Whatever happened to “We don’t balance fights around healers needing to do damage?”

[Fendred]

Except a big reason why the AST opener is bloated, is because Draw and Play are separate buttons. Although 6.2 helped by merging Crown Play/Minor Arcana, and making sure Redraw would guarantee a different Astrosign. Aside from that, it's just using Divination at the 3rd GCD, and Astrodyne after getting 3 seals.
After that, it's back to spamming Fall Malefic/keeping your dot up/placing Earthly Star every min. Y'know, their actual rotation.
Unless they decide to add multiple oGCDs for a more involved healer dps rotation, it's never really gonna have this opener issue.

Also "first responder role"? What? This is the first time I've ever heard anyone describe healers like that, lol

Why are you constantly swapping targets trying to keep up your dps and healing? Incoming damage really isn't all that random, and you can generally plan ahead on when you need to use heals/CDs. Giving healers a dps rotation isn't going to change this heal/CD planning, it just means we aren't hitting the same button repeatedly while waiting for those moments.

Healer DPS varies depending on how well the group is mitigating damage and avoiding damage. In contrast, a tank's DPS doesn't change depending on how much damage he takes. So giving us a DPS rotation is kind of pointless: Its setting an expectation for us to do damage in an environment where we have no consistency.

[Sebazy]

Healer DPS varies depending on how well the group is mitigating damage and avoiding damage.

Again, no not really.

In high end content such as Savage, people eating avoidable damage can generally be topped with oGCDs, doubly so this expansion with how durable Tanks are relative to how infrequent/ignorable most tank busters are. If mistakes are happening frequently enough that neither healer has anything left, chances are the group is mid wipe and running into the wall anyway.

In casual content, again. As per my previous post, all I can suggest is to record your own gameplay whilst healing, make a mental note of when someone eats some avoidable damage and you panic heal them. Then actually count how long it is until some real damage comes in and how many incidental AoE heals they get in between. Unless they eat something when an avoidable AoE is imminent (Aglaia's Azyema is probably the best example), chances are they would have been absolutely fine anyway.

But yeah, in situations where mitigation is actually important, it's there to stop you being one shot. It's really not that likely to make much if any of an impact to the healer's DPS contribution other than perhaps making a more nervy healer less likely to reach for that medica II button when it probably isn't needed. Abilities like Asylum, Whispering Dawn etc are just going to overheal the excess anyway.

What kills our damage is of course simple 'inefficient play', self deaths particularly if we don't have an MP cooldown up soon and forcibly dropping GCDs to raise. A hard cast raise will do far more damage to our DPS than any forgotten mitigation that doesn't just cause a 1 shot wipe.