Has anyone quit healing?

[ty_taurus]

Healer DPS kind of "has to be" taken into consideration for enrage. No fight, not even P8S, demands 100% healing GCD uptime. In fact, I took a look at the lowest scoring recorded clear for P8S II of the last couple weeks which contained a WHM and a SGE. Raise and Egeiro were cast twice by each healer (not sure if these were on 4 separate deaths or if they raised the same targets) which is to say it wasn't the cleanest clear.

The WHM spent approximately 72% of their GCD on DPS tools whereas the SGE spent approximately 90% of their GCD on DPS tools (I included Pneuma as DPS as it's a DPS neutral button and we're discussing damage dealt to bosses from healers). They were responsible for approximately 19% of the boss' HP. Now, we're far beyond initial clears of this raid tier, so these are obviously not representative of launch week numbers, but even if we were to halve these values, that's still a fairly significant amount of damage coming from healers. If that wasn't factored in, parties could cut a fight a couple minutes short. And again, this is P8S II, a fight with very demanding healing requirements respective to the rest of the game. What choice do the developers have if they don't want parties to end fights several minutes early?

[ForsakenRoe]

Just to set the record straight, they did not go back and remove crits from boss autoattacks in pre SHB content. They still can crit, it's just less of an issue now because we have the mitigation of Tank Stance built in as baseline. It was a problem for PLD before the Sheltron rework though, as it meant that trying to Sheltron block would be overruled by an unfortunate crit autoattack. You can see that here, in a log of UCOB from a random group I pulled up, that was uploaded yesterday.

watch as they brand 7.0 as a "return to the roots of your journey!" kind of thing, complete with a massive revamp back to old mechs of HW and SB...and then they act absolutely flabbergasted when it turns out the fanbase LOVES it when you have complex designs alongside simple ones! oh my god, a class can have DIVERSITY from others like it? it can be more in-depth than ankle-deep water levels of thinking? it can STILL be viable in all content even though it plays differently from others like it?! AMAZING!!!

I'd bet real money that if HW DRK was released today (gameplay-wise, with updates to fill in the 30 levels it needs to get to EW level), people would, by and large, say 'yo this is sick actually'. The Scourge DOT, the juggle between DA Souleater or Delerium (and now, having the extra layer of 'save MP for DA Souleater in raidbuffs!', making sure to keep enough to DA your Carve, Abyssal Drain making you unkillable, the whole Evasion thing with DA Dark Passenger's blind effect and DA Dark Dance, the speed freak gameplay of building full skillspeed on gear and it still being viable somehow (how?)

I'd love to see that but at the same time I'm not expecting it. It would be a neat way to introduce "the basic healer" and "the advanced healer", where basic can go through most content and advanced is more for people that want that challenge. Give it a high-risk high-reward kinda deal. You have a complex rotation where you need to weave in heals (both GCD and oGCD) to keep everyone alive while killing current endgame things. You get more damage and an "enhanced" style on the class you like.

Don't we have that already? The 'basic healer' is Conjurer, and the 'advanced healer' is White Mage? At least, that's what I'd have thought. And I have (unfortunately) had the absolutely joyous task of cohealing a Savage run with a CNJ-only player. This was back in HW though where they might have actually had some crossclass skills to make it less griefy idk. It was in that run though, that Synastry got used for it's actual intended purpose (heal two prio targets at once). Is the idea to make CNJ viable as an endgame healing option?

While it's true that devs haven't explicitly stated that a healer dps check is baked into the enrage check, we can easily see that from the current savage P8S part 1 & 2.

IDK about others, but I'd say it's pretty disingenuous to say 'Yeh, I know the maths people have done shows that, in order to beat a Savage fight with no healer DPS contributions, the other 6 players on the team have to be full BIS (including gear from the fight they're trying to beat), and be a Purple Parse Peter, (sometimes even higher)...
...But the devs said one time, like 8 years ago, that healer DPS was not a factor in deciding the enrage timers, which clearly takes precedent over all the evidence our eyes and ears have seen and heard, for the past 6+ years!'

Maybe there's nuance to what they said back then. Maybe they meant 'healer DPS was not a factor in EX trial enrages', which, given the fights at the time would have been either Bis/Rav (yeh, I can see it) or Thordan (I definitely cannot see it), could go wither way? It could be that they meant the Normal mode raid (given that it doesn't have an enrage). It could have been miscommunication between design teams. We've seen that sometimes things don't get communicated properly. A Colorblind setting wasn't in the game, a fan asked about it in a Q+A and Yoshi said 'isn't that already in the game?', when told 'no it is not', he was like 'damn our bad, ok we'll get on that'.

