The Healer Double Standard

[Rilifane]

I've played a few different MMO's and healers never have a lot of dps options. Unless it's a healer who heals through dps, which I only remember one game with that, Rift. As soon as FFXIV began filling with former WoW players I was expecting this to happen. The meters (which I never use or look at) are all anyone cares about. Dungeon groups want to pull wall to wall and expect you to heal through it. Even if you do heal through it they'll complain that you didn't do enough dps. I play a healer or tank to heal or tank. I don't want to be a fake dps when playing those roles.

But that's how FFXIV is.
Not because players make it so or WoW players cried for it, it has always been part of the core design of FFXIV. The devs factor in a signifcant amount of both tank and healer dps when designing dps checks. You can like it or not but this hasn't changed since ARR and it likely never will. That is how Square Enix wants their players to play this game, that is how it's designed.
Healing is obscenely powerful compared to incoming damage even in content you don't outgear.
Many players cried for a nerf to Final Steps of Faith when it was fresh out and nobody was able to outgear it. But both my co-healer and I always found time to dps even though I played safe at first. Even if someone failed a mechanic, it was possible and even neccessary to safely pass dps checks.

Healing would need to be drastically nerfed and lots of oGCD converted to GCD skills. And you'd probably need more completely unpredictable damage flying around aswell. It needs a paperbag doing wall-to-wall pulls to force a healer to hardcast one heal after another. Or shire tanks in Doma and later.
But it didn't happen in any of the patches or expansions and even if the devs would be theoretically willing to fundamentally change that and have ideas how to go about it, I guess by now they're too afraid to take such a drastic step for fear of driving players away from healing.
Over time it became clear that they're afraid of driving people away with increased complexity of difficulty and by signicantly nerfing healing they would definitely put more stress and responsibilty on healers on top of the general complexity of this new healing.

[TonberiScholar]

Healing would need to be drastically nerfed and lots of oGCD converted to GCD skills.

This gets thrown around a lot, but I think it'd actually work better if we did the opposite.

Hear me out:

oGCDs are gentler on reaction time requirements but also easier to constrain resource-wise because you can end up having one pool of resources for Healer-specific responsibilities (pool of available cooldowns/charges) and another for downtime responsibilities (MP).

Remove all the cast-time healing GCDs from the individual Healers (this will only be temporary for some, bear with me). So Physick, Adlo, Succor, Cure, Cure II, Medica, Medica II, Cure III, Benefic, Benefic II, Helios, Aspected Helios. Yank 'em all out (for now).

Give each Healer a Lustrate/Tetragrammaton/Essential Dignity equivalent with 3 charges on a 20s timer, very early on (like Cure-level now or so).

Give each Healer a way to do a low-intensity "upkeep" heal (something like Regen, Embrace or Diurnal Aspected Benefic. This'd also need to be early.

Tie the bare-minimum "expected" Healer responsibilities in Normal-mode content to oGCD healing, and constrain the charges/available cooldowns appropriately. So like on Scholar, instead of being able to spam Physick and Adlo on the GCD, you'd have like three charges of Lustrate on a 20s cooldown, your Aetherflow abilities (Indom/Excog/Sacred Soil) and your Fairy abilities (keep WD as-is, restore Embrace to be manually-targetable, make it stronger, give it like a 10s cooldown).

Then make Savage require more of your oGCD pool than you "have", at base.

Then take all the GCDs you just freed-up in combat and all the space in the Healer kits you freed-up and make genuine interactions per-Job with them. Either providing GCD heals, enabling you to have a chance/cooldown for "extra" charges/cooldown resets on your oGCDs or a mix of both, depending on the Job.

Add some cast-time GCD heals back to the Healers but make 'em important features of the Job, not just a thing they have because they have the thing.

Make some of them into oGCDs and keep some as-is (because variety helps but variety as part of a coherent kit is better).

So WHM'd get Cure, Cure II, Medica and possibly Cure III back. Make Medica II into an oGCD with a cooldown same as its duration.

SCH'd get one of either Succor or Adlo back, but the other should probably cost Aetherflow or have a cooldown (or both). Physick would be gone.

AST'd get Helios and Aspected Helios back. Benefic and Benefic II would be gone or worked into a revamped Card system.

If you need to, for leveling purposes, add Physick as a Healer Role action, but make it after the first three dungeons.

