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

[T-Owl]

I will contest that and say you're wrong. Now, here it really DOES depend on who we're talking about, but first we have to do a quick and dirty parsing of the community. At the top end (99%ers) you have the 1% of the community. Bleeding edge, theorycraft in their sleep, you know, the actual best of the best. Then we have the 9%ers, these are the 90-99% who AREN'T the elite, but want to be. These are also the people that most complain about things like balance and want to exclude people less skilled/dedicated/whatever than them from content. They see themselves as part of the 1%, but they aren't actually quite there. Then you have the Mid-core, which is the 50-90% types that still do hard content, still clear it, but do it more as a social thing with friends for fun and good times. They derive general joy from doing the stuff together, but they don't derive joy from min-maxing everything or making the game into a job. (I largely fit into this group, personally, and have since at least the middle of SB.) Then you have the "casuals(?)" which are the 0-50% that many times don't even step into hard content at all, and on the rare occasion they do, either do so with a group of friends or are doing old content for glamour or the like.

Can you in any shape or form back your numbers or are you just trying to frame yourself as the silent majority like people with opinions on certain movies and comics on Youtube try to do? Just from my personal experience, just catching a glimps at cast bars when doing just random dungeon content, the majority of healers in very high level content seem to be fairly competent in upholding high levels of dps uptime and play with a basic level of competence in casual content, not just 1 in 2. I feel like generally, people overestimate the incompetence of the FF14 community, it seems like most do fairly well in current casual content once its not first time anymore and lack in older content that is not very common in roulettes because many people forget the mechanics at some point and it usually isn't done often enough to keep them memorized.

And to be honest, you could just as well claim that cleric stance was removed because pure heal sylphie minded fanatics bullied new healers who were still about to learn and optimize when to use it and not to use it and find the right balance between dpsing and healing, which will mean that sometimes players will not saved from their own mistakes by a healer. I think the removal of cleric stance without anything in return comes with SEs schizophrenia when it comes to healers. They are pushed heavily into the direction of DPSing alot and were from the very beginning by the very design of the game and at the same time SE pays lipservice to nooo healers don't have to dps. To be it feels like backing down in front of very hardcore pure healer fanatics who in my subjective experience with the community tend to be fairly abusive and intimidating.

[Supersnow845]

Can you in any shape or form back your numbers or are you just trying to frame yourself as the silent majority like people with opinions on certain movies and comics on Youtube try to do? Just from my personal experience, just catching a glimps at cast bars when doing just random dungeon content, the majority of healers in very high level content seem to be fairly competent in upholding high levels of dps uptime and play with a basic level of competence in casual content, not just 1 in 2. I feel like generally, people overestimate the incompetence of the FF14 community, it seems like most do fairly well in current casual content once its not first time anymore and lack in older content that is not very common in roulettes because many people forget the mechanics at some point and it usually isn't done often enough to keep them memorized.

And to be honest, you could just as well claim that cleric stance was removed because pure heal sylphie minded fanatics bullied new healers who were still about to learn and optimize when to use it and not to use it and find the right balance between dpsing and healing, which will mean that sometimes players will not saved from their own mistakes by a healer. I think the removal of cleric stance without anything in return comes with SEs schizophrenia when it comes to healers. They are pushed heavily into the direction of DPSing alot and were from the very beginning by the very design of the game and at the same time SE pays lipservice to nooo healers don't have to dps. To be it feels like backing down in front of very hardcore pure healer fanatics who in my subjective experience with the community tend to be fairly abusive and intimidating.

I posted some data to him a while ago when he asked me if I had evidence that the healer role was not popular or well received recently though most of the data was from ShB since there is little to no data for endwalker and somehow he interpreted me having outdated data meant the healer role was totally fine despite presenting no data of his own. So yes he is big on framing his opinion as being the “silent majority” with nothing to back it up

[T-Owl]

On Optimization: .

I always chuckle at Sylphies who are so proud at putting healing first always and being superior due to their anime healer waifu mentality when I'm certain that they would probably be beaten by wannabe parsers in most cases when it comes to healing output and optimization.

