Quote Originally Posted by Seraphor View Post
Thing is, healers have to be viable for when everyone is executing mechanics perfectly, and therefore only taking bare minimum damage, but also viable for when people are failing mechanics and getting hit. You're there to hold the party together through mistakes, not just a piece of a perfectly tuned machine. So this ideal healer scenario where the damage is enough to warrant full time healing is never going to happen, because you can't expect 100% performance from any party, not even for Ultimates, and therefore can't tune the fight to this unattainable standard without leaving room for additional damage, so it necessitates healing downtime.
While I'm not for full time healing as a solution, just one correction: full time healing does not equal full time maximum output.
In other games where healing was a full time job you did not have to use your most expensive heals and opted for more efficient ways to conserve resources so you always had ways to heal through unexpectedly high dmg. It was just possible that if the party continued to screw up you may find yourself out of resources. The higher healing requirement of fails was always managable just not for an unlimited amount of time.
Your hardcast toolkit offered enough options and synergies to nicely deal with consistent, average damage and some damage spikes while cooldowns were either used if things got out of hand (with randoms/ in casual content) or strictly planned to meet healing checks (in endgame).

But you'd have to fundamentally redesign the toolkits and encounters to make such a thing possible and FFXIV went the green DPS route.
Might aswell improve on that concept and keep the current healing skill floor while raising the healing + optimized dps skill ceiling through more interesting dps options.