Healers need an overhaul

[Semirhage]

I understand that. But, the person I was replying to was complaining that parties need less healing the better they do the content. That's a silly argument because, well... DUH!

Healer do need something more specifically because of this issue. Square Enix isn't going to suddenly pull a 180 and make healing more challenging for the average player, nor are they going to give healers complex damage rotations, for the same reasons. We all know that.

The only path open is to make healing, raises, and buffing exclusive to the healer role. Give tanks and damage dealers debuffs in their place.

Reduce both the length and duration of the buffs so they have to be cast more often. Get rid of all the redundant heals which fill our action bars and have a variety of buffs in their place. As less healing is needed, a healer's value will be measured in how much they improve the performance of the party as a whole.

This would be great.

It's also the line between the "give us more to do during downtime" "camp" and the "NO! Some people just want to HEAL!" "camp".

Increase healing requirements. Move healing back to the healers. And also give healers a skill ceiling to reach for when they get good at healing. That last part? That's the part that always sticks in peoples' craws. Why? For what reason is that such a controversial statement? Why do we need to "leave one healer as-is", with effectively no skill ceiling and just Glarespamming to look forward to as the endgame activity? It doesn't matter how much you increase the healing requirements; they'll go down over time. There has to be a gap that allows unskilled healers can still clear, and Square wants it to be a generous one in most content.

Leaving one healer with its current kit isn't a "focus on healing". It's a mirrored, upside-down focus actually: it's a focus on not having anything to engage your brain outside healing. With healers designed to "appeal to different types of players", you're going to be healing just as much as the others do. You're just going to bonk Dosis over and over again once you're done with it.

All of the grandstanding on here you run into about "designing healers to appeal to people who want to heal" is noise. Press the issue even a little bit, you find out it's always "I want a healer designed to be improvement-proof once I've finished topping the party off". Infer whatever you like about the speaker from there. I prefer Occam's Razor.