On bad game design: I wasn't being rude saying that you're allowed to like the healers. But the reality is, none of them are well-built for this game objectively. This is because of how poorly they translate to the core design philosophies of the game as a whole. If you're content with that, that's your choice. It's not being rude to say that it's your choice. I like honey mustard on pasta, but that's not a good choice. It's not healthy, nor is that something most people enjoy, but that's fine. The key though is that me eating honey mustard on pasta doesn't force anyone else to eat honey mustard on pasta. You can like bad things. It's not an insult.

I feel like people who have this pure healing nothing else mentality are stuck in their mindset in very very oldschool mmos which would force players into that role by being centered around a conservatist and passive attitude while healing, due to ressource scarcity enforcing inefficent healing to preserve mana and inactivity during downtimes to regen it, which doesn't fit into the modern style of gaming which across most genres shifted towards a more fast paced action oriented style of gameplay, which just organically leads to making ressource preservation a secondary concern or a no-concern at all and instead shifts the focus from using downtimes for manag regen towards dpsing towards downtimes.

I posted some data to him a while ago when he asked me if I had evidence that the healer role was not popular or well received recently though most of the data was from ShB since there is little to no data for endwalker and somehow he interpreted me having outdated data meant the healer role was totally fine despite presenting no data of his own. So yes he is big on framing his opinion as being the “silent majority” with nothing to back it up

To be honest, it begins with the assumption that high dps uptime and the glare spam is a hardcore gamer problem, when I personally would describe me by no means as that. I play savage very casually and most of my healing experience stems from leveling a healer and doing casual content with it, having very casually flirted with the role when I started, during Stormblood a bit and most seriously for a few months after Endwalker release. And I ran into this burnout really, really quickly, not by being an elite pro-gamer but just by knowing how healing works in FF14 and wanting to do it well from the get go. Healing is just such a role that burns you out very quickly once you actually try to be a productive team member.

[Renathras]

Can you in any shape or form...

We're literally talking about anecdotes and our personal experiences talking with people.

Do you keep a log of every person you talk to?

If you mean the %ers, I dunno what to tell you other than every survey of the FFXIV community shows only about 20% of people clear Savage tiers and at most 40% of people even try them. This is highly dependent on server and the overall average seems to be around 15% clear them, which includes some of the mid-core.

Also, see this post I just made a bit ago, where I pulled up old, ARR period guides of Turns 5, 9, and 13 and discussed what the healers were doing, specifically WHM vs SCH:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...87#post6096787

You'll note that my overall perspective of the two and what they should be today matches that period's reality (just I think SCH going to SB and WHM keeping Lilies makes sense) while yours does not.

Notice ALL OF THE WHITE MAGES in ALL OF THOSE VIDEOS linked, which are the MTQ Capture guides and Mr Happy's, are what you would degrade as "Sylphies". Indeed, as I point out in that post, you don't see the WHM go into Cleric Stance basically at all in those videos/fights. I didn't see it once. I did see the SCHs going into it several times, but NOT the White Mages.

Further, you don't see the WHMs casting Stone and Aero uptime goes from basically none in Twintania to "spotty at best" in the later fights. Meanwhile, you see the SCH maintain far more uptime, throw Shadow Flare, and while you don't see Ruin casts, you see the Ruin bolts here and there, meaning they're using Ruin 2. The WHM, on the other hand, is almost exclusively casting Cure 1, Cure 2, Stoneskin - yes, STONESKIN - and Medica 2. There's no part in those fights where the WHMs are acting as damage dealers, and these were leading raiders of the period. WHM was played as a Sylphie.

Dun dun duuuuun!

And no, Cleric wasn't removed because of Sylphies being bullied. Holy revisionist history, Batman! Cleric was removed because of people like you bullying Sylphies, not the other way around.

As I said in that post, btw, you and people like you are correct - with regards to SCH. But you appear to be dead wrong with regards to WHM. And Cleric. And Sylphies.

EDIT:

I posted some data to him a while ago when he asked me if I had evidence that the healer role was not popular or well received recently though most of the data was from ShB since there is little to no data for endwalker and somehow he interpreted me having outdated data meant the healer role was totally fine despite presenting no data of his own. So yes he is big on framing his opinion as being the “silent majority” with nothing to back it up

You shouldn't lie.

