The Healer Double Standard

[Rilifane]

-snip-

While I do like some of your ideas, for normal content or "easy healing", as you put it, it would change next to nothing and healers will remain green dps. A vast amount of players who don't want to be green dps aren't touching savage and don't want to.
Savage players are not the ones the devs are concerned about when it comes to bumping up complexity and difficulty because it's already known that they can and will always rise to the challenge.
It sure would be nice for savage players to have complex, engaging healing and dps mechanics with meaningful choices and risks involved.
But everyone else is left where they are now - and those people are and always will be the majority.

oGCD healing is more forgiving and easier to balance regarding resources but the problem stands, that any oGCD healing frees space for GCD dpsing and any GCD not spent on healing is a GCD you can and should be spending on dpsing. Which leaves us with green dps outside savage even if the changes you proposed are made.

Edit: but that said, I would appreciate a change in skill acquisiton so that oGCDs are learned at much lower levels and people learn to use them to their advantage sooner instead of basically overhauling the whole way they healed from 1-50 to 50+ when the oGCDs come in one after another.
Because as it is now it leaves us with healer thinking their casts are the baseline and oGCDs are solely for "oh shit" situations, so they never use them throughout the fight if the situation doesn't arise.
If oGCDs are the way to go, it shouldn't suddenly be dropped on your at at later levels. Even spreading them out some more would be nice, like changing the 40s WHM skill from Cure3 (which most people have long forgotten about by the time they reach content where they COULD use it) to DB. Or even ditch Fluid Aura and make DB the 15s class quest skill.

[TonberiScholar]

While I do like some of your ideas, for normal content or "easy healing", as you put it, it would change next to nothing and healers will remain green dps.

My hope would be that with the increased chance for Healer differentiation granted by this change that they'd be able to make a buffing/non-direct damage option (like the AST kludge I mentioned) more appealing, even if it's really just like a buffing "skin" on top of a GCD damage filler. With the whole "playing a Card both buffs a party member and damages an ally" thing.

In practice, it probably wouldn't work out that way, but it'd at least be closer to "able to accommodate both preferences" than what we have now, I think.

Party DPS is the universal MMO currency, and it always spends, but we can at least change the form that increased party DPS has, if not debasing the value of increased party DPS completely.