Has anyone quit healing?

[ataren3]

I see this argument a lot, but I don't get it.

...why would they have to redesign old fights?

ARR fights all required more consistent healing (bosses could even crit randomly), and it was largely GCD healing since the only oGCD heals in the game were Benediction, Lustrate, and...Embrace/Whispering Dawn?

They did go back and change ARR fights retroactively. No more crits from bosses means no more high damage variance. The tank's personal facing does not matter anymore as to whether they could "block" the damage or have a higher chance to be crit (this was a thing in 2.0). Not to mention all the changes that have been done to tanks in general, since it's much easier to generate and maintain aggro than it used to be.

For this example I'll use Ifrit EX. As a reminder Ifrit EX has these following damage pieces (unavoidable only):
- Tank autos
- Tank buster
- That debuff on a healer that's the big AoE + knockback
- Nail kills
- General raidwide damage
- Incinerate (basically tank cleave)

Keep it simple and just say that Ifrit now does more damage. More damage means more healing. Great right? The problem is that even with this more damage the healers still aren't healing a lot. Tanks are mitigating as normal and swapping as they should. DPS are doing their thing and paying attention to avoidable damage. The damage instances within a majority of this fight are few and far between. So we still have our current dilemma: if Ifrit does more damage but the actual damage instances are still too spread out how can we make the healers heal more?

Reduce their healing? That'd feel awful. Your (limited) heal kit does too little to heal and now the dps check is suffering because you're spending far too long doing these heals. On top of that these reduced heals still have that MP cost to them, so you're burning through mana far quicker than you used to.

Back to the drawing board. What if he did more unavoidable damage and we left the healing the same? Healers now heal more, but they'd still have the mana consumption issue that lucid wouldn't really be able to help with that much. On top of that the dps check is still suffering. Ifrit EX expects everyone to be DPSing most of the time, not healing. Plus we're already in the waters of altering an older fight. We don't want to do that if we can help it, so how can we solve this?

There's no change we can make that will require healers to focus on more healing without altering the fight. If we reduce the damage required to meet the check there's too much and we're skipping it. If we increase the healing in some way that means the dps check becomes more strict than it already is and may lock out other classes.

Now apply that to a more recent (but still older fight) like Titania EX. If I did very little damage or none at all then yes everyone would be healthy but we wouldn't kill it. My damage is baked into the check, and thus I must damage over heal.