Healers need an overhaul

[Fendred]

I have a great respect for FFXIV and the devs that create it but I feel like the design of healers in this game is kind of ridiculous. Why is it that healers are the only role that get an extremely lackluster DPS rotation yet are still required to contribute significant amounts of DPS to clear difficult content? Like, in what world is a 1-button spammed DPS rotation okay for ANY JOB in PVE content? Well, after playing this game for 8 years now and weathering all the various changes to the jobs I honestly think we've hit the point where healers seriously need to be redesigned.

I believe that by redesigning healers to have simple DPS rotations not unlike tanks that more people will be attracted to the role which will boost the overall health of the game. This can be done in two steps: consolidate useless healing actions and add simple rotations that easily tie back into healing. Consolidating actions is very simple to begin with: there's no need for a cure 1/2 or a medica 1/2 when these abilities should simply evolve into higher forms. All the healers have redundancy in their healing kits that could be streamlined to make room for a few DPS buttons which could even add some of these abilities back in some way, shape, or form.

After this, each healer could have a simple DPS rotation that ties back into their healing in some way like increasing their healing potency or granting them a free heal, etc, in the reverse way to how using lilies grants a bloody lily at the end to restore lost DPS. And in the spirit of EW, they could even make it so that using your healing abilities don't break these combos so there's no reason NOT to heal when you really need it but also a reason to optimize your DPS to increase healing. But most importantly, it doesn't have to be overly complicated; just more than the one attack and one dot we've had for a while now. My mind is exploding with countless ideas about how this could be done inside of the current game's framework but I'd love the opinions of others on the matter.

The thing is, while it is pretty normal to be spamming glare to the point of actually wearing down your mana pool from it in normal content, it is a totally different story in savage content. Astrologian's opener shows what would happen if healers had DPS abilities: The healer strains to adjust to incoming raid-wides by comparison to sage, whm and scholar. Normal mode content doesn't require the full use of the healer's toolkit, whereas savage content does. What I do find problematic with healers has specifically to do with scholar and astrologian. Scholar still has leftover heavensward design elements-- that is, they require the player to know when something is coming up to fully utilize an ability. In this case deployment tactics with a guaranteed critted adloq and ground targeting on their primary defensive buff. Sage by contrast is snappy and responsive. Astro's issue is really just ability bloat.