Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Sunhwapark]

The players honestly got what they asked for. They wanted Healers to do DPS, gave SE an 'out' so to speak from designing content that requires consistent

Idk, wasn't there a thing about whether or not healer dps is actually needed in savage+ anyway, and the answer was supposedly 'no' but mathematically didn't make sense ? edit: (for dps checks/enrages i meant to specify)
I can't remember the specifics, but I do remember it being a dispute about sylphie healers in those kinds of content.

Problem with that is that this often messes up planning for mechanics. If you have a mechanic that always targets two healers but then only have one, then you'll have a random DPS be targeted instead. People would generally prefer to just have two healers then have to deal with RNG in their mechanics.

Was going to say the same, but in addition to that - Log chasers will usually go for the standard team composition if possible, since that one site displays 2t/h + 4dps clears by default when looking at profiles. In PF at the very least, they'd usually opt to do a very particular uptime based strategy that tends to be quite different from the 'commonly known strat'.

What's interesting is I'd go so far as to say that "chad healing" has become more prominent than ever before in Shadowbringers and Endwalker. How can that be?

I agree with this. In Shadowbringers savage encounters it was really easy to let AST players do the majority of healing because it cost them essentially nothing in terms of offensive capabilities. It wasn't the same however when a SCH is paired with WHM, more like a competition of how far can we get before we are forced to GCD heal because using their healing tools was a DPS loss (outside of entire boss downtime). I suppose now that they did eventually make it so that using lilies resulted in neutral dps, Scholar's now the only one with 'opportunity cost' tied to their kit still.

In EW, SCH is the only one that didn't get an extra AOE healing skill (Pneuma,Macrocosmos,Lilybell) and instead got another 10% mitigation tool, it still has damage contention due to the interaction with Aetherflow as resource, as opposed to sage where there isn't a thing to consider.
If that kind of trend continues where AST/WHM/SGE get another instant free-cost healing skill, it's only going to push this kind of "chad healer" thing even further where SCH just becomes a Broil spamming 2 minute Chain Stratagem bot.

Unfortunately, I'm not expecting anything to change much in the new expansion - as much as I'd want more engaging gameplay in lower end content.