting to play with, don’t just shield and heal, but manage debuffs on enemies. If you don’t then it will be harder to keep allies alive. To achieve this, nerf SCH heals, return their debuffs and make the debuffs more meaningful. This would be one way of making Scholar more engaging as a healer without relying on DPS (they could remove the potencies from the spells that debuffed before). I used to play Scholar like this in the early days because I figured it’d help with mitigation. I’d be okay with nerfs to SCH heals if their role as a healer was dynamic and interesting and evolution on what I liked about they job when I first played it.

[MOZZYSTAR]

I gave your post a thumb's up OP because more-or-less, you're right. Most of us like juggling the gimmicks we have into the gameplay and being useful beyond healz. We're a support class. We want to support our team in every way we can. Don't take away our abilities to support our team. I think it's a little funny that they first took away Stoneskin and now they took away prot (and bole).

[Addicted]

The healing class I've enjoyed the most in an MMO so far has been Rift's Chloromancer. For those that don't know it, it's a mage job that heals the tank/party via dealing damage, with some direct healing abilities for when no enemy is targetable. I've always thought a job like that could be pretty fun in XIV. For example, using WHM abilities. Casting Cure + Stone would result in an AoE heal around the target. Casting Regen + Aero III would result in a Medica II effect around the boss. A Synastry effect that heals a party member based on how much damage you deal.
In short, rather than having DPS/healing be mutually exclusive you'd weave both seamlessly into the healing kit.

[Ilenya]

The healing class I've enjoyed the most in an MMO so far has been Rift's Chloromancer. For those that don't know it, it's a mage job that heals the tank/party via dealing damage, with some direct healing abilities for when no enemy is targetable. I've always thought a job like that could be pretty fun in XIV. For example, using WHM abilities. Casting Cure + Stone would result in an AoE heal around the target. Casting Regen + Aero III would result in a Medica II effect around the boss. A Synastry effect that heals a party member based on how much damage you deal.
In short, rather than having DPS/healing be mutually exclusive you'd weave both seamlessly into the healing kit.

I believe this is the sort of thing people were hoping a healer based Dancer class would be, something that could fight in melee (or range, I suppose, but we're trying to make the job interesting) and heal off the attacks they were doing. Obviously, that route wasn't taken.