Every problem with the current iteration of healers.

[rachcouture]

From the perspective of a longtime omnihealer main...

White Mage:

• Lilies are more pointless than ever. Afflatus Solace and Afflatus Rapture–exact clones of Cure II and Medica tied to a slow charging meter and thus negating their lack of a cast time–have no reason to exist outside of stacking to use Afflatus Misery, a pretty offensive spell that would have been better off as a trait-based upgrade to Holy. Special meters aren't needed for every class, and this is one of the best examples as to why.
• Bring back Aero III. Give it a trait that turns it into Dia II.
• Get rid of Fluid Aura already. Why is it still a thing?

Everything else is honestly fine, especially Temperance; all future WHM skills should aspire to it.

Astrologian:

• Revert the cards to the original system, just with the necessary change/removal of The Spire. I can't stress this enough. There is no salvaging the rework when it contradicts the development team's desire to streamline all existing jobs. Not only has the identity of the class been entirely gutted in the process by turning every card into a single target damage boost, but it's extremely unintuitive and unwieldy, especially on controller. I spend more time fishing for seals/arcana conversion than I ever did trying to build the buffs I wanted pre-ShB.
• An AoE DoT spell would be really, really nice.

I have no other issues with this job. It's healing and shielding abilities were never a problem, and that still remains true.

Scholar:

• Let each fairy have its own unique skills. Pet micromanagement was a major component of this class. Not only that, but Selene's speed buff and AoE cleanse were far more useful than anything Eos has to offer nine times out of ten; I don't even have a use for her outside of the occasional mega pull as a safety net. Anything 70 and under is an absolute bore right now.
• Art of War is a nice gesture after the loss of Blizzard II as a cross-class years ago, but please, bring back Miasma II.
• I really don't understand why so many useless skills like Ruin II were left in, but essential abilities like the above were gutted.

Still, it's probably my favorite this expansion; more interactive than WHM, but without being convoluted like AST is now.

General:

• Every healer should have four basic offensive spells: a single target attack, an AoE attack, a single target DoT, and a DoT AoE. This covers all the essentials without taking away from the role's intended priority.
• Reinstate Protect as a cross-class skill, but in its PvP iteration: a 20% damage reduction for 10 seconds.
• ... what happened to bringing back Stoneskin?

[Acidblood]

For me the three biggest issues with the current healer design are:

Lack of reward for good gameplay
Examples of 'reward' are DRG's Raiden Thrust, BLM's Polyglot gauge, or 4.X SCH's Quickened Aetherflow... just something that needs to be thought about / paid attention to and gives you something nice in return. WHM lilies are not an example of this as they require neither interaction nor attention.

Lack of interaction within the kit
Good examples of 'interaction' are 5.X WHM Plenary Indulgence and Temperance (which really should be an upgrade from Divine Seal) ... however perhaps the worst example is WHM lilies; they are essentially instant Cure II and instant Medica, so why do we need two extra buttons? It would feel better if lilies just made Cure / Cure II and Medica / Medica II instant cast, which would not only introduce some choice but free up buttons for something more interesting, like Aero 3? PvP Protect? Stoneskin? Cleric Stance? Divine Seal? an oGCD damage spell?.

Lack of general thought required
Due to the first two issues it feels like Healer gameplay has become very stale, just spam (your now limited) DPS until you need to use a healing cooldown (of which there is now an overabundance)... no thought, not much choice, no real ability to optimise, just play like you are a bot (and hope someone gets hit by something they shouldn't to break up the monotony) :/
And of course the new AST cards are the worst example of this, say what you will about the old cards but at least they required some thought.

[Gaethan_Tessula]

For me the three biggest issues with the current healer design are:

Lack of reward for good gameplay
Examples of 'reward' are DRG's Raiden Thrust, BLM's Polyglot gauge, or 4.X SCH's Quickened Aetherflow... just something that needs to be thought about / paid attention to and gives you something nice in return. WHM lilies are not an example of this as they require neither interaction nor attention.

They aren't now, but they COULD be. With some development, the lilies could be the springboard for a spread out "rotation" of sorts that eventually leads to misery, has exciting spells to use in between, and rewards good play. Given that SE probably isn't going to let a job go without a gauge mechanic at this point, this scenario is the best I can see for lilies. And I really hope that's where it goes rather Afflatus Cure 3 or nowhere.

Lack of interaction within the kit
Good examples of 'interaction' are 5.X WHM Plenary Indulgence and Temperance (which really should be an upgrade from Divine Seal) ... however perhaps the worst example is WHM lilies; they are essentially instant Cure II and instant Medica, so why do we need two extra buttons? It would feel better if lilies just made Cure / Cure II and Medica / Medica II instant cast, which would not only introduce some choice but free up buttons for something more interesting, like Aero 3? PvP Protect? Stoneskin? Cleric Stance? Divine Seal? an oGCD damage spell?.

