Just wanna say, I really enjoy healing in this game.

[Renathras]

...

Thank you for the conversation/explanation. I'm not saying you're wrong, just making sure I understand correctly.

Though by this, you mean GCD heals, right? Doing P1S, for example, requires a good deal of healing, but most of it can be covered with oGCDs once you're above ilevel 590 or so. Intemperance, for example, does several hits of unavoidable damage. There's the crystal (fire/ice) damage itself, which is pretty significant, and then the Goaler's whateveritscalled thing where he pounds the ground and does an unavoidable AOE. That and Fourfold are the most healing intensive parts of the fight and will kill people if no healing is performed.

I haven't done P2S as much, but I'm pretty sure it has a lot to, and I remember doing my first clears of it when people had to use Feint/Addle/Reprise because not doing so, the stack mechanics would actually kill the weaker HP party members outright (healers and casters have the lowest max HP values) if they weren't mitigated.

So oGCD heals are definitely needed, but I take it you are referring to not casting GCDs here?

A good way of clarifying this would be Regen usage in Savage.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is because of Lillies as much as anything, right? Per TheBalance, Regen is an movement tool/HPS gain until Misery unlocks, at which point it is a loss vs Solace because Solace generates damage and Regen does not? Regen is still the bigger HPS, though. A part of this might also be the prevalence of oGCD Regens. Whispering Dawn aside (because it existed then), Asylum, Sacred Soil, etc all have a HoT component, and you have things like Physis floating around. That's a LOT of oGCD Regens.

Something that's strange to me:

The "Pure" healers all have oGCD barriers, and the "Barrier" healers all have oGCD Regens (as do...the Pure healers), with the only healer not having an oGCD barrier being SCH (it has to do it indirectly via Seraph). And yet Regen ITSELF is a GCD...imagine if Regen was an oGCD. Regen uptime would probably be a far bigger thing. Compounding this is that Eos and Kardia are both DPS free healing.

Part of the issue there is that, during Alex and definitely during Coil, we didn't have the overwhelming parse DPS environment. DPS was even more important (ironically), but there was more of a focus on healing. Though I think that's a combination of (a) encounter design back then and (b) oGCD over abundance and over power now. You just didn't have the oGCD tools in Alex to heal without using GCD heals. In Pande, you have oGCDs coming out your ears that, as Hellebore points out, can solo heal the encounters. I do wonder which is the bigger part of that, (a) or (b).

EDIT:

NOTE: I'm not saying I prefer the now to the then, either. My favorite healer in WoW was Resto Druid precisely because of how its "downtime" was called "rolling HoTs" because it had something like 5 different kinds of HoTs and you'd "roll" them across the party to keep everyone topped off, and you'd keep the separate one you have that stacks to 3 rolling on the main tank (if it fell off, you'd have to reapply 3 stacks, but as long as you refreshed it before the duration, it kept all 3 stacks, so you'd just refresh it before it fell off), an AOE party HoT, and a heal+HoT. It was also cool you could and would use HoTs (anything that wasn't the party limited one) on other parties, so Resto Druids not in the main tank party would still keep at least a Rejuvination (their standard Regen) on the main tank.

I always found that more satisfying than refreshing a DoT on the boss, personally, and would like it if WHM played more like that today. In ARR, when I was horribad (and so was everyone else), on WHM I played it this way, keeping Regen uptime on the tank and often Medica up on the party to keep people topped off. It was actually vaguely useful back then, but it's completely unnecessary in any way now because of our oGCD toolkits.