Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
Yeah, this is the ultimate problem. But I continue to contend this is due to the oGCDs. Healing needs a total top-down revamp. As much as some people like "healing plans", those are as detrimental to good design as the 2 min meta is. Both hamstring design.
The biggest problem in healer design right now is, if you take the easy route and cut out the large amount of OGCD bloat......what do you fill the void with? Healer kits would be very, very barebones without all that bloat, what's the plan after that?

Do they strip mitigation and debuffs off the DPS and tanks and hand them back to the healers? I don't think the tanks will be too happy about that.
Do they give us more damage buttons? You probably won't be happy about that.
Do they replace it with other equally as pointless GCD heal buttons? That doesn't really solve the issue here.

If they seriously want to solve the stagnation of the healer role, cutting out the OGCD bloat is only one part of the solution. I'd want to see a complete revamp of healer kits to have the damage portion and the healing portion interact with each other, you don't need a bloated kit to have engaging gameplay, you just need a good kit with decent interplay within it.

Alternatively, they can keep most of the OGCDs, but add an MP cost to them. The basic AoE and ST GCD heals can be free or cost very little, but every OGCD should come at a cost depending on how strong it is. That would at least make average healers have to dip into GCD heals to conserve MP, while high-tier groups can still optimise to eliminate GCD healing as much as possible.