Can we stop punishing shield healers for playing together?

[Rilifane]

FFXIV has a completely different approach to combat than SW:TOR, WoW, SOLO and similiar games and they doubled down on this over time. And that is a huge problem with current healer design: it doesn't reflect encounter design AT ALL.
Damage is predictable, with large gaps between two hits and generally fairly low - yet healers are designed in a way that would be fitting for a game with constant damage, random spikes, heavy heal checks and so on. The absolute majority of my hotbar is filled with so many heals I never or rarely have to use because there is just not enough damage incoming.
It has been like this for years, the vocal community wanted to see it changed for years yet in EW we got more of the same and are still left with an overabundance of heals while encounter damage is laughably low compared to what we can do.
Our toolkit would work beautifully in games with high and sustained damage but only a handfull of savage or ultimate bosses ever test it in that way and if so, it's the or one of the last mechanics that gets skipped. And in DF you never see anything like it and are left with too many and too powerful heals that are for the most part disconnected from one another.

[AnotherPerson]

It has been like this for years, the vocal community wanted to see it changed for years yet in EW we got more of the same and are still left with an overabundance of heals while encounter damage is laughably low compared to what we can do.
Our toolkit would work beautifully in games with high and sustained damage but only a handful of savage or ultimate bosses ever test it in that way and if so, it's the or one of the last mechanics that gets skipped. And in DF you never see anything like it and are left with too many and too powerful heals that are for the most part disconnected from one another.

I want to point out that - Healers toolkit aren't designed for constant damage and heavy heal checks, rather they can be on an optimized level. It's designed for medium damage spikes (and vulnerability debuff being a hard limiter), but nothing over that unless the run is completely optimized (which then assumes you won't get vulnerability debuff and that enables more flexibility for killing you). The average player would run out of MP easily from GCD spam if damage becomes high enough that push comes to shove. The whole paradigm fails the moment you have to consider if anyone dies once or twice, especially for healers - because of death penalty or raise MP cost penalty. It's one of those healing toolkit designs that expect your team to die or take damage from mistakes a bit in regular content - which happens a lot more often for stuff when they're fresh or recent, but not for stuff that we're practiced over hundreds to thousands of times... we've practiced them enough to not suffer from death debuffs and mistakes from game mechanics that we never reach the point where things are THAT tough compared to when they were spankingly brand new experiences.

The problem is more largely mitigated now then before, with the reduction in stats no longer making it as easy to cheese older fights if you didn't know the mechanics and risk wiping, but the huge divide between optimized high end runs and non-optimized casual runs is the difference in difficulty, not so much of an individual role but moreso a personal responsibility on mechanical precision - which has always been the forefront of FFXIV's focus. That's the devs take to making content more accessible to older players by allowing more mechanical errors I assume, except more mechanical errors means less unavoidable damage and less unavoidable damage means less healing when players get better.

Imo, the paradigm is ok for casual content, because it's designed for casual content. It's just the high-end raids that are the main issue. Add a couple frequent heavy tankbusters with maybe medium damage auto attacks that require at least a mitigation to be up at all times ... all the while keeping the current mechanical gameplay challenge, and that would be a huge improvement to tank healing/mitigation (especially with how much more tankier they get, starting at at lv 82). Then, you got a decent raid boss for tanks to experience, for healers to actively GCD heal instead of just always spamming 11111, and for DPS to continue DPSing ... but the gulf of challenge between the two would also prove to be a very stark contrast whenever you do the other. Of course, the difference between high-end and casual content also doesn't require casual content to must have 1 pure healer and 1 barrier healer, so that's a non-issue for 2 SGEs working together in casual content.

Edit:
I just realized if that does come to pass, SGE Dosis is no longer goanna go BRRRRR though if autos becomes heavy hitting though. Maybe SCH is looking more amazing? We'll have to see.