Paired Threads: What would it take to make Heaker kits "complex/interesting"?

[AnotherPerson]

/sigh

2. The solution most people seem to be proposing is there shouldn't be downtime with nothing to heal, so the answer there would be healing.

You haven't seen a good one? I've seen others...are you sure you're looking?

No, no one suggested there shouldn't be downtime with nothing to heal. Downtime is a necessary component to making fights flexible and giving brevity to healers or else their MP bottoms out ASAP.
The problem is that downtime is too prevalent -- to the point where you can go upwards to over 80% or 90% casting your GCD damage skill.

In normal content, downtime can actually even reach 100% of the time based on the dungeon, party composition & skill level. I know this is to be true... because I just did a PF challenge where we went into The Dead Ends with a traditional party with 1 tank, 1 healer, and 2 DPS with the condition that the healer cannot heal.... and we cleared it with wall to wall pulls and cleared bosses without the healer contributing to any healing. In other words... the healer doesn't even need to perform their role to clear the fight. They're more or less superfluous... especially when you compare healing to ARR dungeons where you definitely did need a healer to clear the fight.

And the problem with increasing the amount of healing was that... this was already suggested, and it backfired. People tried to suggest to increase more healing time, and then healers quit because they couldn't heal it. Even Yoshi P came out to say he figured this would happen, but there was no mention about just giving healers more DPS abilities.

2) Wait, are we talking about MSQ or Extreme/Savage? The relatively universal position from the community seems to be not to touch MSQ and just leave it as it is. You're not going to find many people accepting the argument that it should require/encourage tons more healing/DPSing in order to clear.

The universal opinion about MSQ is to make it accessible. Accessibility does not directly make one role feel unneeded... or only to be there "as an emergency". That's pretty much the problem with healers right now in normal content.

Edit: I do want to clarify that originally, the reason why increasing healing backfired was because the way they increased healing was more along the lines of mitigation checks rather than increasing the variety of healing methods (DPS actually needed to mitigate, but healers got blamed if DPS forgets to mitigate). I can't be certain if that's truly the reason why healers all just decided to quit (though I suspect it's a mix of both instances of increased healing and foisted responsibility). Most healer skills are also lately centered towards healing their party rather than being targetable on external sources, so I feel a good portion of the healer toolkit design is also flawed in this regard allowing versatility in fights, such as healing NPCs to ensure they live as well. Though I largely suspect the reality is that we just have too many healing skills for most fights that aren't applicable outside of extreme/savage/ultimate if the game is meant to be accessible in normal mode content. The main glaring flaw is just how low damage is in normal content and even solo content, which puts healer in a very weird place with just how much healing skills they have.