Healers need an overhaul

[Aravell]

I'm going to say something that's probably going to be incredibly unpopular and may get some disagreement from some on the healer forums, but it needs to be said. The constant push towards making healers log friendly and introducing damage neutral healing is a mistake and has completely stunted the design of the healer role.


Let's look at the common complaints about the healer role:
The healers are too homogenised
The healer role is locked into a framework of not losing damage from healing, they have to be designed in such a way that people don't "feel bad" when they heal. This is a problem because they can't design any interesting things into the kit without making it either damage neutral or a damage gain, this means bloating the kit with OGCDs that lose you nothing or taking any GCD they add in and tacking on a potency equivalent to your spam nuke (such as Macrocosmos and Pneuma).

There's no decision making
Of course there's no decision making when all they've been doing lately is removing all the wrong decisions, when you get a multiple choice question with only 1 answer, everyone is right and nobody needs to make a decision. They're forced into this kind of design where everyone has to be correct because people will complain about the slightest amount of damage loss (See how people complain about having to lose a lousy 100 potency to use Sacred Soil). Since they have to design every answer to be the same, there's no room for creativity.

The kits are too bloated with redundancy
When the only thing they can do is add healing at no loss, it severely limits whatever they can create, bloating the kit with free OGCDs is the easiest route to achieving this. They can't even introduce meaningful GCDs without making sure it doesn't cause the player to lose any damage. They can only add different flavours of OGCD or upgrade existing skills or they risk making players angry when another healer does slightly more damage.

There's too little damage to heal in content
They can't design fights that stress healer kits to the point of having to dip into GCD healing or players will complain that they're losing damage. They have to design every fight to be easy enough to heal with the OGCD kit. The log mentality is extremely damaging on this point.

There's no skill ceiling
Part of being skilled at healer in previous expansion is cutting down on the amount of necessary healing that you do, that frees you time to help the party do damage. By making everything damage neutral or a gain, you lose this meaningful part of mastering a healer. Anyone halfway decent at any other role can easily pick up a healer and do almost as good as any veteran because there is no wrong decision to make.


With all that said, I'm not against damage refunds like Ruin II and old Misery. Those are trade-offs for things that you need (movement), making everything neutral means you don't need any experience to play healer, thus making any veteran feel like there's nothing to improve upon. If you're given an exam and the correct answers are all already marked for you, would you find that exam engaging?

I firmly believe that they need to reverse course on this trend immediately. Wrong decisions need to exist, strong abilities need to come at a cost, if you feel bad about using your kit because it loses you damage, I think that's your own problem.