I'm gonna say it. cause no one else will.

[Sebazy]

I'll say this. FF14 is expanding. It has a lot of new players and I think it makes sense to cater to the skill floor for the classes. It sucks for us veteran mains. But alas it is how it is, and making healers accessible isn't necessarily a bad thing for the company at this point in time.

This ^

I want healing dungeons to be akin to healing a small gank team in the likes of AV or WSG back in WoW. Huge pressure, an emphasis on efficient triage with failure ending in deaths and wipes ahoy. But I also appreciate that that isn't really what the game either wants or needs as a whole. Entirely hardcore MMOs have tried and failed (RIP Wildstar). I'm sure Yoshida is all too aware of that.

However, it is undeniable that MMO players will clock a lot of hours and get better at their roles. When that happens, the current healer design doesn't give anyone room to grow into the roles and they become outright boring. It's an undeniable problem with the design and a valid reason for people to whine.
The game will be fine if you don't hit that skill tier, or if you do but don't play the role much you may be willing to overlook it. But you hit the skill level and play the role day in and day out it's insufferable design.

Of course, this is the flip side of the coin. Right now FFXIV is riding a crest of a wave that is sailing clean over the flailing corpses of WoW, New World, BnS etc. But at some stage it's not going to be the new shiny game in town. No MMO no matter how dominant will ever be able to lean on fresh blood entering the player pool forever. At some point they will need to start addressing the long term hook in the healer role as it's a thorn that's just getting dug further and further into the game's heel.

A lot of us have been advocating for options that would give us more to do while not raising the skill floor much at all. Alas, we didn't even get that, instead they kept dumbing things down. (weirdly, despite them acknowledging the general player consensus that healers are boring to play)

This. Again.

It's pretty sad that a core part of the naysayer's argument revolves around 'veterans', 'hardcores' and 'raiders' pushing for healers to get a DPS rotation. That is just one of many suggestions that have been put forth here. As in my first sentence, I'd much rather see healing requirements actually increased. Substantially. But it's evident that that's just not happening despite what Yoshida says with each and every expansion. Levelling dungeons see a bump (ironically less so this time round compared to SB) until we hit the level cap, and then it's dullsville as normal. Debuffs are another option I've put forward repeatedly, except of course we used to have those until SB removed them from healers as a whole and gave them to DPS to forget to use them for whatever reason. More buffs are another route that I still cannot believe SE haven't explored further.

Not everything has to be super complex and game changing. My favourite idea that I've seen here mentioned in recent weeks? The idea of adding a Thundercloud style proc to healer dots. Absolute genius idea IMHO. It adds no extra buttons or bloat whatsoever. It doesn't change a single thing for those that aren't DPS minded, but it gives healers that want to optimise something extra to watch and min max. It'll help break up the rigidly fixed nature of our rotation over the course of an encounter. It'll offer further potential for extra weaves and it'll help break up the monotony of endless Glare spam even if a little.