I'm willing to trust the word of the devs on stuff. But if their 'word' is from that long ago, and we have a smattering of data that contradicts that 'word' from more recently than that time, I'll believe the data.

On one hand it feels good as a dps or tank. I'm helping kill the boss with my complex rotations and/or weaving in mitigation. But on the other hand it just feels really awful to play a class that spams one button and really doesn't need to think: "How am I going to keep everyone topped off for the next thing?". There's just not a lot of instances where you gotta keep everyone very healthy for X mechanic. Rather it's "keep them alive and go back to spamming Glare III".

I remember seeing a tweet about DMC5 gameplay, with Dante and Nero's gameplay being hype, they have cool music to go with the bloodpumping gameplay. And then V had this as the attached vid to the tweet. Seem familiar at all? We can just replace Tiger with 'Glare' and Birdy with 'Rapture' and we're 90% of the way there

Healer DPS kind of "has to be" taken into consideration for enrage. No fight, not even P8S, demands 100% healing GCD uptime. In fact, I took a look at the lowest scoring recorded clear for P8S II of the last couple weeks which contained a WHM and a SGE. Raise and Egeiro were cast twice by each healer (not sure if these were on 4 separate deaths or if they raised the same targets) which is to say it wasn't the cleanest clear.

The WHM spent approximately 72% of their GCD on DPS tools whereas the SGE spent approximately 90% of their GCD on DPS tools (I included Pneuma as DPS as it's a DPS neutral button and we're discussing damage dealt to bosses from healers). They were responsible for approximately 19% of the boss' HP. Now, we're far beyond initial clears of this raid tier, so these are obviously not representative of launch week numbers, but even if we were to halve these values, that's still a fairly significant amount of damage coming from healers. If that wasn't factored in, parties could cut a fight a couple minutes short. And again, this is P8S II, a fight with very demanding healing requirements respective to the rest of the game. What choice do the developers have if they don't want parties to end fights several minutes early?

Ironically, going back to SB is a potential solution. The issue atm is that fights are all backloaded, or trimmed of the fluff, so that the fight ends once you've seen everything once. Not so in SB, where a boss would perform it's 'big mechanic' at like, 60% of the way through the fight (Grand Cross Omega, Forsaken 3, Hello World 2, are the ones I'm thinking of), and then after that, it was repeats. After GCO would be another Delta, another Alpha. After Forsaken 3 was... another Forsaken 3. After Hello World 2, the fight literally looped exactly, up to the point where a Hello World 3 WOULD cast, but is instead the enrage. So if the devs want to make sure the 'big hard mechanic of the fight' is definitely not skippable with gear (cough Cachexia 2), put it earlier in the fight.

And for god's sakes stop making bosses have massive 'build up damage enrage' BS, it's not interesting to anyone except the shield healer. Like, OK, some are short enough they get a pass. Eden was OK for it, Titan Tumults, Shiva's Akh Morn/Morn Afah/wyrm heads, and Terminal Relativity were all like 10-15% of the boss HP bar. Fine. But Curtain Call was 1min and 45sec of 'can you count to 8 lmao', TWICE. Why did it need to do the second set of thorns? Just to justify all the million bloody OGCDs we've been given over the years? P8S P2 is even more egregious, thanks to the Phoenix buff, that 'enrage sequence' is FORTY PERCENT of the HP bar! That could have been 25%, and an extra High Concept thrown in between 1 and 2, that would utilize the snake and tree buffs, a 'Petrify this add before it enrages using Snake, and LOS the Snake player using the Tree' or something. This would then ALSO have the effect of planting the seed (heh get it cos Tree) that in the next HC (which was HC2 but is now moved to be HC3) that, since Ifrit is the only buff that hasn't been relevant yet, it's probably useful here for something. Then you can make a much more logical jump from 'use Ifrit for something' to 'Use a previous Mix, and Mix again' to reach the actual answer of 'Mix wind for the middle towers, then mix THAT with Ifrit to get Phoenix'. Nope, instead we get 'do double damage and do almost half of the boss's HP bar, in the last small chunk of the fight'

