Make healers DPS with four or five healing actions

[Shurrikhan]

until 6.1. o.O (I know, surprised me, too:

Fair enough; I should have specified "its replacement" or "our (current/relevant) ST, instant-cast DoT", expecting an irrelevant nit-pick on a technicality over a skill that was by then irrelevant to the earlier point in question. Good use of... Roe's resource (all in the same breadth you slight others for mentioning anything others may have already discussed earlier in the thread -- the very same one, it would appear)?

Fights are ALREADY constrained - so many oGCDs and instant casts means that fights all have to be heavy movement and have large spikes of damage. That's ALREADY constraining fight design. Smaller spikes can be easily handled, and low movement allows for GCD heal use, making the oGCDs redundant.

First, I said nothing of instant casts. But having more oGCDs does not "mean that all fights have to be heavy movement and have large spikes of damage". There is no paired requirement for heavy movement and large damage spikes. There is no requirement for either individually. And is what is thereby permitted goes beyond either.

It is more than a little absurd to say that "Now that we have this tool, fights must cause us to live or die through its advantages." The whole course of the game, and of pretty much any other MMO, has proven otherwise. Literally anything that can make unique use of oGCDs can be good design in the context of oGCDs, and even letting those tools merely be redundancies woven in for efficiency is technically still fully permissible design.

You're free to dislike movement. You're free to dislike damage intake of any sort that would require split-second heals and/or heals from finite resources (e.g., limited by gauge and/or cooldowns). But having those tools does not force X, Y, and Z, just as new mitigation tools do not force constant or per-CD mechanics that would be one-shots if not for a strict schedule of stacked mitigation; those tools are simply something that helps allow for that variance in fight design in a more engaging manner than would changes to the base, spammable kit as to allow for near-infinite mobility, etc.

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:: Again, I'm not a fan of, say, EuD / EuP spam having infinite mobility, so I'm not about to defend a strawman. I'll say only that EuD/EuP spam doesn't outright break the game to me because it's a perk of only a single healer and is generally ill-advised anyways in the present context, but I have not advocated for constantly spammable instant-casts. I just like a degree of additional burst healing available atop our GCDs because of the complexity in fight design and player interactions therewith that such permits.

OGCD heals would be far, far more useful to the game if they could act as something that isn't quite the core of healing nor saved only for specific mechanics (instead, having their consideration interwoven a lot more around our GCDs heals and time-sensitive attack GCDs), but included reasonably/sparingly, they are good thing. Their presence permits that much more from fight design, but they do not force anything. Yes, we should probably re-concentrate/consolidate some of them; they are become rather bloated. But they are not the reason for high movement, etc.; they did not force those outcomes.

Look to the other kits and to trends across the expansions. Movement is simply a growing design fad that fits poorly born partly of and partly for the watering down of role identities (especially, that of Melee and Casters), not a consequence of oGCDs heals.