AST (and DRG) had their improvements pushed to 7.0 PLD are getting theirs in 6.3

[T-Owl]

I'm curious if this is a "good" thing or not.

Some people may love this, but if it ends up where parties aren't able to make because no one can find healers and the raid scene gets relegated to a small % of of the player base again, is that a good thing? I'm not so sure...

On that one, if endgame raids having serious healing checks that challenge healers is driving people off the role, isn't that proving my point of the role having become the one of low expectations?

A second problem here is what the meta has deemed is bad.

That isn't a meta issue though. Thats a gameplay issue, that healers are designed in a way that in most situations outside of general party failure which should justify a wipe and some rare high end game healing checks, those gcd skills come at an opportunity cost that just makes them not worth it, because in 99% percent of gameplay situations, you can perfectly keep the group alive without spending a single gcd heal. I mean, I wouldn't call myself the best of healers but just by virtue of my boyfriend knowing what he does when he tanks I could get away in expert roulette dungeons without spending gcd heals. Not to forget that these gcd tools are kinda shit for half the healer classes in the game, try picking up bloodbornes living failures having rolled a tank as a sage with gcd heals when you've been out of ogcds.

Part of the reason is optics.

Then maybe the game shouldn't allow players to get away with so many mistakes. Like, just restrict all battle rezz in all encounters. Instead of punishing dps for failing mechanics, in most content death is an inconvenience to healers first and foremost. In WoW this problem in my opinion is less pronounced because the game doesn't pushes healers to fix the mistakes of others indefinetely. If you are lucky, you have a class with brezz and that one is highly limited by cd. If somebody failed mechanics, they failed. Though WoW in higher end dungeon content also pushes more responsibilities to tanks and dps, like cc and interrupts.