There has been a lot of controversy around the state of healers in Shadowbringers and I’m not sure which side I am on yet. On the one hand I don’t agree with all of the changes we’re seeing since it appears as if healers will be even less engaging to play than they were in Stormblood. On the other hand I don’t yet know how they plan on changing damage calculations and whatnot so I don’t want to judge prematurely.

What I do see as a problem is an issue that pertains to the entire healer role: basically it was already complete in ARR. What that means is that from that point onward, giving healer new skills just served to incentivize the use of ogcds to have to cast as a little gcd healing spells as possible since there is absolutely no benefit to overhealing either (which is fine). The resulting downtime needs to be filled with something, namely dps which already was very simplified in Stormblood with seemingly no improvement in sight. New healing spells seem increasingly irrelevant to actual healing and instead serve to create space to dps. If we’re really looking at a play style in which we throw ogcds to then go back to spamming a single dps spell button then my suggestion to change something about that situation is rather drastic and requires even more changes to be made in the process, but I think drastic changes are necessary going forward in developing this role.

Remove Cure II, Adloquium and Benefic II and adjust the remaining skillset accordingly.

Every healer has this sort of big boy healing spell and having it readily available on a single button is a problem in my opinion. No matter how much you increase burst damage or damage frequency, in the end you’ll be forced to default to your big heal and just press that over and over. It also detracts meaning from introducing new healing skills since, when it comes to restoring HP, our repertoire has been perfectly adequate since Heavensward. Those big healing numbers are currently to easily accessible and could be otherwise gated behind more involved job mechanics and made the focus of healing again. It's probably only a temporary solution as new expansions, and with them new healing spells, are added as a necessity, but it might just help making healing a bit more fun again.

It seems like heresy even suggesting something like this but I’d like to hear what other people think about this. I’ll likely not participate in that discussion too much, just trying to throw ideas out there.