Do healers have to be easy to play?

[GrimGale]

It's very easy to fulfill the healer baseline role. If you stood there spamming your heals you'd essentially be maximizing your contribution to healing. Problem is, overhealing, by it's nature doesn't contribute to the progression of your party.

In FFXIV's healing there is barely any triage, since all healer job posses very strong and cheap AoE healing spells that allow players to blanket the whole raid with a single cast. MP management has also become much more accessible with strong tools to recover MP essentially integrated into the Job design. (Draw restores MP, Aetherflow/Energy Drain, Free MP healing abilities such as Lillies, Celestial Opposition, Fairy, etc.)

These changes make so that healers are allowed much more time to do anything but heal.

They have the MP, they have the time.

Healer design is essentially made so healers have time and resources to spare. Which in turn makes comparatively easier for them to juggle between keeping track of health bars, boss mechanics, and their own dps.

I suppose the designer team thought we would be overwhelmed if we had to constantly be triaging through wounded and dodging aoe at the same time.

That being said, I think the current game. design of healers does allow for an expansion of the gameplay during the prevalent healing downtime. In fact, healers already have distinct unique things to do, implied or not, during downtime:

WHM is a nuker, SCH is a debuffer and AST is a buffer.

They could stand to have that part of their gameplay expanded.

[Ilyrian]

WHM is a nuker, SCH is a debuffer and AST is a buffer.

In theory that should work but the issue would be how the WHM's damage is weighed against the buffs and the debuffs.
As the party size grows the collective buffed damage of the group/debuffed boss would easily outweigh the WHM damage output otherwise you'd have to scale WHM through the roof which would make them OP solo.
It would just lead to another mandatory SCH/AST meta.

[NobleWinter]

In theory that should work but the issue would be how the WHM's damage is weighed against the buffs and the debuffs.
As the party size grows the collective buffed damage of the group/debuffed boss would easily outweigh the WHM damage output otherwise you'd have to scale WHM through the roof which would make them OP solo.
It would just lead to another mandatory SCH/AST meta.

I always hear this argument and I think it could be fixed with a trait at Level 1. Lets call it 'Conjurer's Call' and say that for lore reasons you reach out to the elementals to help protect your allies granting an increase in damage potency for each person added to your party. This would make the WHM personal dps grow just like the raidwide buffs of your other healing counterparts.