I didn't say "healer role was totally fine". I said that a majority of players are LIKELY content with the healer role, and explained the reasoning for it. You just disregarded the reasoning because you didn't like it and refused to consider the possibility that people's views changes over time, which is ridiculously wrong in almost every real-life situation.

I feel like people who have this pure healing nothing else mentality are stuck in their mindset in very very oldschool mmos

FFXIV 2.1, 2.3, and 2.5 were "very very oldschool mmos"?

FFXIV is the game we're talking about playing!

the modern style of gaming which across most genres shifted towards a more fast paced action oriented style of gameplay

BLM: Exists.

But ONCE AGAIN, this is why I feel that all four healers should be different here. WHM should be more like the ARR paradigm just with the addition of some mitigation tools like Temperance and movement tools like Afflatus abilities that modern fights posses. It doesn't need a "fast paced action oriented style of gameplay". Guild Wars 2 has that. I don't play GW2 because I don't like that. And I'm not saying FFXIV must have that FOR ALL JOBS.

There's literally a simple way for everyone to win here, which I've proposed repeatedly and you guys summarily reject because unless you're getting everything, you seem to consider it somehow horrible.

To be honest, it begins with the assumption that high dps uptime and the glare spam is a hardcore gamer problem, when I personally would describe me by no means as that. I play savage very casually and most of my healing experience stems from leveling a healer and doing casual content with it, having very casually flirted with the role when I started, during Stormblood a bit and most seriously for a few months after Endwalker release. And I ran into this burnout really, really quickly, not by being an elite pro-gamer but just by knowing how healing works in FF14 and wanting to do it well from the get go. Healing is just such a role that burns you out very quickly once you actually try to be a productive team member.

Thing is, you've been playing the role since SB, as you say.

I've been playing the role since ARR.

On WHM, no less.

I'm just going to summarize for time because it's getting to the point of extreme with these post lengths. Sorry.

Same here.

On Optimization: Read https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...87#post6096787 and watch the videos yourself. Yes, I chose to play FFXIV. THAT is the FFXIV I chose to play a healer on.

.

On not liking DPS: I will point you here again https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...87#post6096787 where, AGAIN, THIS IS THE GAME I am playing and wanting to play. The game that is FFXIV. THIS game. You got frustrated when you thought I told you you weren't a "real healer", yet here you are telling me I'm not a "real FFXIV player". Can you not see how that's even worse? Especially when my playstyle is arguably as native to FFXIV as yours is - again, see that other post where I note in summary that SCHOLAR did, in fact, play the way you point out, but WHITE MAGE did not, and played the way that I point out. FFIXV absolutely once catered to both healer gameplay styles AT THE SAME TIME.

Seriously, you need to stop the gatekeeping. This IS the right game for me, as proven by me showing you how that was how it started AND where the current healing design - of all four healers, no less! - matches my gameplay perspective, not yours. If anything, it seems like FFXIV may not be the game FOR YOU considering the healer DPS kits are not to your liking but they are to mine. Do you not see how those words apply to you more than they do to me?

Indeed, my perspective more matches OG FFXIV than yours does AND matches current FFXIV design and Job kits, too!

.

On what it means to be a Healer: No, healer and support are not synonymous. Is DNC a healer? BRD? Both are considered supportive Jobs. CLEARLY, while healers often are given support tools and get the de-facto role of "Support" in games that don't have it as its own fourth role, the two terms are not at all synonymous. You keep mentioning Xenoblade 3. How about we look at a FINAL FANTASY game instead, considering we're talking about Final Fantasy 14? Let's look at the one just before it, FF13. The Medic class in that game had NO OFFENSIVE ABILITIES at all. But there were also TWO Support classes, the Synergist (which I actually loved - all the buffs!) and the Saboteur (all the debuffs). Note that Saboteur spells DID deal damage. Neither Synergist nor Medic had a single damage attack. So both were even MORE pure healer than what FFXIV offers in the role. This was also true of the White Mage Dresssphere in FFX-2, where they didn't even have autoattac/Attack command, instead having "Pray" as their spamable ability.

