My take on the simplicity of healers and the healer problem

[Jeeqbit]

Healing overall is a job that has a really low skill floor and no skill ceiling to keep more experienced players having fun with the role.

I don't agree with that because although I am not a healer main, I have observed healers planning cooldowns with eachother and having a learning curve. If you were at the skill floor, you would probably just spam cure into cure II instead.

Also the job design largely matches the hardest difficulty of the game (ultimates, min ilvl savage), where planning cooldowns around actually matters. This leaves the rest of the people with an overload of healing buttons with little to no use.

I agree with this, but there are some exceptions, such as leveling dungeons where the item level has a tight sync or very specific pulls in specific dungeons, which can cause you to burn through your entire kit. Most dungeons don't sync well enough and barely require healing though.

1. More vulnerability debuffs instead of damage downs

I agree that vulnerability debuffs made expansions like Heavensward more challenging. From what they have told us, they moved away from it to damage downs to allow us to see further into the fight even if the rest of the party wasn't very good, while still making it difficult to beat because of lack of DPS. Players are more likely to greed a vuln than a damage down as well because of their obsession with DPS.

2. More % damage raidwides or ones that require you to have a shield in order to survive

I do like this because it prevents a fight from becoming easier because of gear, but that is a problem as well because gear progression is important in an MMO, otherwise what is the point of trying to get the raid gear?

I am mostly happy and generally don't mind the homogenization amongst their spells

Their abilities were always pretty homogenized anyway. They always had a cure, cure 2, a single target shield (Adloquium/Stoneskin), aoe regen, aoe shields (even white mages had aoe shields known as Stoneskin II), an esuna, an aoe attack, a single target attack you can spam, a damage-over-time, a healer bubble of some kind, a rez and before role actions, they would cross-class Cleric Stance to do attacks. I could probably find more.

It's true that scholars had a few more dots from being an arcanist which made them busy, but even white mages had accumulated a lot of these by Stormblood.

Astrologians were the most unique with their card system. None of the healers had anything like it and I agree that their card system has been nerfed to the point of not being nearly as fun. I found it really fun at the start of Shadowbringers so they should at least go back to that and work from there.

What created the concept of a shield healer was the value people placed on scholar for the task over white mages. White mage's stoneskins got meme'd to the point of being removed, turning them into a pure healer, a distinction that still exists today but was kind of started by players.

1. Remove/rework Energy Drain - it should reward you for healing not punish you for using your healing gauge for damage.

I already address how WHM had a shield ability before, so another history lesson. They did remove Energy Drain once and the backlash was so big they rushed to bring it back as fast as possible in the next patch. Scholars love Energy Drain and they get upset when it's taken away.