Thanks for making this thread, Billy. With the lack of a Feedback forum and I'm not sure if the devs read these forums at all I'm hoping to understand better what other people enjoy about their healer jobs, both in previous and current iterations. It might not get our tools back, but it's fun to write about.

SCH

TL;DR: I can only speak for Scholar, as I haven't played Astrologian or White Mage enough to know how they feel, but I feel all Healer's problems stems from that SE seemed to design healers around a scenario that doesen't exisist unless everything goes very wrong. Sure in normal Trials and Alliance, enrage timer is very lenient to non-existing, but this all feel like it was made to accomodate Savage and Ultimate, where you can't afford a death most of the time. As Tanks, our role isn't DPS, but as Tanks we are expected to do a lot of it fighting in Solo Duties and Quests. Being assured that healer DPS wasn't factored into fight designs I don't think is the reassurance for giving us something more than one DPS button with the occasional other to press. If we could get a Cleric Stance variant that turned all our healing spells into being able to hurt mobs then I'd be on board for making a majority of our skillsets healing spells.

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I'm pretty bad at analysis as I barely remember what potencies my skills have, such I cannot rightly say if we're doing more damage on Scholar now than we to in previous expansions. I've been more interested in how it feels to play. Barring the time and resources it would take to make something new and interesting for the healer jobs, I'm all for reimplementing all Arcanist skills and a Cleric Stance stance with healing penalty as Scholars way to fall back on if there's no healing required.

Having played this a long time there was one side of the game I've been seeking out recently: Fights where everywhere can go wrong very fast, like E4 or any 24-man. Where I'm constantly ressing healing and waiting on cooldowns to pull someones healthbar out of danger from the next raidwide. That or in higher floors of HoH and PotD where mobs hit like trucks, standing in aoe or cleaves means death and there is a random element of patrols and traps. These are moments where I often can't think of doing anything but healing and ressurecting. Unforunately, these are a small fraction of the entire content wherein I can use the skillset of a Scholar and in everything else I can calmly heal it up because I know it's coming. It also happens it is exactly this content the game wants me to run countless times in order to gain tomes, level up characters, progress Fates and if I want to help someone in lower levels. I would really like for them to find this fun first and foremost.

Reason for the thrill seeking above is that I enjoyed that too back in 3.0, but then it was another side of the Healer playstyle for me. I could easily and quickly swap between modes. If I ran Sohm Al for the 30th time I had gotten a feeling of how tanks used to pull, so I would follow close, see how they settled in, make precautions and then activate Cleric Stance and see how much of DPS abilities I could get off before the tank's or DPS's HP got low. This was all the while I had Eos doing her part with Rouse, Whipsering Dawn, Fey Illumination and Fey Covenant inbetween my GCDs. The suite of damage and debuff abilities along with Eos was huge so it was a great fun game of seeing how much or what I could squeeze in before that mob was dead or someone needed healing. I wanted to be responsible, so always tried to gauge how fast the tanks HP was going down before turning on CS and saved at least one Aetherflow until AF was off cooldown again.

This wasn't exclusive to level 60 dungeons either, thanks to Arcanist getting a lot of it's skills before level 30 and Cleric Stance was a level 8 CNJ skill meant I could stay busy even in trivial content like Halatali while Eos could even take care of most of the healing. Did it make Scholar overpowered compared to the other healer jobs? Most probably as we could shoulder almost all healing on Eos. What I really think they should've done is bring the other healers up to where Scholar was: access to a dps class' multitude of skills at lower levels and give them something much earlier to deal with healing in leveling dungeons. Like Regen could be unlocked at level 15 for Conjurer. If classes are problem, then I can see them just letting Jobs absorb classes and have them start at level 1 as all new jobs do.

Thing was, at any time I could drop the DPS act (Cleric Stance notwithstanding) and turn into Triage mode after Alliance B suddenly got wiped out. I enjoyed DPS and Healer aspect both of the job. After the Small Sundering in 4.0 and the Great Sundering in 5.0 the DPS part is not longer enjoyable as a couple Broil III delivers seems to do what a lot of keyboard dancing took back then. It was not about the amount of damage, it was feeling of making use of everything I had, sometimes for a marginal improvement. After 5.0 I tried dedicated DPS jobs, the thrill of having many buttons to press is there, but it gets dull fast with nothing to heal. Scholar is now fun when I'm so busy can't think about doing damage, but gets dull there is nothing left to think about than doing damage. Which I'm afraid happens a lot of the time these days.

That they now are looking to condensate the 2.X Quests gives me hope they haven't forgotten there are Duties under level 71 that people still run and they could turn them into a bowl catharsis where you eagerly await all the ways you can mess up a pack of mobs with cornerstone abilities unlocked very early for not just healers, but all jobs.