What if we stopped calling the green role healers?

[ty_taurus]

Right, but they don't want you to DPS with more complexity, either. So it doesn't make sense for you to cite half their design philosophy while pretending that the other half is negotiable.

The proper conclusion is to realize that healing is working as intended and that you can choose to either embrace your glare button or move on.

I'm not so sure "as intended" is the correct way to describe the situation. There's clearly a lack of deeper understanding of how healer players approach content that has lead to many of the existing changes we've seen be counterintuitive to what the design team wants of the healers.

They wanted Afflatus Solace/Rapture to be forgiving healing tools, yet for the majority of the game, they work best as weaving tools regardless of whether you need the healing or not.
They want to make AST more consistent, yet they reintroducing RNG Lord and Lady.
They want AST to not have opener pressure to have each seal within 20 seconds, yet the new Astrodyne still has that same pressure since you do ultimately want that little extra damage it offers even if it's not as significant as Divination is currently.
They want want SCH to be a barrier healer, yet Adloquium and Succor are only ever really useful in challenging content.
They want WHM to be easy and forgiving, yet they're destroying its MP economy and have refused to update its ancient and clunky GCD healing spells that mislead new healers into thinking things like Freecure and Cure III are staple spells.

Doesn't really seem like everything's working as intended from my perspective.

[Naoki34]

What if we stopped calling the green role healers?

Well, it's green, unless you're a dog or colour blind, it's still green.

It's like calling a lalafell, potato, it definitely looks like a potato especially the potato women.

[MintnHoney]

I would love it if we could change the role name to Specialists, perhaps, and just allow each job to specialize in different forms of support and thematic play. For example, AST could specialize in creating strange effects and horoscopic trait magics, while SCH could specialize in situational/tactical battle boosts/debuffs, while WHM could specialize in therapeutic effects (for example, turning a debuff into a buff) and simple-but-direct buffs, and Sage could specialize in drain effects (attacking to heal) and sapping stats from enemies as a transfusion (buff) for party members.

The problem is, Squeen doesn't seem interested in anything that would stray from a path of simplifying battle mechanics. At least not up to this point. So any chance that we could take that away from the game would be met with the most stubborn resistance from them. Otherwise, calling them specialists also takes away from the fact that each job is technically a specialist of its own accord.. and then, calling them Specialists doesn't really provide much of a definition for a role, in the same way that Tank or DPS, as role categories, do.
And yet, without trying to think too much on this, I'm not really sure what else to suggest.
Minders? Because we take care of the party first and foremost and we primarily focus on Mind as a stat? I'm not sure.

It's like calling a lalafell, potato, it definitely looks like a potato especially the potato women.

Nah, they look like Capybara folk.

[HappyHubris]

I would love it if we could change the role name to Specialists, perhaps, and just allow each job to specialize in different forms of support and thematic play. For example, AST could specialize in creating strange effects and horoscopic trait magics, while SCH could specialize in situational/tactical battle boosts/debuffs, while WHM could specialize in therapeutic effects (for example, turning a debuff into a buff) and simple-but-direct buffs, and Sage could specialize in drain effects (attacking to heal) and sapping stats from enemies as a transfusion (buff) for party members.

But that's a LOT of work to balance/implement (e.g. you need debuffs in every encounter to change to buffs, but they need to be weak enough that non-WHM parties work), and you're just recreating the same issue we have now:
-Healing doesn't take a lot of your toolbar or focus.
-If these new specialization activities don't require much time, you're still going to spam that DPS button.
-Square doesn't want non-healing parts of your activities to be more intense than a dot and single nuke spam.

[Setesh45]

And what happens if you're glare spamming in savage fights?

Yes, I believe you that you're spamming glare for 70% of the fight's duration like people mentioned here.
And even if that was the case which it isn't it's still not an issue with the healers but bad instance difficulty, if your healers don't have to heal your fight is broken.
If you wish to do DPS don't play a healer!

[AikenDrum]

if you wish to not dps as healer, dont play a healer!

what's with this disinformation anyway? if you don't know how to play a healer, there're many great guides; going on forum to spread fantasies that have no basis in reality looks like trolling at best

[HappyHubris]

I'm not so sure "as intended" is the correct way to describe the situation. There's clearly a lack of deeper understanding of how healer players approach content that has lead to many of the existing changes we've seen be counterintuitive to what the design team wants of the healers.

They wanted Afflatus Solace/Rapture to be forgiving healing tools, yet for the majority of the game, they work best as weaving tools regardless of whether you need the healing or not.
They want to make AST more consistent, yet they reintroducing RNG Lord and Lady.
They want AST to not have opener pressure to have each seal within 20 seconds, yet the new Astrodyne still has that same pressure since you do ultimately want that little extra damage it offers even if it's not as significant as Divination is currently.
They want want SCH to be a barrier healer, yet Adloquium and Succor are only ever really useful in challenging content.
They want WHM to be easy and forgiving, yet they're destroying its MP economy and have refused to update its ancient and clunky GCD healing spells that mislead new healers into thinking things like Freecure and Cure III are staple spells.

Doesn't really seem like everything's working as intended from my perspective.

Lining up a list of quibbles in execution is missing my point. Square intends the following (from lead developer interviews):
-Healers should not have a challenging DPS rotation that could cause pressure in groups (explicitly said).
-The Shadowbringers amount of incoming damage / required healing is as intended (explicitly said).

The game just isn't designed for performing healers. It's designed to make sure that healers are in supply.

[HappyHubris]

Yes, I believe you that you're spamming glare for 70% of the fight's duration like people mentioned here.
And even if that was the case which it isn't it's still not an issue with the healers but bad instance difficulty, if your healers don't have to heal your fight is broken.
If you wish to do DPS don't play a healer!

So you're saying that we should just stand there when healing isn't required?

[Silver-Strider]

Yes, I believe you that you're spamming glare for 70% of the fight's duration like people mentioned here.
And even if that was the case which it isn't it's still not an issue with the healers but bad instance difficulty, if your healers don't have to heal your fight is broken.
If you wish to do DPS don't play a healer!

Yes, it's the instance that's broken and not the plethora of heals at our disposal. Let's not kind ourselves, healers have so much free healing available to them that we can heal most instances with 1 hand mindlessly tapping between free heal buttons 1-10 the entire time, and that issue is made worse by the inclusion of support skills offered by other roles on top of it all that makes healing effortless once you learn a fight. Now that our Auto attack is on a 1.5s cast time, it'll be even more mind numbingly easy to heal.

[Setesh45]

So you're saying that we should just stand there when healing isn't required?

No, I'm saying it's ok to keep casting glare for 10% of the fight's duration. It's not 70% outside of the easiest content like dungeons.
I'm also saying SE should up the difficulty of content so healer's actually have to heal. Damage to the party should also be coming constantly, not only in waves, leaving big gaps where nobody gets damaged.