Latest Official Developer Statements About Healer DPS?

[Renathras]

And even in the very rare case they do let healers wear metal (laws order is the only class specific example I can think of) they have to add a frilly dress extension to it just so you don’t forget you are a healer and healers wear robes

Don't forget the Ronkan (I think?) gear from ShB. It's chianmail, which is very much metal.

Got any data to back any of that up?

Fast forward to Stormblood and you started to see a real shift. Cleric Stance in it's original form was gone, WHM finally had MP to spare and all 3 healers had access to solid oGCD heals at this point. This is where the DPSing healer became the norm at all levels of endgame content rather than the exception.

Do you?
Or is this just your heresay again?

You made a claim first. Can you prove it?

ShB was when just about every Healer felt comfortable DPSing...because the DPSing was so streamlined that it was almost down to "if no healing is needed, press this button over and over until healing is needed". This is when midcore content and even casual content adopted the policy, as well as Extremes and even Experts, and it was the expectation across all levels of endgame content, not just Savages. Note that "Endgame" does not mean "Savages", it also includes Expert roulette and Extremes.

The real problem is healing demands in most duties. In most duties you arent being forced to heal at all. Power creep makes this worse at an excessively quick speed making duties just 2 patches older trivial. Its just very bad balance towards healers.

If healers were more reliably demanded to heal, the 1 dps button wouldnt have been an issue to begin with. The real problem is lack of healing demands which causes healers to focus to dps.

Hammer -> Nail's Head

This is the reality of our situation.

Too much power creep, too many overpowered oGCDs reducing the need to GCD heal, encounters designed to be mitigation checks rather than healing on unavoidable damage AND for avoidable damage to outright kill most players so that healing to make up for mistakes often isn't possible, and in more casual content (and some hardcore content, like the Ultimate TOP that was 0 healer cleared) Tanks and DPSers having too much healing as well. (Look at how much healing DNC can output sometime; it's insane and makes 4 man fights trivial to clear without a Healer, and obviously I don't need to explain WAR at this point, right?)

But that brings us to the usual problem, even if they made proper healing-intensive fights they will still be 100% limited to just savage, ultimate and maybe the odd extreme. So in the majority of content, expert roulette, alliance raid, normal raid, treasure maps, etc you will still be bored to death.

Not to put too fine a point on it: But this will always be true from highly skilled players doing casual content.

"But not DPSers!"

...yes, DPSers, too. A lot of high end players get bored doing AOEspam wall-to-wall pulls and see Experts as a chore to DPS, too. And for people used to doing DPS rotations while avoiding complex mechanics in the Savage dance, doing an optimal DPS rotation during one-mechanic-every-60-second octopus at the end of Aetherfont is "bored to death", too. Same for Tanks. There's nothing unique to Healers about that.

If high end content engages you, that's what you're going to be doing more of, and with the advent of Criterion, they don't need to change-up "casual" content to be "not boring" for high end players if you have valid alternatives to grind for tomes/etc.

To put it simply, you likely CANNOT design content that is non-trivial/non-boring for high end players to do over and over and over again that ALSO is still accessible for normal players in a general environment. And this community has generally accepted that MSQ is for everyone, not just hardcore people, who tend to only do it once before moving on to content more engaging to them. (Note Expert roulette is MSQ content, thus is MSQ). At the end of the day, some content is just going to be boring for you if you're a hardcore raider. That really can't be helped. The goal should be to make it where such players don't need to keep doing the content (most everyone's fine with the one run for the story, but not the weekly grind for tomes) and can get their tomes from content they find more enjoyable.

Honestly, Criterion is an interesting design choice going forward since it has both solo, casual, and hardcore versions. It just needs to provide tomes commensurate to that.

Yes, this is the point that gets lost in the sauce it seems.

I don't think it does, it's a different argument.

Think about it - how in-depth would a healer rotation in Lapis Manalis have to be for you not to be bored? Would a 1-2-3 not still be boring? (As noted in that ongoing discussion in the Healer forum right now, everyone seems to agree that wouldn't do it). What about a SMN rotation? No, that gets called boring all the time as well. So it would have to be a full on DPSer rotation before "more DPS buttons" would really fix the problem. Dia having a Thundercloud proc would be novel for...a week. A 1-2-3 Stone-Aero-Water combo would be boring overnight.

I think the issue is that nothing WOULD actually make 4 man casual content NOT boring for high end players such as yourself or others like you, unless we get something either high APM like GNB or DPSer level difficult like BLM. And at that point, we run into all the attendant issues of Healers having full on DPS rotations.

Moreover, an additional issue:

UNLESS the damage gap between optimal and "glarespammer" is small, then when you get a Healer that does the bare minimum, now you're extending the time the run takes to the point of really annoying regular people, and we run into people just dropping healers and doing 1T/3D premades (even more than they do now). Meaning people's "get in, get out" runs will take even longer, leading to even...more...complaints.

Also:

With the amount of healing and mitigation tools non-healers have available they pretty much can increase the healing requirements in easier content. When the casual healer can't keep up then the rest of the party can step up their game.

No I agree they don't want healers to be more offensive. They just haven't faced the reality that unless you give healers something else to do (buffing, debuffing, cc cleansing, more healing) they're going to be more offensive because that's all a healer's kit is.

More or less, this.

I honestly think this is the core issue of why healers feel so boring. The healing abilities themselves are effective tools, but they're not FUN. I would like them to diversify what they do. I like delayed healing abilities like Macrocosmos. Lean into some healing tools giving a heal over time but little spot healing. Make some abilities spot healing without the regen. Make me use the correct tool for the job. Right now every raidwide is solved by "just use whichever OGCD is not on cooldown."

This, and that we're so oGCD healing focused, it leaves us with a LOT of "dead" GCDs to fill, so we fill them with the same damage nuke spam. If all oGCD heals were GCD heals (or, at least, a lot more of them were), that would change that a lot. WHM right now has the least oGCD healing and the least Glarespam (ironic, given the name) of all the Healers.