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

[HyoMinPark]

Sometimes the silent majority exist. Please do not conflate forum commentary of the few, when data for millions exist.

You are being disingenuous by trying to use the data you posted as any defense of the “silent majority prefer their healers to be simple” when it proves nothing of the sort. There are many reasons for what you posted, the biggest one being that SGE is the brand new healer toy after 6 years of healers not getting a new job within their role. That in an of itself is a huge factor in why it is so popular.

You are also neglecting the job design flaws of the other three that have been voiced here and on the subreddits by both hardcore healer mains and casual healer mains. Of all the job changes, when the AST cards were overhauled in ShB, a lot of the complaints came from your casual healer because the flavorful mechanic they loved about the job was dumbed down and changed.

Also, let's not forget, WHM by most is considered to be the simplest healer. It's also the most popular healer and has been for a very long time. People will say things like "because only healer to start is conjuror", actually ignore how easy it is to job change in this game. They also ignore tanks & dps that are not starter jobs being popular.

WHM is the most accessible of the four healers, being available from the start of the game and the easiest of the four to learn due to being straight-forward and beginning friendly. It is also a Final Fantasy staple. But what you are failing to realize is that this does not mean that people prefer simpler healers when a lot of players—especially those invested in the Final Fantasy genre—flock to a job due to aesthetic.

This has always been extremely common with BRD, who is by far the easiest to play DPS and has always been the most popular (with the exception of ShB—even HW bowmage was one of the highest played DPS jobs back then despite the mass exodus of BRDs): people like the bow and arrow aesthetic, or they are drawn to the idea of a more traditional, Final Fantasy BRD—and then sorely disappointed when that does not exist in this game. There have been countless topics about this on both this forum and the FFXIV subreddits. The same applies to WHM.

You are trying to present an argument that your data does not support because your data is way too vague. There are far too many variables to consider as to why it exists the way it does, so trying to argue “people prefer simple healers, look!” is flawed.

Your ideals of what a healer should be does not match that of the devs. It does not mean they don't play their own game.

Except it has been proven time and time again that the development team for FFXIV is extremely out of touch with the way players play their game. Again, this has been the case for years. I wouldn’t expect someone who hasn’t been playing that long to realize this, but it is very well documented in places other than just the forums.

This view of devs as being callous or nefariously mistreating healer jobs/players is a very strange one, and I can't reconcile it with what I have seen of the dev team.

While I wouldn’t call it callous or nefarious, the developers have been severely neglecting healers in terms of job design and balance. WHM was ignored for the entirety of Stormblood with its pointless Lily system in favor of them spouting “Just try it out! You’ll like it! We promise!” Except players hated the original lilies because they had zero bearing on the way you played WHM. The Lily gauge was thrown into the corner of your screen and blatantly ignored.

I've come to terms with healers being simple on DPS rotation, rather, I look forward to new, interesting, spectacular and challenging content instead of a wishful healer re-work into a complex DPS job.

And time and time again the developers have proven that they will not give us more challenging content in terms of healing. Even Ultimate, the hardest content in this game, still requires less than 50% of a healer’s casts be used on healing—GCD or oGCD. It’s a far cry from the simplicity of dungeons; but it’s also not this Uber challenging piece of content that suddenly requires 80% healing uptime because high damage is constantly rolling out to flatten the party.

I've said it in another thread and I'll say it here: Healers are likely playtested in the context of limit testing fights, where they have to use much more of their healing kit in order for the party to survive. The fact that there are a lot of salty healers on the forums who don't get listened to doesn't change the fact that there are still plenty of contexts in which healing is far more engaging, the listed example being one of them.

That's not to say healer design is good, but healers are by no means ignored or uniquely neglected.

So are you saying that, at minimum item level blind progression, healers have to heal more because they have no context regarding the fights or their damage = more engaging healing? That’s what it sounds like—and while not incorrect, it’s a flawed premise.

You are ignoring that minimum item level doesn’t last beyond week 1. Blind progression doesn’t last beyond the first or second clear. And now where does that leave healing? Scripted and back to mindless nuke spam for the majority of a fight. This has been well-documented throughout the years if you pull any decent healer log for any Savage or Ultimate fight. None of them require high healing uptime. A healer’s most pressed abilities are its damage abilities; and the ratio of them compared to healing ones is always heavily skewed in favor of the damage ones.

Why does healer engagement rely upon doing a fight blind—so you don’t know when and where to expect damage, and any good healer would default to playing it safe versus not—or reliably upon another condition put forth in another healer thread: relying on a healer‘s party being an absolute clown fiesta so that they are forced into babysitting the group?

I ask you this as someone who opts to heal new content day one because that is when it will be at its most challenging. It’s new. People fumble. People make mistakes. And I have no idea when to expect damage. I ask you this as someone who frequently heals 24-mans due to the staggeringly high possibility of each run becoming a meme that requires me to healer LB3 more often than not. Why do I have to go out of my way to find engaging healer play versus just having it naturally?