Here's an idea for an enrage: The boss does not have an enrage timer. It has an add on it's body, like the heart in Shinryu EX. Every X seconds the add is alive, it applies one stack of a debuff, either Vuln Up or some DOT effect, to the party, stacking infinitely. If you kill that add, it deactivates for X+1 seconds, so the stacks can drop off. However, when it comes back, it has HP boost, stacking each time it dies and returns. The gameplay is instead shifted away from 'pump as much damage as possible' and more into a 'try to survive as long as possible' format, because the 'enrage' is 'your healer is not able to outheal the add's effect'. Obviously, killing the boss sooner means less dying. But it would also mean that, if you pumped healing enough, you could drag the fight out a bit more than you could against a hard enrage. Maybe you decide that, earlier on when this 'heart add' is weaker and has less HP, you're going to have your Pure Healer pure-heal harder, taking more stacks on purpose, killing the heart with 'incidental cleave' like a DRK using Salted Earth, a WHM's Assize, SGE's Phlegma, stuff that is used for ST but happens to also have AOE component to it too. Choosing 'when' to reset stacks could be an interesting strat decision that different groups would come to different conclusions on. Some groups might prefer to do the first stack reset at 2mins in, others might drag it out to 3mins, who knows

oops, all dissertations

[ty_taurus]

Here's an idea for an enrage: The boss does not have an enrage timer. It has an add on it's body, like the heart in Shinryu EX. Every X seconds the add is alive, it applies one stack of a debuff, either Vuln Up or some DOT effect, to the party, stacking infinitely. If you kill that add, it deactivates for X+1 seconds, so the stacks can drop off. However, when it comes back, it has HP boost, stacking each time it dies and returns. The gameplay is instead shifted away from 'pump as much damage as possible' and more into a 'try to survive as long as possible' format, because the 'enrage' is 'your healer is not able to outheal the add's effect'. Obviously, killing the boss sooner means less dying. But it would also mean that, if you pumped healing enough, you could drag the fight out a bit more than you could against a hard enrage. Maybe you decide that, earlier on when this 'heart add' is weaker and has less HP, you're going to have your Pure Healer pure-heal harder, taking more stacks on purpose, killing the heart with 'incidental cleave' like a DRK using Salted Earth, a WHM's Assize, SGE's Phlegma, stuff that is used for ST but happens to also have AOE component to it too. Choosing 'when' to reset stacks could be an interesting strat decision that different groups would come to different conclusions on. Some groups might prefer to do the first stack reset at 2mins in, others might drag it out to 3mins, who knows

oops, all dissertations

Simply put, moving from hard enrages to soft enrages. And that would certainly add flexibility to fights, though in that scenario, what would likely happen would be that those soft enrages would be designed with a "goldilocks zone" in mind--or in other words, the sweet spot of where the party is expected to clear, and healer DPS would still need to be taken into consideration in terms of identifying where that goldilocks zone falls. But, as mentioned, it would add flexibility not only to the healers but also to the party in general in their ability to recover from lost DPS.

[ForsakenRoe]

It'd put more emphasis on non-damage utilities like Magick Barrier, Minne and Mantra (why do they all start with M?), which might start to break the vice grip of 'damage > all' that plagues the game's design. It'd also help justify some of the absolutely ridiculous changes we've seen recently, like 'oh Veil heals too' and 'Oh SIO heals too, and has a regen'. Though, if a fight were to have 'stacking DOT constantly through fight', I imagine SGE would be absolutely monster because of Panhaima, and AST due to having two different OGCD regens on 60s CDs to ration out. Job play rate disparity would probably be hilarious

Maybe we could flip it around, and say 'only the healers are able to deal with the Add', maybe by having it be a 'heal it to full' mechanic like the dragonheads in Shin EX rather than the heart? Though I guess that then means 'lmao what HP boost, Benediction says hi'. A fight where WHM is the preferable healer to bring, in order to cheese something? Say it ain't so!

