Nobody Really Wants To Heal

[Adrestia]

They'll level up to that standard. There's ways for a company as professional and competent as Square-Enix to measure this.
Take The Burn's last boss for example, some healers will cry, die, and fail but eventually they'll get better at healing and complete the fight.

They have ways to measure when enemies are doing too much/too little.

That's an incredibly optimistic viewpoint you have, I'll give you that. In my opinion, the higher clear rates of The Burn as time went on had more to do with people overgearing the fight and ending it before too many cycles of mechanics. Many groups I've been in kill it before the first set of line AoEs. I still see healers fumbling there plenty, but we just don't take enough damage or for a long enough period of time for it to matter any more. We're back to the status quo of 70% of GCDs during the fight can be used on healer DPS.

[Amnmaat]

Well ilevel power won't change in Shadowbringers, the struggling healers will get an easier time once the ilevel adjust does its magic. The point is those healers that struggle will be fine, which is what most people use against the need to make content more healing intensive.

[Adrestia]

Well ilevel power won't change in Shadowbringers, the struggling healers will get an easier time once the ilevel adjust does its magic. The point is those healers that struggle will be fine, which is what most people use against the need to make content more healing intensive.

They make it through fine today because if they only press the right button about once every 10 seconds, that’s enough that no one is going to die very often. Make it so they have to perform at the level that a DPS is expected to perform, but with the penalty being the party dying instead of a fight taking longer, and many of these healers are going to get a rude awakening.

[RyuDragnier]

I'd rather prefer if healers were more support in general, and got more party support oriented buffs and debuffs. So say, AST could increase raw damage for the party, SCH could put debuffs on enemies that could strengthen the party (think chain strategem, but also versions for direct hit, and vuln down), and WHM could increase the party's substats, such as DET/SS/Crit/DH. Basically, give the healers more to do to support so we worry less about DPSing and more about increasing the rest of the party's DPS while not healing.

[cougarel]

I'd rather prefer if healers were more support in general, and got more party support oriented buffs and debuffs. So say, AST could increase raw damage for the party, SCH could put debuffs on enemies that could strengthen the party (think chain strategem, but also versions for direct hit, and vuln down), and WHM could increase the party's substats, such as DET/SS/Crit/DH. Basically, give the healers more to do to support so we worry less about DPSing and more about increasing the rest of the party's DPS while not healing.

Tbh this is how it was in Lineage 2, you had a pure healer and 2 co healers which acted like a mana generator and had more buffs/debuffs and some healing spells + an ultimate buff which could be used only on a party member for 4 mins or so.
That combo was really effective when raiding since the one healer could focus on the tank /party and the others would have to keep the main healer mana and also use the ultimate on a party member every time it was available.
So in the end there wasn't any dead time for healers at all.

[Sylve]

You know what … Lets remove the second healer from Full Parties.
BOOM, Instant increase to the healing required by the Healer. No more 'Meh, the other healer will fix it, ima pewpew some more.

On another note, It'd be pretty cool if they made boss abilities have random cooldowns upon use.
Basically instead of having X Ability have Y Cooldown, give that ability a range of cooldown times that it goes on with each use. Tankbuster might be a 10 second cooldown this use, but the next one could be as little as 4 seconds away. Would add some much needed 'surprise' damage that Healers would need to be wary of. Not limited to Tankbusters of course.
Imagine that painting boss being able to zip into whichever painting it felt like at any point during the fight as another example.

[Nedkel]

I would be so much happier if this was the case and everyone was expected to play thier role in a more concrete way. Even in alliance raids where several people are dying at once that just makes healing more engaging and gives DPS who have raise in their toolkit an opportunity to support the party. Non-healers would have more expectation to dodge mechanics, especially DPS with the "healer adjust" mentality. They would also be 100% responsible for DPS like they should be and would need to worry about movement and damage rather than just nuking while standing in aoes and expecting to be revived constantly. The whole we need healers to DPS to pass DPS checks would no longer be a thing.

