Dear Square Enix, do something with GCD healing please.

[Shurrikhan]

Dps is always useful. oGCD's create faster, flowing gameplay. It's about time they accepted, embraced it and designed for that gameplay instead of putting their fingers in their ears and pretending we still Medica II spam.

No one has called DPS less than always useful. No one is asking for Medica II spam. But what is this "embracing" oGCDs even supposed to mean? If having to use GCD heals occasionally (and the bottleneck to DPSing Silver is referring to is not MP, but literally just your party's survival), a la Coils where we actually had more incoming damage than oGCDs alone could deal with, is so wretched... What then?

I'd much rather they embraced the current battle cleric design of DPS support with a wide array of healing spells to smoothly weave in.

How is that any different from what we have now? Do you just want healing to solely be oGCD (assuming you mean abilities, not spells, here) and we spend even more time just turreting?

[Liam_Harper]

How is that any different from what we have now? Do you just want healing to solely be oGCD (assuming you mean abilities, not spells, here) and we spend even more time just turreting?

I did mention before I'd be fine with healing almost solely being oGCD. But that's no reason to become a turret, you replace the GCD heals with more DPS. You then have engaging dps and a strong healing kit that needs to be planned and involves thought due to cooldowns and can't be blindly spammed.

Similar to now, but blind Medica II spam is no longer possible and the dps aspect is more interesting.

[Shurrikhan]

I did mention before I'd be fine with healing almost solely being oGCD. But that's no reason to become a turret, you replace the GCD heals with more DPS. You then have engaging dps and a strong healing kit that needs to be planned and involves thought due to cooldowns and can't be blindly spammed.

Similar to now, but blind Medica II spam is no longer possible and the dps aspect is more interesting.

Again, no one's going to Medica II spam anyways, so that matter is moot. Toxicon, Clemency, and the ability to cast more than one TBN per 2 minutes would each be as deserving of removal as the ability to "spam" Medica II.

By all means, find more button-efficient ways of meeting Medica II's applicable capacity or decision-making (and, ideally, make its niche more often useful if you're going to bother with such), but it's not as if Medica II spam is some dire threat we need be rid of. I haven't even seen the skill cast more than once in the last year despite still seeing as many WHMs as SGEs (and more of either than SCH or AST).

I wouldn't mind trading out some/many GCD healing options for offensive actions (so long as those offensive actions aren't more convolution/bloat than complexity/depth), but I'd rather first...

1. Increase the "sustained" or otherwise "non-critical" damage dealt during encounters. Such wouldn't increase the difficulty of healing much despite making the role feel more relevant.
2. Consolidate more obvious forms of bloat. (AST provides plenty of examples, as does Aetherflow even being a thing when compared against SGE's system. Arguably, Lilies as an entire system, as compared to just automatic cast-completion upon movement for Cure II and Medica that'd consume a granular, time-generated resource, is also bloat.)
3. Rework or trim more uniquely redundant and lackluster skills (such as previously iconic skills like Celestial Opposition that are now just an oGCD version of a GCD skill).
4. Make resources that currently seem barely useful (Fairy gauge, Lilies now that their damage cost has increased, etc.) more appealing -- not just in terms of relative potency, but also gameplay.

Even after that, I'd like to see what we can do to intertwine curative/buffing and offensive systems interestingly that would neither oblige wasteful healing nor simply go (more obviously) the way of Green DPS.

If none of that gets skipped over and the added choices don't end up essentially just following a bloated rotation a la tanks or (gag) Dragoon, then I'm all for more DPS buttons and am plenty willing to sacrifice some healing GCD keys to get them. I just want to make sure we're not forgetting the cake for the icing here.