What Healer kit (not encounter) change would make GCD heals NOT bad gameplay?

[Semirhage]

I know you don't like current healers, but (at the risk of derailing my own thread) I'm curious: Do you really think all the healer healing kits aren't deep? I get WHM's you might not think is, but SCH's? SCH's kit, at the very least, if none of the others, has several anti-synergies that require choosing abilities knowing the conflicts they have with each other (e.g. using Dissipation means no Seraph for 30 seconds), and trade offs (Energy Drain vs Soil vs Excogitation vs Indom), and abilities that require some forethought, planning, and setup (like Recitation Spreadlos, especially if paired with some of the other abilities like Fey Illumination and/or Dissipation and/or Protraction). A kit which has a lot of different abilities, which tend NOT to be as powerful (Whispering Dawn is weaker than Physis 2, etc), which need to be slotted into a healing plan for encounters.

Is that not deeper than a puddle?

I'll grant that specifically Scholar is ankle-deep. Energy Drain and Dissipation's tradeoffs are...a thing. They're not a particularly impactful thing due to how infrequent healing requirements are; Energy Drain's damage loss is as low as it's ever been, and Dissipation barely holds you back in the current self-healing tank and AOE every 60 seconds snoozefest of a combat system, especially if you already have your fairy cooldowns ticking but they exist nonetheless.

But apart from those tradeoffs...are Scholar's healing abilities *really* that interesting? What considerations do you need to ponder before farting out a Whispering Dawn? What will that cost you down the line? Is there a resource you're foregoing when you use it? When you punch Fey Union, you...have healed your target! Yay, you win. What next? Oh that basically had no effect on your decision-making process and had an opportunity cost that was close to indistinguishable from Excog, or Lustrate, or...I hope I've made my point. Healer kits have breadth, not depth. Casting Adlo and Deploying it is about as interactive as healer kits in this game get. Holy crap, a GCD with a follow-up oGCD that actually depends on the order you used them, and required two seconds of forethought? Frightening, may scare new healers. Must flatten the rest of Scholar's kit lest the sprouts get the idea that spells can have...effects, which cause you to do things in a way that makes you think about stuff, how droll!

Nah, instead the healer kits are largely a group of disconnected potency bombs with different animations you can split cleanly into "moves one person's green bar to the right" and "moves everyone's green bars to the right", all of which require relatively little discernment or placement (thanks Jupiter-sized ground heal-walker!), and more importantly, none of these features are content-dependent.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm okay with a healing kit that knows what it's about, and keeps itself Spartan in lieu of making the healy part of healing complicated. A single-target heal or two, an AoE or three, each with different reasons to use them? Cool, love it. Give me something interesting to do while juggling that and we'll get along fine. FF14's healer design commits the cardinal sin of pretending that healing is complex with a whole buffet of "different" healing abilities as if it thinks it's made an interesting minigame out of them.

FFXIV designer, don't hand me a class that's effectively built out of Cure Light Wounds, Cure Moderate Wounds, Cure Serious Wounds, Cure Critical Wounds, Mass Cure, and Heal, then tell me "you're sure to have your hands full with all of these exciting and fun spells! I'm sure your mind's a-racing with these totally different and unique abilities which are so engaging and hard to use you won't have time for anything outside Magic Missile spam as your side gig!"

So yeah. Very rarely any deeper than a puddle. Healer kits are, with few exceptions, largely unconnected sets of redundant potency bombs that appear to be designed by someone who thinks four copies of Mass Cure are "deep" if you make one of them a HoT and give another a louder sound effect or something. Does -anything- in these healing kits have anywhere near the moment-to-moment impact of, say, choosing which three abilities you'll use under Perfect Balance? What if you need to refresh Demolish? Will it fit in the Perfect Balance plan you need to execute? What about refreshing Disciplined Fist? Do you have Leaden Fist up? Does that change what one of your three choices is?