Indeed, you're reaching into everything OTHER THAN Final Fantasy games to make your argument. Particularly, you're reaching into games that aren't like FFXIV at all - Xenosaga is a single player semi-action RPG (this would be more relevant if we were talking about Guild Wars 2 class design), and League of Legends is a MOBA, which isn't like MMOs in most any respect other than within the short duration matches you gain some levels.

If we instead look at Final Fantasy games, or even other non-action MMOs, we see thee healer role is much less defined the way you suggest. Some even outright had Support as a recognized fourth role, like Guild Wars 1 and Everquest, and Pantheon and Ashes of Creation are also looking into doing that same thing with their own takes on the Support/Control role, AoC with Bard and Pantheon with Bard and Enchanter. Both WoW and FFXIV's devs are, I believe, on record saying if they ever DID a fourth role, it would be Support (suggesting they see it as potentially distinct), and many of the most support oriented classes in games that don't have a Support role are in those games as DPSers or even Tanks, not always Healers.

And further, what you consider "engaging" and what other people consider "engaging" are not necessarily the same things.

You ARE correct in that different people like different things. And the great irony here is, there's a way to ACTUALLY make everyone happy - everyone who doesn't insist on getting everything their way and anything less than that being unacceptable, that is, but those people would be more content too, at least.

.

On FFXIV's DPS Checks: Look at those videos. https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...87#post6096787 Again, LOOK AT THEM. Notice that the WHM is contributing essentially 0 DPS for the most part. They're still clearing the fights. Now, you can argue those weren't "Savage level content", but people of that era would call you out on that claim. Indeed, other than Second Coil (which was given a Savage version that broke the internet), all of the Coil fights were what we would consider Savage content today, and the Savage Second Coils we'd probably call Ultimate. Regardless, your claim is off by the face of it. BUT THAT ASIDE: No one is asking for healers that deal no DPS.

Seriously, that's such a strawman of a canard fallacy, you guys need tto stop it.

.

On bad game design: Well, just as you above incorrectly thought I was being rude to you, I'll accept here you likely weren't tyring to be rude, either. But I contest none of them are well-built for this game. They are all built where they are suited to clearing the content. Moreover, the Devs' stated design philosophy, that healers be approachable and functional in content and not too alienating to players to pick up and be competent with, seems to be being met.

It strikes me that you're confusing what you WANT healers to be, and what you personally FEEL game design should be, that is, two very subjective things, with objective fact.

You're expressing subjective, which is fine, but not objective analysis.

OBJECTIVELY, the healers are built VERY WELL (arguably too well) for the healing needs of the encounters, and they are built very well to the Devs' design intention for the Healing role.

As far as the last - that you liking something doesn't force it on others - you realize that's literally my argument, right? Indeed, my entire position at this point, restated several times, of changing SCH, AST, and SGE to appeal to different players while leaving WHM to appeal to those of us that like FFXIV healing as it is right now IS that solution.

And "You can like bad things" is a statement, but when you're attacking people's taste (which, again, is a subjective thing), that is, in fact, an insult. Though I accept you are not INTENDING it as one.

[fulminating]

What does savage clear rate have to do with healers being poorly designed in all content?
Not that t13 is remotely relevant to non blue mage healers these days, but all the old clear guides/vods indicate is that white mage wasn’t as well designed as scholar. A lot of the gcd healing the did seemed unnecessary, but they did have aero uptime. It’s also unfortunate that coils were chosen seeing as there’s no logs from the time.

[Renathras]

What does savage clear rate have to do with healers being poorly designed in all content?
Not that t13 is remotely relevant to non blue mage healers these days, but all the old clear guides/vods indicate is that white mage wasn’t as well designed as scholar. A lot of the gcd healing the did seemed unnecessary, but they did have aero uptime. It’s also unfortunate that coils were chosen seeing as there’s no logs from the time.

The argument often goes "FFXIV healers have never worked this way", so here is demonstration that they, in fact, DID work this way.

It's an odd "appeal to authority" fallacy where people are appealing to the game's history to make their argument have an aura of authority to it. The problem is - they're wrong, as the game never WAS what they are saying was.