Of course healers with already high ilvls will be happy to be able to heal a lot more than they do DPS, but what with the healers that are not geared?
Its really hard to balance healers so that all healers could heal all the time, their gameplay depends on so many factors that is impossible to balance dungeon/raid for healers with all ilvls brackets and make them heal for the most of the time. Your gameplay as a healer is based mostly on the performance of your team, if your team is weak, weak geared, weak skilled and soaks up all the damage you will have an opportunity to heal non stop thats how it often looks like in alliance raids, but if your team is going to be really good and they know their stuff, then you will be left with pretty much dpsing most of the times.
SE could give more unavoidable AOE damage in duties, but if it will become any harder than it is now, it could hurt pugs and people playing casually. They also could increase the difficulty of high end content on savage raids to give a healers an option to play harder content where they could heal more. However it will still ruin pugs that are running it, because you really cant balance healers having to heal non stop and dps having to meet a dps check, it will multiply the difficulty levels if it will be easier to die in them and still include dps checks for a team.
You could give encounter a source of constant damage that is being delivered to a tank, but what if a tank does not meet the expectations and its dying faster than you could heal? Then its another ruined encounter.
The only way to solve it is to nerf healing abilities to the ground, take away scaling, give more base healing and rework encounters into the boring and stale WoW style ones, which will ultimately kill this game all together.

Its far better to allow good healers in good teams to deal significant amount of damage, instead of trying to figure it out how to make them healing non stop, thats all.

[Bahati]

Of course healers with already high ilvls will be happy to be able to heal a lot more than they do DPS, but what with the healers that are not geared?
Its really hard to balance healers so that all healers could heal all the time, their gameplay depends on so many factors that is impossible to balance dungeon/raid for healers with all ilvls brackets and make them heal for the most of the time. Your gameplay as a healer is based mostly on the performance of your team, if your team is weak, weak geared, weak skilled and soaks up all the damage you will have an opportunity to heal non stop thats how it often looks like in alliance raids, but if your team is going to be really good and they know their stuff, then you will be left with pretty much dpsing most of the times.
SE could give more unavoidable AOE damage in duties, but if it will become any harder than it is now, it could hurt pugs and people playing casually. They also could increase the difficulty of high end content on savage raids to give a healers an option to play harder content where they could heal more. However it will still ruin pugs that are running it, because you really cant balance healers having to heal non stop and dps having to meet a dps check, it will multiply the difficulty levels if it will be easier to die in them and still include dps checks for a team.
You could give encounter a source of constant damage that is being delivered to a tank, but what if a tank does not meet the expectations and its dying faster than you could heal? Then its another ruined encounter.
The only way to solve it is to nerf healing abilities to the ground, take away scaling, give more base healing and rework encounters into the boring and stale WoW style ones, which will ultimately kill this game all together.

Its far better to allow good healers in good teams to deal significant amount of damage, instead of trying to figure it out how to make them healing non stop, thats all.

Regarding newer or ungeared Healers having a rough time due to higher damage output I don't believe that would be a major issue. It always will be a factor just like it is now and has always been until skills are learned and gear is obtained. I would rather new healers have the opportunity to stand "idly" and learn mechanics in down time so they can improve rather than have the expectation from other players they need to be DPSing or they are lazy.

Healers need to learn mechanics just like everyone else but they also need to divide their attention between enemies and their party. That being the case I'd rather healers not have to worry about DPS just to meet checks at the same time. Higher enemy damage and needing to focus on the job of healing and support is much preferred to bring some off record hybrid class with no clear direction but a ton of pressure from the player base.

[Sylve]

Of course healers with already high ilvls will be happy to be able to heal a lot more than they do DPS, but what with the healers that are not geared?

Welcome to the fundamental problem with Healers in how MMOs currently function.

