Healer design is still terrible and I'm tired of apologizing for it.

[Grimoire-M]

That isn't optimal, it's lazy. I'm certainly won't deny Zodiark's mechanics aren't well thought out. Nonetheless, you can't be optimal by depending entirely on someone else to lead you around.

So yes, I can blame the players who can't be bothered to actually look at his mechanics for themselves. At least when those same players are trying to argue healers have too many responsibilities and need to stay incredibly simplistic to be functional. Or when said players claim they're perfectly capable of handling EX or Savage contents so long as they have Bis gear.

The problems with the content do not change at min-item level. XIV's healers are explicitly designed around everyone else making way more mistakes than you should reasonably expect in the long run, because their encounters are entirely based on finding the safe spot, which one person CAN do in cases like Zodiark. That invariably makes balancing between newbies and the speedclear/world-first meta worse. If you're expected to dodge everything, you're gonna try and dodge everything. but if your primary mechanical test irrespective of role is dodging things, you shouldn't be surprised when things feel stale and/or frustrating. The result of that design is healer kits have an extremely limited shelf life. What people are asking for is for SE to do something to prevent healers from getting stale as a result of that, either by changing the encounters such that penalties for getting hit by a positional mistake are lower but unavoidable damage is higher yet overall potential damage intake in those spike windows remains the same (you know, making mechanics less punishing in isolation, but still require healers when things are going well), or by giving healers things to focus on when things -are- going well. In my opinion, both should happen, because multi-dot management ultimately lets people like FuzzyMuffin meet expectations by only gunning for 100% DoT uptime while people who do want to maximize their support potential have appropriate pressure DURING prog AND more things to micromanage after they're done prog.

The ultimate result of dodging is this game feels super easy for veterans but impossibly annoying for newcomers to get into if they rush. The design's gotta let up somewhere, and shifting the tempo of encounters is generally a good way to do that.