Has anyone quit healing?

[Punslinger]

Pressing additional buttons is largely a psychological thing. People want to feel as though their preferred job has complexity even if it doesn't. Hence the illusion of choice.

I think you're on the right track, rotational complexity is important, but I don't think it's about having an illusion of choice. If it were, people would stop playing the moment theorycrafters mathed out the optimal rotation.

Instead, I think it is about performing two different dances at the same time and keeping all the steps straight: the dance of doing your rotation without error, and the dance of doing the fight mechanics without error. It sounds simple, but it is the difficulty of executing both these things perfectly that is the heart and soul of MMO combat.

And this is why healing is soul-crushingly boring right now. Because all damage is scripted, all of the actual healing is part of the "fight mechanics" dance. Healers are only keeping track of the fight and when they're supposed to use their oGCDs. Healers don't have to do a rotation dance, because it's just refreshing a DoT every 20 seconds and spamming one spell the rest of the time. Imagine a BLM doing the same DPS it does today, but all of it is baked into a 1000-potency Fire 1 that they just spam endlessly.

Other MMOs solve this problem by making healing more reactive, including more random-damage mechanics in boss fights, and making MP a scarce resource. Putting actual decision-making in how to heal gives healers that skill-execution complexity that's missing from FF14. But FF14 can't do any of those things without a massive overhaul to the game design and to six years' worth of game content, so it's likely that Square will have to do what they did for tanks, and give healers a proper DPS rotation to perform during downtime. It's the only way to salvage the healer role given the corner Square has designed themselves into.

And all of the counterarguments that come from the Sylphies of the world, about how healers should be "real healers" and not "Green DPS," fall flat when you look at the tank redesign in 5.0. One can just as easily say that tanks should be "real tanks" and focus on aggro management and mitigation instead of DPS, yet Square has given every tank a real DPS rotation to perform. Mitigation, like healing, is done in response to scripted tankbusters. Mitigation, like healing, is entirely off the GCD. Mitigation, like healing, is a binary proposition: either you survive or you don't. So why shouldn't healers be given something interesting to do with all the GCDs they aren't spending on healing, when tanks were just given something interesting to do with all the GCDs they aren't spending on tanking?