It's fair to say - as I did - that it was PARTLY that way in that SCH was a support DPS/Healer hybrid. But it clearly was not that way in total truth because WHM was not. It's also interesting to see how LITTLE Aero uptime there is in those videos, and how the vaunted Cleric Stance dance, supposedly the high point of healer design and gameplay, wasn't even being used at that high level by WHMs, and was only somewhat being used by SCHs.

My point was to dispel that faulty appeal to authority so we could actually come to a shared realization:

FFXIV has, through its history, appealed to both types of players AT THE SAME TIME in Job and encounter design. And there's zero reason why that was true then and not possible now. No laws of physics or even encounter design have changed to make a thing impossible that was once the norm.

Also: Do you have links to these guides/analyses about WHM not being as well designed as SCH in ARR? I remember that argument (and it was valid) in SB, but in ARR, the assumption was you carried one of each to raids and they were considered to fill different niches and do so well.

[Supersnow845]

You shouldn't lie.

I didn't say "healer role was totally fine". I said that a majority of players are LIKELY content with the healer role, and explained the reasoning for it. You just disregarded the reasoning because you didn't like it and refused to consider the possibility that people's views changes over time, which is ridiculously wrong in almost every real-life situation.

Yes so your argument basically becomes “person with opposing view has outdated data so I’m just gonna assume that general sentiment has moved in the completely opposite direction took with nothing to back that up because………”

Whether you go by outdated data, opinions on the forums, reddit, Facebook, literally anywhere people don’t like the design of the healers, you are well within your right to still like them but I still have no idea where your absolutely unshakable insistence that the healer role isn’t a problem comes from

[Archwizard]

Optimizing damage and optimizing healing is the same thing.

No, it isn't. And never will be.

That's like saying mastering being a gunslinging police officer and mastering being a surgeon treating gunshot victims is "the same thing".

That's a flawed analogy, least of which because neither one of those two has the overlap to fulfill the role demanded by the game. Gunslingers are not expected to render first aid while shooting, nor are surgeons expected to shoot while performing surgeries (and in fact take an oath to do no harm).

Optimized healing is the most efficient use of your healing (and mitigation) tools, to minimize the amount of additional healing required for maximum group uptime. (Any definition that proposes "maximizing healing" invites overhealing, which is suboptimal by definition.)
Optimized damage is the most efficient use of your damage-dealing tools to maximize the amount of damage you personally deal.

Optimizing raid healing, consequently, optimizes personal damage: By minimizing GCDs spent on healing, you are maximizing time for damage output.
Simultaneously, optimized raid damage requires optimizing personal healing: Maximum damage is only achieved when the entire group's downtime (ie death), as well as periods of reduced output (like Weakness debuffs), are reduced to zero.
And of course, maximizing your damage output is a form of damage mitigation, as it reduces the periods in which the party is taking damage that needs to be healed.

For any given group composition, the two are intrinsically linked -- of course, the bulk of healing optimization falls onto the healer's shoulders, rather than any other role, due to the tools at their disposal being more numerous and powerful than any other job's, while their GCD heals come at the lowest damage cost.
However! This is also why it's a tank's responsibility to use their mitigation tools, and why DPS are given tools to assist in personal healing and raidwide mitigation, in order to assist healers in minimizing raid downtime while continuing to deal damage.

So yes, for a healer, optimized damage is optimized healing and vice versa.

[Rilifane]

Optimizing healing is basically the requirement for optimizing damage. And in turn, optimized healing (not maximized, as you said) is with with optimized damage in mind even if it that's not the active thought process behind it or the person doesn't go through with it in the end because there is no reason to work towards dropping a GCD heal unless you plan on using that GCD on something else and the only other option is damage.
MP is not an issue unless you plan on going for high dps uptime and thus constant MP loss... which, again, means that damage is the goal in mind.