Because we all want to 'feel powerful' with ilvl upgrades. For DDs, that means doing more damage. For Tanks, incoming damage goes down while outgoing damage goes up. And Healers … Well, as our own healing power rises, the Tanks damage intake is going down... So we get stronger and heal less often.

Only Healers have this problem.
Thing is, the solution is to boost the amount of Healing a Healer is required to perform. Problem is, Tanks wont like increasing their ilvl and NOT seeing a reduction in damage intake.
WoW went the wrong way and turned healing into an endless session of whack-a-mole. Watch any raid footage and you can see the entire raids HP fluctuating madly for the whole fight.

Bosses don't need to hit harder, they need to hit the party frequently and unpredictably.

Also removing the second Healer from full parties in such a scenario would give Healers more room to actually utilize the full suite of tools we have for keeping the party off the floor.

[Adrestia]

WoW went the wrong way and turned healing into an endless session of whack-a-mole. Watch any raid footage and you can see the entire raids HP fluctuating madly for the whole fight.

Bosses don't need to hit harder, they need to hit the party frequently and unpredictably.

Er...but hitting the party frequently and unpredictably is what creates that (fun and engaging, in my experience) whack-a-mole effect? I’m confused how these two statements jive.

Going back to the last time I played seriously (a brief stint with Legion showed me I didn’t like where class mechanics and gameplay had gone) in WotLK, when I mained a resto shaman, I remember the whack-a-mole keeping me laser focused or people died. To me anyway, that’s what healing is about.

In the Anub’Arak fight in ToGC, you had tank damage, unavoidable AoEs, random target DoTs, fight mechanics (dodging/kiting stuff) to do yourself, plus the boss would frequently put a very heavy DoT up on a number of people that would kill them in 1-2 globals. Your job for that mechanic was to almost instantaneously identify which of the raid members under your purview got the debuff and was going to die first, heal them, and as soon as that heal landed, heal the second person you were responsible for. Every healer in the raid had to do this on top of their responsibilities. It created a real sense of urgency and intensity for the entire fight; if you fell behind on your other responsibilities, someone would die while you were healing up people with this DoT. If you were mentally exhausted after doing your own mechanics and didn’t pivot into DoT-healing mode instantly on demand, people died. Your performance mattered from the moment the boss was pulled until the moment he died (much like the performance of the tanks and DPS did).

(Speaking broadly, not to the person I quoted to ask a question of)
Now, I know what I just described there sounds *awful* to a lot of people here. To those people who “play games to relax” and just want to waltz through a dungeon and can feel like a hero without the hard work. I get it, really. You play games in a way that is different to me and to people who like WoW/RIFT/insert-other-GCD-limited-MMO healing.

However, in the game model SE has chosen, in which every player is thrown into the grinder that is expert dungeons, normal mode raids, first 2 fights of savage maybe, it is impossible to please us both. The expert you enjoy is one that makes me want to fall asleep. The one I enjoy is one that stresses you out. But I need tomestones too. For me, who loves Eureka, I had a great alternative for most of the 4.x cycle. But many people didn’t like that and so still had to do experts. We don’t *want* to be there, but game design demands that we pay the expert penance to get our gear for the content we like. That’s the source of this un-fun “can we just clear this and get it over with already?” feeling. It’s not big epeen DPS (although for a time that can be a distraction from the monotony).

How would people feel if game design was shifted so that there were level 70 “normal modes” that gave tomes and gear at a lower rate, and all-new “experts” that were designed for a must-heal-like-a-madman type of gameplay? RIFT had experts like that at launch and a lot of people got the idea that the game had ended for them because it was too hard. WoW today has mythic+ dungeons but I don’t know how broadly received they are. For my two cents, I hate tomestones as a concept and would see them go away, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.
This also came right off the back of the Twin Valks fight, where you kind of got to roll your face across your best AoE heals all fight and satisfy yourself with godlike healing numbers for little effort. So not every fight was peak intensity, but you still mattered.