Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Shurrikhan]

If we look at the distribution of buttons, I think its fair to assume that the devs think that healing should be the core of the role and dps should be auxiliary (disregarding how they have designed fights with enrage timers).

To be fair, there's no real mutual exclusivity here --Are we meant to heal OR are we meant to deal damage?-- except when those two things share a resource (be that Aetherflow or just sheer GCD time). Every kit is <long-term throughput> plus an assemblage of <short-term throughput capacities of capped or greatly diminishing returns> by which to less tax their <long-term throughput>. In other games, that <long-term throughput> might sometimes be healing, but every fight in this game is solely a matter of reducing the enemy cylinder's life-metric to 0, making it always damage.

Then we look at Lilies and we see that the reward for using 3 lily abilities to heal is dps neutrality/boost (I forget how the current numbers balance out). So its a auxiliary reward for performing the core role.
This feels super weird if you are using all your healing abilities then I would expect you to be in a part of the fight where you need more healing but instead you are throwing heals out and you get a shiny button saying "hit them hard" while you are focused on keeping folks alive.

Is it any weirder, though, than oGCD heals? An oGCD heal says "Here, use this so you don't have to spend would-be offensive time to heal." Both are ultimately just ways of making that healing cost no damage. Heck, this is true even for building up to a gigaheal (a la Undulating Tides) if such wouldn't involve waste. All bigger heals are designed to do more in less time, as to be able to --so long as you don't specifically need it for a heal check-- spend more time attacking.

The only differences are (A) that one doesn't care when you use it, so long as it still prunes would-be GCDs of healing (especially if those would be necessary during raid buffs) and the other wants to be specifically used during raid buffs and (B) that one consumes weave space and the other produces it.

WoW Holy priest have a Talent called "Surge of Light" that I think shows a much better reward system. The talent give a 8% chance for both your healing spells and your single target dps button to give you a charge for 1 instant free heal that stacks twice. Its everything Freecure should be.

How I would translate this to FFXIV: Freecure would give a 25% chance(to account for GCD difference) for any cure/cure II or Glare to grant a free, instant, oGCD Cure II. (balance numbers as needed)

That still would change very little, though, save in that this would

1. double Lilies' healing power by simply overbuffing it relative to the existing system,
2. gate much of WHM's free healing (in terms of not costing the WHM damage) behind RNG,
3. further punish downtime,
4. slightly further punish the MP efficiency of healing GCDs [SIZE="1"(all MP costs would be, in effect, reduced by 250 through the 25% chance of a free 1k MP spell so long as you would need to use that healing anyways, but that's a much bigger difference relative to natural MP gen for Glare III than it is for Cure II)[/SIZE]
5. cost WHM's their AoE free-healing option,
6. cost WHM 3 instant casts (for mobility and weave space) per minute,
7. cost WHM an average of 3 oGCD weave-slots per minute,
8. cost WHM a non-Glare offensive cast per minute, exchanging it for another Glare, and
9. lock normal Cure II casts behind having consumed all Freecure procs, as opposed to having a separate button for that purpose.

Time, itself, is a damage AND/OR healing resource. Lily generation doesn't care where that time was spent, only that it's been 20 seconds. At present that's every 8th GCD. Sticking an equivalent chance onto each spell would net a 12.5% Freecure chance. If the free Cure II itself no longer consumes a GCD, we don't even have to make room for those GCDs nor allow it to proc itself. But that's all it would be. Rather than getting your free 800 potency of healing per 20 seconds, you'd get it from an average of 20 seconds' uptime. Rather than getting weave space, you'd lose it. Rather than building towards a unique and impressive spell, you'd be building towards maintaining the ability to cast nothing but Glare and Dia.

That's the main problem here: There's simply nothing warranting further heals to be cast. Changing the impression those heals give off isn't going to make much difference so long as there is virtually no reason ever to sacrifice direct/clear-capped/long-term throughput (damage) for capped/short-term throughput (healing, in our case here).