We are in need of a official response to the healer situation

[Gaethan_Tessula]

The issue with that here tho is like fro mwhat I seen the people who PLAYED healers in 5.0 all said they were fine tho. Mr.Happy, and various others aren't worried about healing based on what they played, I watched tons of podcast of them saying so. So if we go by THAT then why ARE people worried?

So, again, a lot of that particular response of mine was aimed towards people discouraging another poster from letting the discussion here influence their thoughts/advocating blanket distrust of outside opinions. In isolation from the game.

Of course, your point is likely "if you typically trust expert consensus, why don't you trust Mr. Happy et al.'s take?" It's a decent one to make. Quick confession: I am not a master healer in this game. I know I'm not good enough to do Ultimate, and have no desire to waste my and other's time failing at it. I therefore wound up falling out of my static this expansion after O4S because I didn't want to prog UCoB (also, I had to finish graduate work and adjust to post-grad life). So Mr. Happy is by FAR a more accomplished and skilled player than I.

So, time for an analogy. There's a neontologist/neoecologist that was a teacher of mine. She's by far more accomplished than I in science (several dozen papers versus my three at the moment). I also think she's a better scientist overall both in terms of coming up with study methods and in insightful analysis of results. What she isn't, though our fields are very closely related, is a paleontologist. If she proposed the presence of Probabiles animalis, an extant taxon restricted to steppe, indicated a steppe ecosystem, but I have fossil or geologic data (other fossil taxa, paleoecological proxies) which conflicts with that conclusion, I'd be deeply skeptical. Perhaps Probabiles animalis had a wider realized niche in the past or we're dealing with a no-modern-analog ecosystem. I'm a worse scientist than her, but I know paleontology well enough to be confident in my ability to assess based on available evidence. Here, that available evidence indicates to me that the existing hypothesis based on the fossil record should continue to be be favored until further support for the steppe hypothesis manifests.

In this case, Mr. Happy is a better player than me, but he's not a healer main. It's not what's on the top of his mind going into a new expansion. The same goes for most of the other FF14 experts who've played, because Square Enix invited almost no healer mains. Meanwhile I've been in the healer White Mage viewpoint almost exclusively outside of braindead casual content for my entire time playing this game, and I think the things I have managed to clear inform my opinion enough that I'm not speaking from complete ignorance.

The opinions of these expert players do figure into my thought process, but they clash strongly with my present experience, knowledge of tooltips for new skills, and prior patterns of Square Enix balancing/game design. Not one of them has answered the important question of "what are we supposed to do in the downtime? Is it more fun than what we had in StB?" As in my analogy, I think the burden of proof lies on the new hypothesis, showing that Square Enix has succeeded in getting healers right for the first time in two expansions, rather than the old one, which is that healing uptime is very low in FF14, DPS or support skills have to therefore be well developed to leave the role fun to play GCD to GCD, and that WHM lacks the tools it needs to be more than the prog healer.