Healers need an overhaul

[HyoMinPark]

I wrote:

There's nothing monotonous about running with tanks and/or DPS who don't know their kit, don't know the mechanics, or both. I don't even find it frustrating, because I don't have high expectations for pugging, and certainly don't expect a fast clear.

Go out of my way? You mean, by doing duty roulettes?

Yes. You do have to go out of your way. The average duty roulette is just that: average. People aren’t dying left and right; I can keep the tank alive with oGCDs if they somehow forget about their self-mitigations and heals. DPS may eat an AOE or two, but nothing my oGCD toolkit won’t solve. I don’t really have to lift much of a finger in the average duty finder run.

What I do have to do is find true meme parties to feel engaged on healer. It’s the main reason why I always heal 24-mans on the day they release: people are going to eat stuff, people are going to die, and I will actually have to go into damage control. I finally get to be an actual healer, and not just a gimped damage dealer. Because that’s what healers are at this point: gimped damage dealers. We certainly aren’t healers. Content is being done without us—that’s how “valuable” we are.

I spam old 24-mans—specifically Dun Scaith and Orbonne Monastery and sometimes the NieR raids—just to get that one party that is a complete mess. The main way for a healer to remain engaged is to basically go out of their way and find groups like that. In any average group, you are pressing one button the majority of the time: be it your AOE or your single-target nuke. And you are doing little to no thought while doing so.

As in all of life, you can either find a way to enjoy what the game offers you, or not.
Totally up to you.

Or…the developers could make healing at all levels engaging. Be it by giving us more to heal, or by giving us an actual rotation or something else to do other than spam Glare/Malefic/Broil/Dosis until our keybind breaks. That sounds like a much better alternative instead of what you suggested: telling us to go find parties that are basically a mess.

Or, you know, instead of the developers themselves telling us to go do Ultimate. I’ve healed Ultimates. They don’t require nearly the amount of healing you would think a fight with the tag “ultimate” would require. And if the hardest fights in the game require so little healing compared to the amount of damage abilities I’m using, then how do you think normal content is?

In a world where FFXIV had infinite development resources to allocate, that might be true. But we don't live in that world.
Every change consumes development budget. So every change comes at a cost: other changes not made, less and/or lower quality content being developed, and so on.

But feel free to keep asking for the change you want.
I'm saying, quite simply, that I don't want what you want, and by implication would rather SE directed their efforts elsewhere.
Like to more quality content, for example, I never don't want that.

I have no expectation that I will convince the "healers need an overhaul" contingent to agree with me.
I just want SE to hear that yes, some people like what they've done with healers (especially with SGE).
It's regrettable if people on this thread can't tolerate seeing that put in print, but it's still true.

Healers have been asking for changes for years. Since late Stormblood/Shadowbringers release. It’s sad that people would rather see us silenced because “it’s fine the way it is because I said so” versus actually considering what those asking for change are saying.