[SargeTheSeagull]

I’d love healer exclusive mechanics in 14. In one of WoW’s raids in Shadowlands there’s a fight where the boss will continually damage the dude you’re trying to rescue. Tanks and DPS have to take the boss down while healers have to keep Sunstrider alive. I’d love something like this in 14. Maybe if you keep the dude’s HP above a threshold the party gains a damage buff or something like that

[ty_taurus]

I’d love healer exclusive mechanics in 14. In one of WoW’s raids in Shadowlands there’s a fight where the boss will continually damage the dude you’re trying to rescue. Tanks and DPS have to take the boss down while healers have to keep Sunstrider alive. I’d love something like this in 14. Maybe if you keep the dude’s HP above a threshold the party gains a damage buff or something like that

Ifrit EX had Searing Wind. Throughout pretty much the entire fight, Ifrit alternates applying a debuff called Searing Wind to each healer. Searing Wind causes the healer to emit a point-blank AoE around them that deals damage and knocks back any of your teammates standing around you for each server tic during its duration. As soon as it falls off, the other healer gets afflicted with it. Healing in Ifrit EX forces the healers to manage quarantining themselves away from the group and thus cannot AoE heal easily during that time, and is made more complicated during nail phases where the party needs to run around the room destroying nails.

Leviathan EX had Briny Mirror. That was also a debuff that Leviathan would place on the off-tank and would be reapplied to have 100% uptime on the second tank. Every time you heal that tank, even if through AoE heals, hits you with a stacking debuff that gradually reduces your casting range and spell radius, which also shrinks the size of your AoE heals. If you heal that tank too quickly, you'll have so many stacks that you literally cannot heal anyone but yourself as your range and AoE radius become 0 and you need to wait for that debuff to fall off to heal again and would need to work with your cohealer to manage those stacks to prevent them from getting too severe.

[Silver-Strider]

Ifrit EX had Searing Wind. Throughout pretty much the entire fight, Ifrit alternates applying a debuff called Searing Wind to each healer. Searing Wind causes the healer to emit a point-blank AoE around them that deals damage and knocks back any of your teammates standing around you for each server tic during its duration. As soon as it falls off, the other healer gets afflicted with it. Healing in Ifrit EX forces the healers to manage quarantining themselves away from the group and thus cannot AoE heal easily during that time, and is made more complicated during nail phases where the party needs to run around the room destroying nails.

Leviathan EX had Briny Mirror. That was also a debuff that Leviathan would place on the off-tank and would be reapplied to have 100% uptime on the second tank. Every time you heal that tank, even if through AoE heals, hits you with a stacking debuff that gradually reduces your casting range and spell radius, which also shrinks the size of your AoE heals. If you heal that tank too quickly, you'll have so many stacks that you literally cannot heal anyone but yourself as your range and AoE radius become 0 and you need to wait for that debuff to fall off to heal again and would need to work with your cohealer to manage those stacks to prevent them from getting too severe.

I remember there was a way to Cheese Leviathan by having the healer get enough aggro to trick the system into giving them the debuff. I know I've had that debuff several times in the past before the offtank when I was a healer, that it made that fight infinitely easier since Regen/Fairy abilities didn't build up stacks so for the first minute or so, you didn't have to worry about healing either tank.

God I miss those days

[ty_taurus]

I remember there was a way to Cheese Leviathan by having the healer get enough aggro to trick the system into giving them the debuff. I know I've had that debuff several times in the past before the offtank when I was a healer, that it made that fight infinitely easier since Regen/Fairy abilities didn't build up stacks so for the first minute or so, you didn't have to worry about healing either tank.

God I miss those days

The way I "cheesed" it during ARR and HW was by macroing Embrace to Stoneskin and setting my faerie to obey. This would cause her to heal whenever I'd cast Stoneskin on the off tank. Back then, her potency was 300, and she was unaffected by Briny Mirror. Meanwhile Stoneskin, since it was not a heal, also didn't trigger it, so it was kinda like a reverse Adloquium.

[Renathras]

watch as they brand 7.0 as a "return to the roots of your journey!" kind of thing...

Honestly, I can't imagine them ever doing this. If they shifted the Job design back to Hw, they'd do the encounter designs as well. Can you imagine the outcry of modern raiders? "I have to run the gorilla?! BUT MY PARSE!!! Make someone else do it, like a Healer or the Ranged, no one cares about their pareses anyway!"

Personally, I wouldn't mind HW era WHM without Cleric, but that's just me. Aero 1, Aero 2, Stonespam, repeat. Same thins as today, just instead of 4 GCDs for Afflatus buttons per minute, it's 4 GCDs for Aero 2. No real change there. Though honestly, I like the Afflatus buttons better than Aero 2, but...having an actual reason to use Cure 2, Cure 3, and Medica 2 again wouldn't be so bad.