Teach people to heal with their oGCDs and their maintenance heal first and use their Job mechanic interactions from there.

Spitballing:

• White Mage: Keep the Lily system, make Cure I MP free, make Cure II proc a Lily. Lower the cooldown on Afflatus Misery to 60s, bump up its potency a bit (to be even with three Glares or so), change Lily Gen to be one every 20s. Let their Tetra recharge chance be on Cure or Glare. They'd be the "endless Healing" healer while also being the "compensated for GCD healing with Lilynuke" healer. So basically "like now but better".
• Scholar: Make whichever of the GCD heals they kept (either Adlo or Succor) lower the recharge of the Aetherflow action when a shield completely breaks. Make hitting a DoT'ed target with Broil have a chance to reset Embrace or Lustrate's cooldown. Give 'em back Shadowflare as an Aetherflow dump with a cooldown (and with the Slow returned).
• Astrologian: Cards need help. Put Draw on the GCD, make the action of playing a Card do a Benefic-level heal on the target in addition to whatever buffs they add to them. Add a thing where they select an enemy target with like a "DoT" and that enemy takes damage when they GCD-draw. Maybe make Minor Arcana have a chance to reset ED's cooldown or something. Buffing should be a bigger part of their actions.

Then, for Extreme/Savage/Ultimate, bump up the amount of needed oGCD heals beyond what you can cover with your "standard" allotment, so you have to use your Job mechanics/GCD-cast things to recharge them quicker.

We'd end up with a gentler difficulty curve (because reacting is, generally, easier than pre-planning) and more room to differentiate the Healers both thematically and mechanically, since most of the differentiation is in their GCDs but they're intended to handle "easy" healing with just oGCDs.

Bonus: If you have "intended" things to do with your GCDs that aren't overhealing, people can't complain about people not DPSing (as much) because Healing GCDs would be a mechanic thing instead of a thing you'd be a fool not to trade for DPS GCDs wherever possible.

Make the boring stuff boring but easy and put most of the in-game combat time into more-complicated but technically "optional" GCD mechanics.

[Rilifane]

-snip-

While I do like some of your ideas, for normal content or "easy healing", as you put it, it would change next to nothing and healers will remain green dps. A vast amount of players who don't want to be green dps aren't touching savage and don't want to.
Savage players are not the ones the devs are concerned about when it comes to bumping up complexity and difficulty because it's already known that they can and will always rise to the challenge.
It sure would be nice for savage players to have complex, engaging healing and dps mechanics with meaningful choices and risks involved.
But everyone else is left where they are now - and those people are and always will be the majority.

oGCD healing is more forgiving and easier to balance regarding resources but the problem stands, that any oGCD healing frees space for GCD dpsing and any GCD not spent on healing is a GCD you can and should be spending on dpsing. Which leaves us with green dps outside savage even if the changes you proposed are made.

Edit: but that said, I would appreciate a change in skill acquisiton so that oGCDs are learned at much lower levels and people learn to use them to their advantage sooner instead of basically overhauling the whole way they healed from 1-50 to 50+ when the oGCDs come in one after another.
Because as it is now it leaves us with healer thinking their casts are the baseline and oGCDs are solely for "oh shit" situations, so they never use them throughout the fight if the situation doesn't arise.
If oGCDs are the way to go, it shouldn't suddenly be dropped on your at at later levels. Even spreading them out some more would be nice, like changing the 40s WHM skill from Cure3 (which most people have long forgotten about by the time they reach content where they COULD use it) to DB. Or even ditch Fluid Aura and make DB the 15s class quest skill.

[TonberiScholar]

While I do like some of your ideas, for normal content or "easy healing", as you put it, it would change next to nothing and healers will remain green dps.

My hope would be that with the increased chance for Healer differentiation granted by this change that they'd be able to make a buffing/non-direct damage option (like the AST kludge I mentioned) more appealing, even if it's really just like a buffing "skin" on top of a GCD damage filler. With the whole "playing a Card both buffs a party member and damages an ally" thing.

In practice, it probably wouldn't work out that way, but it'd at least be closer to "able to accommodate both preferences" than what we have now, I think.

Party DPS is the universal MMO currency, and it always spends, but we can at least change the form that increased party DPS has, if not debasing the value of increased party DPS completely.