Minimizing healing has nothing to do with not wanting to heal, secretly wanting to play dps, not like having to heal or anything like that, it is a logical consequence of how the game is designed: incoming damage is limited and predictable, survival is binary (you live or you die, you can't "live more" or "die more"), damage is always useful.
So there are no two different camps called "optimized healing" vs "optimized dps". The former is a requirement for the latter and done with the latter in mind. The latter won't work unless you work on the former.
The goal with anything that has limited usefulness (like healing) is always to find the sweet spot where you meet the requirement but don't waste resources on going beyond that as anything beyond this point simply has no purpose. As such, getting good at healing will always result in healing less regardless of personal preference.

[Renathras]

Yes so your argument basically becomes “person with opposing view has outdated data so I’m just gonna assume that general sentiment has moved in the completely opposite direction took with nothing to back that up because………”

...and then gave several reasons as to what that because was. I didn't stop with "because.......". I don't remember what all I noted at the time, but (a) being further removed from the emotive knee-jerk reaction, (b) new people to the role enjoying it, (c) overall que information (that healer ques went from being in demand across the board to being more similar to tank ques, and this was WITH Tanks getting a new Job then), (d) additional changes that happened (at least one of your surveys was from before Energy Drain was returned to SCH), and so on and so forth.

I didn't stop with "just because I say so", I actually GAVE REASONS for my thinking so. Reasons you didn't dispute so much as you ignored, just as you're doing now.

NOT ONLY THAT, but even your own data - the later data - showed a reversion, with SCH even in the surveys YOU PROVIDED being the number 7 most satisfied Job in the most recent data that you DID have, where it was rock bottom in the first set. This both shows that the data you provided MAY have been unsientific to the point of being bad data, but if we assume it was overall valid, seemed that the community had moved away from the initial position and views had changed, which was literally my position proved by YOUR data.

Yeah, leave ALL of that out, why don't ya.......

Whether you go by outdated data, opinions on the forums, reddit, Facebook, literally anywhere people don’t like the design of the healers,

And this is part of the problem - setting aside the outdated data, the rest of your points of reference are all SPECIFICALLY groups who don't like healers. That is, the people who don't like them are the ones most likely to go to forums and complain about it. Look at these threads. ALL of these threads have roughly the same 20 people complaining. There are some additional voices, but it's largely a relative handful of people in a game with over 3 million players, a good quarter or more of whom play healers. Do you not see how insane it is to try and extrapolate the views of THE most upset to the entire community, especially based on such a small sample size to begin with? And even IN THESE PLACES, you get pushback from people like me who aren't upset about the state of healers, or who think that they need some tweaks but are not horrible.

In simple terms, this is like only surveying Political Party R to get an opinion on Political Party D's position on an issue. OF COURSE it's going to be resoundingly negative. But if you surveyed Political Party D OR if you surveyed all citizens in the polity, you'd be getting different results.

you are well within your right to still like them but I still have no idea where your absolutely unshakable insistence that the healer role isn’t a problem comes from

Because it's currently entirely functional in the game, because there are other solutions for dealing with the issues, and because the VAST MAJORITY of the playerbase aren't on the forums complaining about them.

That's a flawed analogy, least of which because neither one of those two has the overlap to fulfill the role demanded by the game. Gunslingers are not expected to render first aid while shooting, nor are surgeons expected to shoot while performing surgeries (and in fact take an oath to do no harm).

It's mindset. WHY are you doing what you're doing.

One man may be driven to make money because he wants to bask in wealth and use his fortune to dominate others. Another man may be driven to make money because he wants to create philanthropic organizations to ease the suffering of others. Both are amassing wealth, but their minds of of completely different matters for the why. So when they get wealth, their goals of what to do with it are different. Further, how they approach doing so is different - the first may be perfectly fine with unscrupulous means while the second sticks with entirely legal and ethical ones.

There is a similar case here.

I optimize healing because my mind works for healing. It works for thinking about damage and restoring it, mitigating it and requiring lesser additional tending, etc etc. No where in my mind is the thought "How can I ensure I don't waste a GCD on a heal instead of a Glare...". The entire thought process is "How can I ensure this heal is sufficient for the situation...". The end result may be the same, but the base approach is not, and the goal is not. To me, Glarespamming is filler once everything else more important to me is done with. To you, Glarespamming is the GOAL that drives you to do everything else leading to it.

