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

[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Yes so your argument basically becomes “person with opposing view has outdated data so I’m just gonna assume that general sentiment has moved in the completely opposite direction took with nothing to back that up because………”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Whether you go by outdated data, opinions on the forums, reddit, Facebook, literally anywhere people don’t like the design of the healers,

And this is part of the problem - setting aside the outdated data, the rest of your points of reference are all SPECIFICALLY groups who don't like healers.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.