The Healers should be reworked? New player perspective.

[ty_taurus]

Maybe. If the auto system was smart enough to always do the right thing so that using it would actually produce more DPS than not using it outside of someone not using it executing exactly perfect play - in which case they'd merely do "just as well". But I doubt that'd be what you want.

Especially since the actual easy fix would be...to leave one single Healer Job alone.

Why does that matter to you? It's not like you're a high-performing healer right now.

An auto-combo button would lack nuance to do things like hold afflatus misery if you need to wait for the next buff window, or it would still have you apply DoTs even to an enemy with 5% of their HP remaining. But you can also just keybind regular Glare outside of that to delay whatever the auto-button is telling you anyway. If anything, the system would improve your current performance. But a master healer wouldn't use it.

I'm not calling it harmful -- merely an utter waste.

Using XIV "combos" is to purposely make a single action take up multiple buttons of space. And that has accordant, if minor, issues:

Assuming a 3-step combo, we either...

• lose 2 actions (each 1 button) to support that 3-button single action just to keep that slightly less punishing an option,
  --or--
• we effectively make the already zero-advantage option of non-consolidation (especially, without a context in which those tactile cues of moving from 1 to 2 to 3 would be useful, as on ShB or EW SAM, HW NIN, etc.) also waste handier button-space that's becoming increasingly more valuable/limited.

XIV "combos" are pure bloat. If you want to use them to offer multiple different attack animations and some ppgcd cycling on a single action/button, by all means, go for it. But there's no point in constraining the rest of the kit around a pretense that those are separate actions.

At which point, you'll have just another Healer with n non-healing GCDs, but one of said GCDs has 3 animations. It's an incredibly small improvement, if any. And you could as easily have provided that animation variance instead through actual skill interactions (procs, status effect conditionals, branching sequence-based conditionals instead of merely a single rigid series of unlocks, etc.).

Any other way to use multiple actions together (or, better put, having each skill actually be its own action) would be better, be they actual combos (see other MMOs) or whatever other means of interaction. So while I wouldn't be opposed to a consolidated combo, we can most certainly do better.

It wasn't a 3-step combo though. Did you take a look at the example I gave using a mix of old WHM gameplay? None of that is "combo" in the literal sense. It's just a button that chooses the generally most important tool for you when available.