On the Class thing, I think they don't really want Classes. They were a holdover from character data being ported from 1.24 to 2.0 that required keeping it in the game, but Yoshi P and the Dev team seem to look on it as a necessary bandage, not a good design, which is why it hasn't been done with any other Job aside from ROG/NIN, which was apparently supposed to be a 2.0 launch Job but didn't make it. RDM is weird because it gets spells and Dualcast super early (even now when synced or doing PotD) because of how central Dualcast is to its identity. Imagine if your first 30 levels were you pressing 1-2-3 over and over with those weak unenchanted melee attacks... I can see the desire, but I don't see it happening for both lore and gameplay reasons. Though it would be cool to see Limsa's Musketeer guild actually realized as an in-game Class.

Healing absolutely feels bad because...

Well, not even all of them are those. For example, FFXI isn't designed for keeping everyone at 100% at all times. WoW has flirted back and forth with what it does. Indeed, that's part of the FFXIV healing problem - people need to be at 100% before every major mechanic since the mechanics easily do 80-110% (requiring mitigation) of party member health in some cases. The "heal checks" aren't about sustained healing, they're about blowing big CDs and pooled resources (AF, Lilies, etc) to quickly top people off in a hurry between multiple waves of damage. But now, we even have single press buttons that DO THAT like Lilibell, Seraph/Consolation, Macrocosmos (in though requiring a few other things), and Panhaima.

The problem is precisely because FFXIV's model requires people to be topped off before each mechanic. While it's true they don't need to be 100% right AFTER the mechanics (allowing some more gradual regen between mechanics) between HITS of mechanics, and before the mechanic starts, people have to be at full health. This is true of Extremes and Savages and basically all of them. Ex5 has long periods of no damage, but when the damage goes out, people have to be healed or they will die, and they need most of their health going into the mechanics and between hits (e.g. during the rotate phase or during the stack/spread/cross-lines-box attack) or they will die. Having a person at 30% health going into a mechanic means they die.

That leads to a healing model all about a healing plan of oGCDs that you smack rapidly in damage windows then don't touch any healing for the next 30 seconds. RARELY, a GCD will be thrown in, like Rapture or Spreadlo, but that's the exception instead of the rule. The rule is that GCDs are for damage, oGCDs for healing, and oGCDs do all of it.

While it's true that devs haven't explicitly stated...

Agreed with this. If they don't want fights to require Healer DPS, they need to loosen the Enrages so Healers don't have to do so to beat the checks in an average party.

Supposedly they don't design them to require a lot of Healer damage EFFORT - the whole reason they made the rotations so simple was so all healers could meet the requirement - but the real problem is the Enrage tuning itself, as we saw with Week 1 P8S that was sidelining even some DPS Jobs like MCH and Tanks like PLD (though also for mitigation on it) and WAR.

On one hand it feels good as a dps or tank.

I was with you until you mentioned complex rotations. TANKS? Complex rotations? Heck, half the DPS don't have complex rotations. MCH? SMN?? It's also weird to me that people feel like doing 0.001% of the boss's health bar "feels good", but to each their own, I suppose. I've always felt healing more impactful than damage dealing, personally, outside of quick burn adds, anyway. Things like Solus' shield are the only times I feel like I'm actually achieving something as a DPSer. And that mechanic felt pretty good on a Healer, too, due to the incoming damage making casting GCDs a useful way to counter that, actually feel impactful, and the healing there actually had to be done or people would die and the party would fail the check (ah, ShB Thin Air Cure 3 spam...those were the days...)

I think this is a "to each their own" thing, but I literally feel nothing when DPSing. And I mean on DPS Jobs. I'm just pushing buttons that do damage, and it's so boring. The only part of RDM's rotation I somewhat like is the melee/finisher combo, and when I get to Verraise people. I can't fathom how people play DPS Jobs without raises. It's so mind numbing and boring and just...bleh. So uninteresting. I'll do it on support DPSers when absolutely necessary, but give me a Healer any day.

But on the other hand it just feels...

It's more like "Top everyone off into this mechanic, blow some oGCDs during this mechanic, now spam Glare for the next 30-45 sec..."

