Would you rather healers get more complex healing kits or more complex DPS kits?

[Calysto]

And yet, in ARR, healing was more GCD based than now and damage more consistent meaning healers were using far less Stone/Ruin 1 casts - even ignoring their DoT refreshes - to cast healing spells. The game has literally done this before. No, more complex dps kits are NOT the "only" option.

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God I feel this.

The problem isn't we don't have enough DPS buttons.

The problem is we use the ones we have so much because encounters have far less healing than they used to and far more non-healing Jobs that do healing/mitigation/sustain. I also have been playing since ARR (2.3) and all the people that say "The game's always been like this" - no. No it has NOT.

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No, no it has NOT. In ARR, it very much wasn't this way.

PARTLY because we were all less knowledgeable back then, but also because kit and encounter design didn't work that way. WHM had one oGCD heal, Benediction, on a 5 min CD. There was no way in hell a WHM could oGCD only heal like you can now. And we didn't have a fixed 10000 MP pool with fixed MP costs for spells. You had to use GCD heals, meaning you'd go OOM if you did too much damage, so WHM's often would do less damage and more healing. "healers do DPS" was not a "staple in this game since the beginning". Where that really took off was HW, because some of the raid bosses were so overtuned you HAD to have healers DPS otherwise you couldn't clear the Enrage, and this was something Yoshi P said they didn't intend to balance around, which is why no raid fights have been that bad since Gordias, which almost killed the game a second time and devastated the raid scene.

You may have heard that "over and over", but it's a lie and always has been.

And no, healers shouldn't have complex DPS kits and maybe 3 healing spells. That's not a healer, that's a DPSer. Hell, DNC already has almost that, as does RDM. Those aren't healers, they're DPSers.

As a former career SCH (2.x-5.99), I can say that's mostly wrong - at least for that job.
Yes ARR was mostly GCD focused, so it was more balanced between attacks and healing. The kit was also more balanced and not just ST/DoT/AoE for damage and you had cleric stance and pet actions to pay with too.
The fights were a bit less scripted : The goal was keeping the tank/party alive. after that you either payed with your dps kit or sat around.
You also had more utility as you could chose between Eos or Selene.
MP management was a thing, but it still was more forgiving that TP management at the time.

While increasing healing requirements and healing complexity would be fine, They have stated that they won't do it to not scare "new healers" (up to ultimate I guess), so what's left ? DPS and utility. Since utility can't affect difficulty, it either goes back to utility for DPS or irrelevant/niche.