Healers Exist for DPS fun only?

[Roeshel]

And yet, look at the progression of healing tool kits. Buffs removed, DoTs removed, abilities to heal and to bolster healing increased. We can't ask the dev team what fueled these changes or ideas and no one who has ever interviewed Yoshi P or the dev team dares to even ask questions about healers, so we never get to know and the dev team is never really challenged in that regard. Even if it may not have been implicitly said, the changes in healers in recent expansions certainly imply it. The Healer Hall of the Novice trials also heavily implies it.

Why do we have DPS and DoTs? For soloing and main questing. That's something I am pretty sure you can find Yoshi P saying somewhere. The thing is, people on this forum and in this thread want healing requirements increased. That's fine and all, but the problem with that, hence the post I quoted, is that trials are not a war of attrition. They're a battle against time. As I mention in my post, even if you manage your resources to the fullest and keep all the dps alive, that doesn't mean the boss is going to die. You can still hit enrage. This is a fundamental problem and flaw with healer design, FFXIV's concept of healers, and boss encounter design. One of these things has to give and the devs cling to all of them.

The devs have really pushed healers into a closet from their own design concepts. We're kind of doomed not to get any more interesting kits until we're either let out of the closet or some of the walls are broken down.

Here is a historical overview of AST:

HS:
DPS skills:
Malefic II - 200 damage potency - AST's main damage output at level cap
Combust I & Combust II - DoTs
Stella - useless utility spell on GCD with 100 potency - 2,5 cast time
Gravity - 200 dmg potency to first then 10/20/30/40/50% reduced damage for the next targets. 3s cast time. - Gravity back then was in awful condition, can't weave while casting, can't move in between casts, and on big mob packs, you deal 100 damage potency to the majority of mobs every 3s. The skill stayed in this wretched state for 4 whole years until Shadowbringers came - the expansion that allegedly destroyed AST

Back then all healers had cleric stance. An ability that goes against the concept of healers healing while doing damage. It most probably affected ticking regens as well. I don't want to imagine the mess it caused. You had to stop DPSing just to heal. This type of playstyle is akin only to WHM and it's one of the major issues with the job currently.
For some reason, everybody had access to Aero during HS. An ability that thematically suits only WHM. It had the same potency as Malefic II so unless they wanted to move or weave, they wouldn't use the spell.

SB:
Malefic III
Combust II
Gravity
Earthly Star

Basically Shb AST with old card system with probably serious clip problems and terrible AoE. The only time when you can weave is when you reset DoT. Lightspeed decreased your damage output so it is not something you would want to use to deal damage.

Fast forward two years and now we have the actual quality of life changes for the better. The whole card system is revamped so that you don't have to fish for balance, you can weave with every cast, your AoE is not sluggish and weak, LS is not working against you. Your skills support the playstyle that is expected of you which is to DPS all of the time without clipping. In the previous expansions, you didn't even have that. Not to mention that AST up until Shb had no access to AoE for any content in ARR. Their AoE was available at level 52. I would have probably never queued for leveling roulette. Can you imagine? Running Keeper of the Lake and not being able to AoE anything. The suffering must have been unfathomable. What else can you do besides AoE-ing? Circle your unspreadable DoTs? Give me a break. That gameplay was terrible.

Looking back at AST and the changes made it becomes clear that the GMs are trying to optimize your gameplay for DPSing. The gameplay of AST today is the most fluid version we ever had.

For AST, there was only one unique and offensive spell that got removed - Stella. It being a GCD made it a completely pointless ability to have. Turning it into oGCD would have made it into Fluid Aura with a different pointless utility but it would have still been used because of the DPS. It being removed is better than staying the way it is. It is a poorly designed spell.

It is not completely accurate to say that DoTs were removed for AST. They were simply organized. You don't need Combust ∞ on your bar. As far as Aero is concerned it should have never been part of AST's kit, to begin with.

From what I remember when I was doing the Hall of Novice you are advised to attack when there is nothing to heal which is more or less the old method of healing when healers still had Cleric Stance which made DPSing and healing at the same time as healer difficult. It used to swap MND and INT stats during HS so you must have been healing nothing when it was active. This also means that INT was not an attribute used by magical DPS only but by healers as well which makes healers unnecessary complicated and unable to deal significant damage unless their Cleric Stance is on. I wonder how they were building their BiS back then if healer's gear also had INT stats.