For those who main/semi-main a DPS (e.g. DNC, RDM) but like Healers...

[Shurrikhan]

I guess we just think of skill ceiling differently as well. For my part, I think there can be no skill without choice.

No one has disagreed with this, only with what creates "choice".

To a degree, said "choice" is always an illusion (and is generally more aptly described only as "optimization", especially from an amount of information that is significant but not wholly complete, as to allow for educated gambles), but that illusion goes a whole lot further if the best choice requires some degree of mathing out in the moment instead of following rote procedures (use action type A for situation A, with no contextual variation to how either the action nor situation are defined).

Which is why some have been reminding you that if you don't split each action into discrete uses and the likes of at-cost and no-cost "Use DoT only the moment it elapses" was never necessarily the best net value one could get from it, and therefore one of multiple considerations involved in optimization instead of being so dominant as to replace all else.

Make your DoT act like a loss-less multi-charge Ruin II CD and the most choice you have is in which GCDs to fill per minute with your charges... which was already a part of the earlier optimization problem anyways. You've simply reduced a meeting of multiple optimization problems to, instead, a single optimization problem that is much better summarized by a single rote procedure.

At which point, "use your mobile attack when you need mobility and don't need to heal" is already pretty well a non-decision, and by the time its charges would be insufficient enough to present any sort of choice, any non-embarrassing amount of healing requirements would also involve such things as instant-cast heals, because choices aren't made in isolation (unless you literally cut everything into distinct categories -- "only use for A; A will only use these" -- which, yes, would harm the sense of actual "choice" or decision-making).

"This isn't to say that mechanical perfection isn't hard, but it's a different kind of hard and one I don't find engaging."

Then your problem isn't one of "choice" or even a different way of defining it. It's that you want a challenge that you can more easily meet completely.

Which would be fine if not for two things:

1. that you then remove the option for a greater skill ceiling from whatever job you happen to like and insist satisfy your need to reach the skill ceiling with a more limited amount of cognitive load, and...
   
   
2. that you had elsewhere insisted on being given the same output as jobs that are far harder to optimize, meaning that you reduce all the jobs you're not personally interested into second-class citizens who simply pay more for, at best, the same reward or else, to keep them balanced, truncate what complexity is available to them.

I.e., the same exact two points over which you'd butted heads with others repeatedly over the year.

Admittedly, like counts of those rebutting your positions could be slightly inflated by those who find your personality intolerable, but even then, it seems likely that the larger portion of those who've been involved in those threads (insert "vocal minority" here, I suppose) prefer a sense of balance that accounts at least slightly for effort required to play the job well (i.e., even without Raise, EW SMN should not be doing EW BLM rDPS).

Personally, I'm just tired of all the Healers playing the same-ish. I'd like to see them all play at least somewhat differently. SGE pressing Eukrasia before it's Dia/Biolysis/Combust isn't really different enough to satisfy that desire.

Same.