Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
Also, most people DO say they want to replace the downtime with more healing - and are promptly told that's impossible, trying to get them to agree to more DPS instead. If the option is "more DPS" or "more healing", I choose more healing. If the option is "more DPS" or "nothing/keep things as they are", I choose nothing.
You're misconstruing the situation here. It's fairly well recognized that there is a problem with healer gameplay right now, only how severe of a problem that is does vary between the people you ask. Wanting more variety in healer DPS gameplay is a criticism that has been prominent in forum discussion since particularly Shadowbringers, and a common retort to that criticism is "why add more DPS when you can just make healers heal more?" And that sounds like it makes sense, because wouldn't you want healers to heal more frequently?

The problem with that retort, though, is that in order for the amount of healing alone to satisfy the people who have an issue with healer design currently would require that all content, including things meant to be easy and simple, would need an astronomical increase to the frequency of outgoing damage and a dramatic rework of how healing kits work, and those of us who are very experienced healers who feel the pains of a boring DPS rotation recognize that the volume of healing we would need to make the one-button DPS structure no longer a pain point would require such an extreme increase in outgoing damage, that it would make the role unplayable for the average healer who currently struggles with content like Barb EX. It has been said multiple times at this point, which makes me confused as to why this is still being misunderstood, but I have not, nor have I seen anyone in the pro-DPS camp say that healing requirements cannot increase at all. Rather, what has been said is that they cannot be increased enough for us to be engaged in the healing role from the healing alone.

It would be great to see some increase to healing requirements and a return to an environment where healer gameplay more often involves utilizing healing GCDs rather than only relying on, or almost entirely relying on healing OGCDs. But we still would require an expansion of DPS tools in order to find the healer role sufficient. Just making healers heal slightly more often will only scratch the surface of the issue unless taken to such an extreme that the current healer population will crumble.