Healer kit adjustment idea, 40% dps to 60% heals/utility

[LilimoLimomo]

I'm curious: How would you answer these questions that I posed previously?

1. What fraction of every minute do you expect a healer to keep the GCD rolling?

2. Of the GCDs that healer is casting, what fraction is required by mechanics, and what fraction is available to help the party recover from mistakes?

Because it's worth noting that if you're spending 19 out of 20 GCDs (95%) on healing that's required by mechanics, that leaves you a mere 1 out of 20 GCDs to help the party recover from mistakes -- which means the entire party has to play to a certain degree of perfection.

I like the way you framed these questions, because it helped me to realize ways in which I could communicate my thoughts better. When I say I want 80-95% of my time to be healing, I should clarify that I am talking about time spent casting; that does not take into account time that needs to be spent moving to get in the right location. Worth clarifying that. Because of that, I don't have an answer to the first question, because I think that's highly dependent upon the movement requirements of any specific fight.

Before entering the second question, I want to clarify my range of 80-95%. Fights have tempos that vary, parts where things get more or less intense, and that was what the 95% was supposed to be: those temporary moments where the intensity is raised and there is less wiggle-room. If your survive those periods, then any bodies that got left behind in the scramble can then be recovered afterwards when the pressure drops back to normal. It was not meant to suggest that healers should be working at 95% of perfection for the full duration of a fight; in fact, these numbers are intended to represented the percentage of cast time that a casual player is spending casting healing spells; more skilled players would presumably have less time healing and more DPSing.

I'll spell out what that means a bit more using myself as a case study. When I'm doing current normal raid content, fights generally end with my having only cast Cure 2, Medica 2, Regen, and Assize. Which is to say, I am in no way making optimal use of my kit, particularly the oGCD parts. Even playing in this sub-optimal way, roughly 75% of my cast time is Glare if nobody is making mistakes.

So with all of that clarification out of the way, let's get to your second question: the fraction required by mechanics would be the 80-95%, and that leftover 20-5% would be the fraction for helping party members recover from mistakes. If you're not helping party members recover, that becomes DPS time instead.

I guess it's also worth saying that I'm not married to these exact numbers; they're just an estimated attempt to communicate the vibe of what I'm experiencing. So to escape that potential distraction, maybe it would be better to say this: right now it feels like the majority of my cast time as a healer is spent with no healing to do, so instead it's DPS time (unless my fellow players are gracious enough to make mistakes). Personally, I would like that to be flipped: I want the majority of my cast time to be devoted to healing, with a minority of my time devoted set aside for recovering from mistakes and DPS.