Scholar gets to choose...do I Energy Drain? Or do I use any one of these functionally identical healing abilities that have very slight differences in opportunity cost but won't really matter overall because I have like five of them and maybe I need to take Soil's mitigation into account but probably not. Oo, I need to spreadlo this, better plan out my next twoooooo whole oGCDs and one GCD, *phew* that's the most prepwork a healer in this game ever needs to do and 2/3 of that is on identical cooldowns, what depth.

[Katish]

I think in order to make GCD heals have a use is to have isolated phases where healing contributes to the overall dps of the fight. (So it's not an always thing, but when it is, it gives use to healing potency and casting). Basically how much healing can you fit into the window that healing converts to damage, can even combine it in phases where healing is needed the most so it tackles two issues with one stone. (Maybe this might actually also add value to being a healer)

I'm also all for one giving sections of fights places where jobs excel during that section and other jobs are left behind. Basically a self burst window...(This being very anti two min window meta because you'll be saving your buff until that window). But this will never be a thing given healers are third class citizens and that this is meleewalker which will continue into meleetrail. lel

[Shurrikhan]

I think in order to make GCD heals have a use is to have isolated phases where healing contributes to the overall dps of the fight.

Deaths prevented by healing already indirectly contribute rDPS to a given fight that goes unaccounted for. If the problem with that current experience is that we don't have sections with healing requirements enough that healers have contextually fitting and satisfying kits... why would we want to have "isolated" phases where Cure effectively hits for greater relative potency than a Shadowbringer (500x1.3 vs. 600x1.1)?

Wouldn't we want instead to simply make the whole experience less self-contradictory, or even just have at least the occasional fight offer something other than damage as the uncapped resource (such as being won by increasing a unit's HP to full instead of reducing a unit's HP to 0)?

[Katish]

Deaths prevented by healing already indirectly contribute rDPS to a given fight that goes unaccounted for. If the problem with that current experience is that we don't have sections with healing requirements enough that healers have contextually fitting and satisfying kits... why would we want to have "isolated" phases where Cure effectively hits for greater relative potency than a Shadowbringer (500x1.3 vs. 600x1.1)?

Wouldn't we want instead to simply make the whole experience less self-contradictory, or even just have at least the occasional fight offer something other than damage as the uncapped resource (such as being won by increasing a unit's HP to full instead of reducing a unit's HP to 0)?

Because this is the direction they have signed off for, making healing to the point healers aren't needed. And this is what they'll continue doing so going forward, so that isn't exactly correct anymore...this reigning true from dungeons to ultimate even lel. It doesn't matter that it takes skill, the fact it's even doable is a flaw in of itself and shows that the value healers contribute to a fight might as well be 0 with a good team. You could probably form a static and conduct much of the same. Where value needed added in the role with the current way things have been headed, isn't in healing anymore, but damage contributed because at the end of the day we're replaceable in instances where healing isn't needed or isn't needed as much and they would rather fill a position with another DPS.

And then there's the longevity issue of content where even where once we were needed, with gear scores getting higher that content eventually might no longer need us.

[Absurdity]

Because this is the direction they have signed off for, making healing to the point healers aren't needed. And this is what they'll continue doing so going forward. So that isn't correct anymore...at least with a certain party comp.

I actually kind of want to see them continue this direction, just to see the healer population dwindle even harder until only the cure bots remain.

Call it the morbid curiosity of wanting to see CBU3 dig themselves out of the hole that is healers being a completely dead role and preventing people from completing anything harder than expert roulettes.

[Katish]

I actually kind of want to see them continue this direction, just to see the healer population dwindle even harder until only the cure bots remain.

Call it the morbid curiosity of wanting to see CBU3 dig themselves out of the hole that is healers being a completely dead role and preventing people from completing anything harder than expert roulettes.

I mean I doubt the role will just die, there will always be the people who will keep spamming heals no matter what "the idealist healer", but should the role die Square will probably just increase mitigation and healing contributed by other classes...they'd sooner do that then fix the role that's supposedly supposed to contribute to that. The babysitter becomes the babysat logic.