A summary of healer issues

[Rolder50]

Healing in this game is currently the worst healing of any MMO I have ever played. Though most of that comes down to the unbearably scripted fight design more then the healers themselves.

[Renathras]

Though most of that comes down to the unbearably scripted fight design more then the healers themselves.

I think this is the crux of it. It's also why solo healing Ultimates is possible at all - because of how scripted the fights are. No matter how hard to learn they are, they play out the same way (or almost the same way with minor variations in cases of fights like SoS Extreme). To a point, games can't be infinitely variable, but when the fights are scripted and the design intent is people learn the mechanics to where they take almost no damage (since so much is avoidable and NOT avoiding something is pass-fail and often an outright KO), then it majorly cuts down on healing, making the kits and encounters somewhat disjointed.

Though that is only part of it - FFXIV fights have mostly always been this way, but it wasn't AS much of a problem in the past. The issue now is compounded by how much free healing Tanks and DPS have, as well as how many and how powerful oGCD healing Healers have. It makes the damage to health bars/refilling health bars part of healing trivial for the most part - if people AREN'T getting hit by avoidable mechanichs or collected vuln stacks, it's relatively easy to keep their health topped off - which, in turn, leads to a weird situation of you only have "excitement" healing when everything's going wrong, but when everything's going that wrong, you tend to wipe anyway. Conversely, once people have mastered the fight, there's little to do because the fights are designed to have very little unavoidable healing, relative to the Healer oGCD toolkits + Tank/DPS oGCD toolkits if we're just talking unavoidable damage.

EDIT:

...

You're kind of proving them right, you just don't realize it...

[Sebazy]

Though that is only part of it - FFXIV fights have mostly always been this way, but it wasn't AS much of a problem in the past.

That's not entirely true. Don't forget that crits on tanks used to be a thing, as well as a lot more bosses having secondary non telegraphed tank busters that were on their own cooldown independent of anything else the boss was doing (Although in some cases would effectively queue to land alongside a cast ability).