It is for this reason that Glarespamming doesn't bother me, because it's just something I'm doing in deadtime while waiting for something more important and interesting to need doing, whereas to folks on the other side of the fence, the GOAL is to be able to sit and do damage, and thus the damage rotation being boring is a big deal because that desired playstate is boring. As my desired playstate isn't the damage dealing piece, I don't care how boring it is, it's the filler. Filler's going to be boring. NIN's filler is boring, too; 1-2-3 1-2-3 1-2-3 1-2-3...not particularly exciting.

This is, in fact, what I specifically addressed pointing out that his view is entirely mechanical. If you don't like the police/doctor, how about this: Firemen sometimes break into homes to put out fires. Robbers break into homes to steal stuff. Both are looking at the most efficient and functional way to "break into" the home to achieve their goal. But their goals are night and day, even if they are using the same methods and tools to achieve them. Again, just because two things MECHANICALLY achieve the same result doesn't mean, in terms of feel or enjoyment of Humans doing them, that they're the same. I don't know how many examples I can come up with - all of which you'll hand-wave away for one reason or another - to point this out to you. (And yes, as a person who has been in the former of those two businesses, firemen are thinking how to do so while causing the least unnecessary damage they can, so it's not dissimilar - in case someone was thinking "Firemen don't care about damaging the doors/windows and just bust in", that's 100% false, in fact.)

IN ORDER TO optimize damage you must optimize healing, but OPTIMIZING HEALING is not necessarily TO optimize damage.

A true Sylphie (which apparently I'm not, despite being accused of being one) might optimize healing and then sit on their hands to "regen MP" until more healing is needed. CLEARLY they aren't optimizing damage while they ARE optimizing healing. So, QED, that demonstrates that the two are NOT the same.

You MUST optimize healing to optimize damage, but you CAN optimize healing WITHOUT optimizing damage. Clearly, then, the two are and must be distinct. In the first case, optimizing healing is a means to an end/goal. In the second case, optimizing healing IS the end/goal. They are clearly distinct.

Optimizing healing is basically the requirement for optimizing damage.

As stated above, agreed.

And in turn, optimized healing (not maximized, as you said) is with with optimized damage in mind

And here's the breakdown and where you become wrong:

No it's not.

To use the fireman example above, the fireman IS trying to optimize how best to break into the home, but they are NOT doing so with the intent of robbing the place, as the robber would. While they are trying to do the same first part of the A-then-B process, they are not doing so with B in mind. At all.

Minimizing healing has nothing to do with not wanting to heal, secretly wanting to play dps,

This chiefly depends on the person. It isn't true in all cases, it is true in some others.

There ARE two things you further said that I agree with. Specifically:

unless you plan on using that GCD on something else and the only other option is damage.

incoming damage is limited and predictable, survival is binary (you live or you die, you can't "live more" or "die more"),

THIS is what I feel like the problem is with current healer design in this game.

To the first, that there's nothing else we're allowed to do. We don't have buffs that aren't on CD that we can use, we don't have useful mitigations that aren't on CD that we can use, etc. Again, watching those videos of those ARR fights, there are a number of times you see the WHMs casting Stoneskin, and it WAS ACTUALLY USEFUL (and arguably necessary) to do it in that content.

And to the second, this is more or less related in that the damage in this game has become insanely boring and predictable. Sometimes you get more challenging things going on, but generally the answer is just "use more oGCDs!" instead of unpredictable things that require spot healing or actual triage thinking. Again, you can look to Coils and Alexander fights where damage was less predictable and required more active and reactive healing.

So there are no two different camps called "optimized healing" vs "optimized dps".

Yes, there are.

Your first sentence was correct. Those that seek to optimize damage MUST optimize healing, but it's because their objective is to optimize damage. Those who optimize healing TO OPTIMIZE HEALING are not doing so to optimize damage. Indeed, you get a lot of healers out there that have optimized healing but don't have optimal damage. Why is that?

Because, clearly, the two actions are not the same.

...but, this is a total canard. This is a completely irrelevant diversion from the core issues.

I feel the need to correct it, but at best it's a technicality - and a technicality you guys are getting wrong anyway.