Again, doesn't feel any better being a DPS or Tank to me, but to each their own. I honestly don't find "complex rotations" require thought in most cases. DPS rotations are either hectic Vegas wack a mole fests where everything's lighting up (or nothing is) like BRD, or are rigid rotations you practice for hours on a dummy and then do by muscle memory without thinking. Most DPS rotations in this game don't have actual thought behind them when it comes to execution, people have just convinced themselves they do for some weird reason. It's like people saying Old PLD was more flexible and had more choice than New PLD. Old PLD's DoTs were part of the rotation; there was never any point you thought "Should I Royal or should I Goring?", it was Royal/Goring/Royal/Goring/Requiescat; repeat. New PLD is simpler but ironically has more actual choices. The exceptions are proc based Jobs like BRD or DNC, since they actually require you to modify what you're doing based on inputs, so there's nothing rote about it. RDM and BLM to a FAR lesser extent, since (a) both can manage their procs a bit (Sharpcast/Acceleration) and (b) the procs are only slight deviations of their rotations (Firestarter is just a substitution for Fire 1 if in the Fire phase or for getting INTO the Fire phase you get it as a free instant instead of...casting...the same spell..., and Thundercloud is often a movement tool but in practice is just a button that nudges your rotation one GCD to the right; RDM's are just a Jolt substitution.)

I'd love to see that but at the same time I'm not expecting it...

Outside of Limited Jobs, every Job is designed to clear all content, so this will never happen. The "basic healer" would do as much damage (on average) as the "advanced healer", then the advanced healer players would complain, then their Job rotation would get nerfed again. This is how things played out from HW->SB->ShB.

They still can crit...

Huh. That's...kinda crazy, actually.

I'd bet real money that if HW DRK was released today (gameplay-wise, with updates to fill in the 30 levels it needs to get to EW level), people would, by and large, say 'yo this is sick actually'.

Maybe. It depends on how much damage it does in end-game content. That seems to be what people care about more than almost anything now.

Don't we have that already? The 'basic healer' is Conjurer, and the 'advanced healer' is White Mage? At least, that's what I'd have thought.

Can't do any "real" content on CNJ. I haven't tried, but I'm not sure what all you can que up for in just base Classes. Can you even que up for modern Extremes and stuff? I guess if you have the ilevel, but... I healed ZodEx as a CNJ (8 man all Classes clear - I think to date the only one on FFLogs...), and it's rather different having none of your post ARR tools and missing half your ARR tools. If CNJ was a full on thing capable of clearing Extremes and Savages which just had a different general flavor of healing from WHM, sure. But that doesn't exist.

...But the devs said one time, like 8 years ago,...

Which is why I, personally, always qualify it as "We don't have a stated position from the Devs on modern encounter design; the only stated position we have opposes it, but was also from most of a decade and two healer and encounter design paradigm shifts ago". By this I mean "We don't know what their intent actually is". We know what the numbers are, but that's quite a different thing. For example, the numbers have strongly encouraged groups not to bring PLD or MCH to raids, and in P8S launch, there were clearly some parties that could not clear the content. Even now, there are some party compositions that are considered clearly inferior in the current meta, which is why people have asked (even disregarding P8S as they said it was overtuned) what party compositions they're using to test.

Maybe there's nuance to what they said back then. Maybe they meant 'healer DPS was not a factor in EX trial enrages'...

Yes to nuance since that's true of almost everything, but it's VERY unlikely they were talking about Extremes. It's more likely they were just...really bad at balance at the time. And at some point, just decided "Screw it, just make all the Healer DPS easy and we'll balance for a general baseline of 40% of a DPSer or something".

Simply put, moving from hard enrages to soft enrages.

Honestly, that would probably be better for a host of reasons. Would be kinda funny seeing things like 3 Healer parties being a possible strategy, lol

I’d love healer exclusive mechanics in 14. In one of WoW’s raids in Shadowlands there’s a fight where the boss will continually damage the dude you’re trying to rescue. Tanks and DPS have to take the boss down while healers have to keep Sunstrider alive. I’d love something like this in 14. Maybe if you keep the dude’s HP above a threshold the party gains a damage buff or something like that

There was also the dragon in ICC, I think. FFXIV has somewhat done this on rare occasions, but more as a secondary thing. For example, healing Estinian during the add phase of the Nidhogg boss fight (the dungeon, not the Trial), healing the NPCs in the Bozja CEs, etc. So it's entirely possible to do it.

[Jirah]

Hearts really are the second class citizens in the game huh. With the fewest examples. Half the time you’re just a glorified babysitter spamming Glare or Broil anticipating a basic bitch raid wide that can be wiped clean with a Rapture or a indom then continue to spam. The game desperately needs more scenario where healers need to be primed like SOS or Ivalice boss #7