Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
So what happens when you have a healer that always does damage and always does healing?

Simply put, the swing between outputs (curative and offensive) available to said healer becomes painfully minimal, making them far less flexible (and, in many cases, less engaging) than more traditional healers (if just not done so poorly as, say, XIV's).

Need more healing? Your damage is already maxed out, so your healing is too. Need more damage? Your healing is already maxed out, so your damage is too. The most you'd have available is to, say, pop a banked haste buff and just hope your damage will be sufficient to keep everyone alive.

It therefore tends towards both the inflexible and quickly stale.

It's not whether a damage-based healer CAN keep up or not that makes it a bad design. It's that it's a kit designed to have minimal opportunity to change its throughput (profile).
a damage-based healer doesnt mean that damage translates into healing all the time, or even in the same way for every single spell. it doesnt have to be a 1:1 translation of damage done to healing done. any design problem can be fixed with enough creativity.

just off the top of my head, having more skills like zoe that purely increase healing would affect the healing output without caring for the damage output. having more variation of kardia healing effects would also help (like if e.dosis gave a shield like in pvp, if phlegma gave a regen, if toxicon did aoe healing, etc). the basis for making sage lean more into "healing with damage spells" is there, and it could work if they doubled down more on that aspect instead of copying scholar's homework.