The reason we healers DPS

[EaMett]

Are you actually suggesting that players who struggle to meet the healing requirements amount to a lot? With this amount of downtime? The main complaints I've seen are about healers not doing dps during downtime and having so much downtime to begin with.

If requiring people to cast more healing spells would alienate a lot of them then why do we ask healers to cast dps spells? It doesn't add up. This This "Schrödinger's" downtime both exists when people debate healer dps and doesn't exist when people suggest that we should have reasons to heal more.

Because dps spells are optional and can be cast when the healer is comfortable with the healing portion of the fight. Some people just aren’t comfortable.

You know how sometimes you die and then get raised and suddenly you’re completely off the mark and confused and just fall victim to some other mechanic? Or if you’re a healer, suddenly something unexpected happens and you focus so hard on healing someone/raising that you tunnel vision and fail a mechanic?
You aren’t doing much during your downtime in those moments. But it’s not like you’re just sitting there idle. Your brain is trying to catch up.

You’d be surprised how many people feel overwhelmed in a similar fashion just all throughout their downtime. It can be for several reasons, maybe they forgot where the skill binding was, or aren’t used to healing, or take a lot of time to target, or have to see full hp bars to breath. Basically they simply never get comfortable enough to push dps.

It’s usually a combination of the above where downtime will be spent overhealing, selecting targets, mentally prepping for a mechanic, etc.. the number of times I’ve had to outright tell my pug co healer in o11s to stop healing during the first phase because my fairy can literally do everything by herself is frightening. And even then they’re sometimes still worried and can’t help throwing a heal out because omg people are at 40% hp or they’re so hung up on not dying to mechanics that they’re so focused on boss cast bars and placement that they don’t cast any dps spells (or very few). They aren’t dpsing, but hey aren’t AFK either.

SE has made it a point to be inclusive of all player levels and that’s a great thing. It just means that combined to choreographed encounters, healing downtime will always be a thing.

[Reiryuu]

You’d be surprised how many people feel overwhelmed in a similar fashion just all throughout their downtime. It can be for several reasons, maybe they forgot where the skill binding was, or aren’t used to healing, or take a lot of time to target, or have to see full hp bars to breath. Basically they simply never get comfortable enough to push dps.

All right, but should everyone else be punished because they can't handle it, or should there be more training opportunities for those who are slow and uncomfortable? Are you going to hold the entire class back when many understand the material to an adequate degree or are you going to give those that need help some extra help outside of class, perhaps give them a few extra practice assignments to help gain confidence? If SE really wants something like that to happen, why not differentiate the healers to appease multiple playstyles instead of dumb all of them down to fit one particular playstyle? Hell, why not do that with WHM/Conj? Take out the WHM stone, you get a heal-only version of the WHM. Pop the stone back in, you get access to all the more complicated stuff. Conj can already equip all the healing gear anyway.

[EaMett]

All right, but should everyone else be punished because they can't handle it, or should there be more training opportunities for those who are slow and uncomfortable? Are you going to hold the entire class back when many understand the material to an adequate degree or are you going to give those that need help some extra help outside of class, perhaps give them a few extra practice assignments to help gain confidence?

It's really hard to know exactly why SE made the changes they made. There have only been a couple of things they've expressed in regards to healers. And that's that:
1) They don't like that healer optimization means aiming at freeing more offensive GCDs
2) They struggle to balance healers.

But we don't know anything else past that. is 1) a personal preference or is it an opinion based on some internal metric? Is 2) because they don't have the ressources, the tools, the knowledge, the experience? Is 2) in part because their design is flawed from the start, or their idea of what balanced healers are is misplaced?

Kinda hard to tell. We know they have little healer experience just from the fact they created something like lilies and the original PI. It's pretty obvious since any experienced healer could tell it was bad before even trying it out (and said so in forums). What is also obvious is that they're completely disconnected from their online healer community and have been for quite a few years. It's also a safe bet to say they don't have the proper tools or have a really restrictive concept of "balance" given how hard they're trying to homogenize healers.

But beyond that there's so much more that is unclear. Do they want the classes to play better or be more popular? If it's the later then maybe they'll get more new players into healers than old ones leaving? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Who knows.
And that also applies to:

As for inclusivity. While all nice and good, there is a stark difference between being inclusive and coddling. SE does the latter by making everything extremely easy. This, in turn, gives no incentive for players to improve.

Honestly, I've said this multiple times over the past 2 years. But SE's idea of balanced healers is just plain wrong and their idea to fix it even worse. Homogenization of healers for balance is going against 40 years of game design principles. AND them making that balance while lowering the skill ceiling and removing our risk/reward mechanisms is also in violation of basic game design principles. Especially when they could have accomplished the same without going to those lengths.
So All in all I have no clue what they were thinking.

The options we're left with are. They either don't know what they're doing, or there's some hidden agenda we aren't grasping. Maybe healer balance is costing them too much so they said "screw it, homogenize the shit out of them and give everyone trust healers to make up for lack of players". Money saved.

[ForteNightshade]

SE has made it a point to be inclusive of all player levels and that’s a great thing. It just means that combined to choreographed encounters, healing downtime will always be a thing.

Which is fine, but if healer downtime remains how it's been in Stormblood, then the dev team needs to accept healers will be expected to DPS, especially in higher level content.

As for inclusivity. While all nice and good, there is a stark difference between being inclusive and coddling. SE does the latter by making everything extremely easy. This, in turn, gives no incentive for players to improve.