Healing in ffxiv definitely can be fun. But outside of doing a first-time run on new content, it very rarely actually is.

Others have said it better than me but we have ridiculously bloated healing toolkits, each one individually being enough to cover most damage. Speaking of which, damage output is generally quite low at its base, and just gets more infinitesimal as ilvls increase. Healing always has a clear winner for which spell/ability is the ‘meta healing spell’, like Afflatus and Assize / Indomitability and Lustrate / Essential Dignity and Celestial Opposition. And of course only one of that already small set of healing skills is an actual GCD spell, and it’s instant cast.

Then, as if to throw salt at the wound right after stabbing healers in the back, SE decides we don’t need DPS abilities either. So we have a very small list of actually worthwhile healing tools because everything else is noticeably less efficient (I mean, is there ever going to be a scenario where you’d use Physick instead of Lustrate? Probably not).

Ultimately, healers end up stuck with barely any healing to do, only one or two healing spells that they actually need to use, but only one DoT and one filler attack to use between the very rare heals.

If you ask me healers should be able to help out the party during downtime. It just makes sense to me with a trinity setup to have the tank defending the party, the DPS dealing damage, and the healer doing healing or support. I’m not even talking damage support like AST. I think healing would be really fun if we had spells like Protect and Stoneskin to temporarily reduce damage taken, or spells with indirect support features like the old Shadowflare and Slow, or Miasma and Heavy.

I just think that making healers just do all dps, deleting all GCD heals and leaving only a few oGCDs, wouldn’t really do anything to make it more fun. At the very most it’d just make the role feel even more redundant; I’d prefer if they reinforced the focus of the role as something different from tanks and dps