Healers need an overhaul

[Shurrikhan]

If you want to simplified it down to the core ... sure. But in 2.0 DPS and Healing was still a choice.

No more or less so than now. You healed as was necessary and avoided overhealing unless there was an upcoming AoE that'd kill anyone not topped off (in which case it was better to go a little over than under). That's... exactly the same as today. The changes are solely:

• A slight reduction in the minimum skill required (as relative healing requirements are far less now than then), but you have more (frequently redundant to point of bloat) healing buttons to manage, and
• A more significant reduction to skill ceiling, as there's less to manage outside of healing / less to optimize in throughput towards long-term requirements).

You have cleric, which makes DPS very in-efficient outside of it.

If you start a cast, you have (if not wasting time and thereby throughput) essentially committed to a GCD of either healing or offense. Cleric Stance merely increased that commitment by a single further GCD.

It was not deep. It did not increase "choice" in healing vs. dps. It was simply a bloated and mostly nonsensical shift lever, as if you had to double-clutch before each time you wanted to turn in the other direction.

You had MP management, meaning going all in on DPS would leave you short of MP for actual healing.

Not really. You simply brought a Bard. Outside of an undergeared and/or underperforming run, there was still virtually no reason to ever use a more MP-efficient option like Cure I / Physick, especially if running a SMN.

And they have tripped away even what little there were since.

...Which had solely to do with relative healing requirement nerfs to placate anxious healers, reductions to the non-healing-related parts of healer kits, and removal of dependencies on other jobs (Ballad, Promoted Bishop, and Manashift). There was no point at which you were more incentivized to GCD heal wastefully. It's never been anything but a bad idea.

Remember at the beginning of 6.0 where Lily were a DPS loss? God, heaven forbid you to heal with Lily - which is your supposed free heal - which is the reason why your MP regen is lower than other healers ... community cried about this "bad MP economy" because of a self-created MP crisis over some small potency loss.

There are three factors for something to actually be "free":

• It must cost no MP/TP.
• It must cost no offensive potency over time to use.
• It must cost no curative potency over time to use.

See an MP cost attached to any of the other healers' sources of "free" healing? As oGCDs, neither do they cost offensive potency, given sufficient weave space (which all have now). And as oGCDs, casting them does not prevent them from being stacked with a GCD heal in the same global's space if necessary (i.e., no curative opportunity cost / not redundant with normal outputs).

Previously, Lily met only one of those 3 factors. Now it meets two. It still falls short in terms of stackable burst healing. The only reason that isn't being likewise pointed out is because there's virtually no use for that anyways because the burst healing requirements were trimmed so short and tuning made up for what combined throughput would have otherwise been lost to Lily casts being GCDs instead of oGCDs.

It's always DPS DPS DPS, if healing means loss DPS than people refuse to heal.

Except a lack of heals that result in a death results in a far greater DPS loss. If not healing at a given moment would not result in a death or more personal dps loss being required later due to having to heal more at that point, then... yeah, you shouldn't be wasting your time healing.

But your entire purpose, including via not letting people die outside of specific exceptions (i.e., when it would cost more resources in MP, time, and CD value, to fight through a debuff than to just rez after), is to speed up the run. Healing is your uniquely fleshed out means to do so, but your purpose in attending the run remains the same as everyone else's: to do the thing (clear the instance, etc.) as quickly and enjoyably as possible (balancing speed against risk as per the time, goals, experience, and patience your team has).

Uh ... how about making fight where you actually need to utilize the entire kit and even more? How about oGCD is the extras you need for extra oohm and MP economy instead of your bread and butter.

Those advocating for more to do during downtime aren't the people you need to convince to allow additions like that. They clearly have more than enough downtime (enough to get bored of how little depth and variety are available within it). They're merely advocating for at least increased skill ceiling.

You'd need to convince the "don't increase the skill floor" crowd, which, yes, predominantly tend to be those asking for (still) little to do regardless and some of the staunchest opponents against adding (back) any sort of non-healing depth despite still seeming to struggle with the skill floor (such that the space between there and the ceiling is pretty irrelevant to them).

How about tank buster coming harder and more frequent that are beyond the healer oGCD's capacity?

It's not either-or, unless you are asking for harder than Ultimate levels of healing requirements in all content. You can both have more than 2 ST buttons for use in downtime and have less downtime.

So long as there is room for less capable players, there is going to be room (yes, optimizable downtime) between floor and ceiling -- which will only expand as gear increases. The downtime, then, is still going to be a significant component of healer gameplay worth addressing even if it were a fifth its present size.

Ok, you wrote that and you still don't see why I said what I said? Like ... you're suggesting remove HEALING ABILITIES and replace them with "interesting DPS options" on Healers ... and me saying people just want to play green DPS considered gaslighting?

You do realize that healing abilities are literally the oGCDs, the bloated count of which make the skill floor higher than it otherwise would be relative to the meager healing requirements in this game (thus expanding the downtime required to placate/allow for less skilled/coachable players)?

If you want less downtime, especially without increasing the skill floor to the point of excluding a portion of players currently accounted for, the most direct solution would be to trade excessive healing oGCDs for additional actions useful for downtime. That's not mutually exclusive with other changes to healing kits, tuning, or context. It's simply a very easy and reasonable first step that could be taken.