Make healers DPS with four or five healing actions

[ty_taurus]

There are many reasons why it's difficult to resolve this issue by trying to replace DPS spam with more healing instead.

1. There has been no notable change in the frequency of outgoing damage between ARR content and current content, or if anything, damage is sometimes less frequent than in ARR/HW content. Meanwhile, every expansion has not only added more healing resources to the healers, but every new resource added has been DPS neutral--either OGCD and thus weave-able, meaning it gives healers more DPS uptime, or GCDs that also deal the same damage as the healer's basic spell, or refund that damage via the blood lily. Meanwhile every healer attack spell has been streamlined to a 1.5 second cast time, meaning every GCD gives you room to weave any of these resources. We have more DPS uptime than ever before because of all these reasons.

2. Other roles have received increased levels of sustain, particularly Paladin and Warrior who are able to answer to the already diminished instances of necessary healing. As has been discovered, there's enough non-healer sustain that a healerless party was capable of clearing Ultimate. While that is not a normal expected playthrough, it speaks to the above points about how little healing is needed vs how much healing is available to use.

3. Consider that a player has the ability to cast a new spell every 2.5 seconds. If your goal is to rework healers to heal with their GCD more often than they attack with their GCD, how often do you think damage needs to be delivered to the party in order to sway healer gameplay away from DPS and toward healing? Consider points 1 and 2 as well. You would probably need raidwide damage every 3-7 seconds in all forms of content, even dungeons, to demand healers stop attacking and heal given our current resources.

4. FFXIV healing has vastly more accessible forms of AoE healing than WoW does. Generally, party damage can almost always be resolved in 1-2 GCDs ignoring all of the OGCD healing resources at our disposal. WoW does have AoE healing, but far more often has to rely on single target healing because their AoE healing doesn't have the same power and availability as FFXIV AoE heals.

5. If you want to change the the environment for healers to prioritize healing over damage, you're going to need to make some drastic changes to a combination of both healer kits and fight design. This would inevitably require reworking every single fight in the game to ensure the new model for healing encourages healing over DPS, and is also doable with whatever changes the healers receive to their resources, even if that's just rebalancing HP to account for considerably less healer DPS. It should go without saying that this is a truly monolithic task and would be incredibly time consuming and expensive to accomplish.

The truth is that FFXIV has always been an environment that promoted a very offensive healer playstyle--more combat medic if you will. Whether intentional or not, it has also only ever continued to feed into that environment with every expansion. Constantly providing more and more free healing, incredibly powerful AoE healing, faster DPS cast times that enable weaving, and more non-healer sustain than the game has ever had before. All things that lend themselves to maximizing the time healers get to spend DPSing instead of healing.