Technically, keeping Afflatus skills as their own button is likely meant to be a choice enabler. The choice is "do I want to save this Afflatus skill for when I need to move or weave, or use it now for healing?" Leaving Cure 2 and Medica open lets you save the afflatus while still getting the specified type of heal out.

The issue with this is that there's not enough damage dealt to the party in this game to make this a valid choice within most fights. Many times you'll use a different ability entirely, or not heal at all, if you want to hang onto an afflatus skill. As such, unless encounter design changes, I don't think much would be lost by folding the buttons together as you propose. This kind of design strike-out reflects how poor the dev team's grasp of how healers actually play is.

That said, I have never understood the button bloat fears. 3 X-hotbars for controller on a W-bar setup or flipping between 2 main ones with a third for niche or long cd skills has worked perfectly for me. Trying to require every job to have fewer than 32 skills is unnecessarily restraining kit diversity imo. Definitely a fan of OG Fluid, PvP Protect, or a sub-50 Divine Seal returning.

Lack of general thought required
Due to the first two issues it feels like Healer gameplay has become very stale, just spam (your now limited) DPS until you need to use a healing cooldown (of which there is now an overabundance)... no thought, not much choice, no real ability to optimise, just play like you are a bot (and hope someone gets hit by something they shouldn't to break up the monotony) :/
And of course the new AST cards are the worst example of this, say what you will about the old cards but at least they required some thought.

In anything sub-Savage, this is 100% true. MSQ especially is dreadful on healer, because the damage output can't be anything that would kill the most fragile of DPS.

[Lola_bunny]

From my own experiences my problems with astro pretty much breaks down to, Noct sect is too mana expensive for what it has. Once I realized that blue is melee and red is ranged the cards lost all meaning. As someone who genuinely enjoyed the lore it saddens me to see that it's been made effectively meaningless. Also doesn't help that I often find the seals not applying even if the person has gotten a hit in or two.

White mage for me is lacking a proactive way to build blood lily, I regularly over heal with the afflatus just to not have 3 up, maybe a shield or a damaging ability. It'd be nice to have a damaging aoe again like aero 3, perhaps kill 2 birds with one stone and have an afflatus ability that spreads dia. Whm feels the least affected for me at least but I think that's mostly from already having lost so much in Stormblood (still a tad salty that 7 of the 10 role abilities were once WHM) but whatever in the past.

I wish I could bring something to the table for SCH but it's the healer I have the least experience with, almost zero time spent (the pet stuff always seemed so daunting).

Mostly though my biggest problem so far has been the seeming lack of response from the dev team. I don't know the scale of feedback but I did see with the last live letter how many questions were posed and no response, not even some much as a "we're aware" or some boiler plate "Listening to feedback and making adjustments". The sound of silence is deafening, I'd appreciate any level of awareness even if it's just them dismissing us, anything but silence.

[kartana]

It comes down to 1. content (especially 4-man) get easier every expansion 2. there is less and less to heal even in harder content and 3. the dps healer dps rotation is mind-numbing boring since you basically press the same 2 buttons. I would be ok with the two buttons if we need to use our healing kit more often. Even at the hardest content the difficult comes mostly from remembering what to do when and where to move, meaning you need to remember where to stand etc. rather than improving your skill usage. There isn't even healing needed when people are new and mess up since most of the failed mechanics these days mean insta-death.

In general, everything (content and classes) in FFXIV feels more and more like it was designed with whiteboards and spreadsheets. And while there is no way around that, it never should FEEL like it was designed that way. It's probably because the same design people (for classes and content) do the same stuff for too long.

[nalol]

I'd also go with lack of interactions in the healer's kit.

I play mainly SCH so i'll talk more about it. but more interaction between fey heals and SCH heals. the only procs left are cure to cure 2 and benediction to benediction 2.

and the WHM lilies .. in a way. other than that .. the lack of interaction on our kit makes it boring compared to some of the dps's kits.

also the boring dps of the healers. I totally understand .. as tanks, we have another role so we can't have a complex rotation like a dps class, but come on, now it's really boring.


I want to be able to make good plays as healer, and that the kit has more depth to allow us that.

[EchuKayu]

I suggest giving healers a slightly more engaging DPS rotation, something few in buttons, but interactive like DNC or RDM, as the biggest thing to do. I'd also suggest making their resource system more interesting, in some way. I'd suggest not giving a healer a MELEE AoE.

For SCH I'd like Seraph to actually last the full 20 second duration it says it lasts, rather than only lasting 17 seconds, because if you use Consolation at 1-3 seconds, the delay makes it so it doesn't go off and the faerie leaves
You can make Pitch Perfect for BRD go off when it is queued but the song is dropped, so I don't see why you can't do that here.

[Dyvid]

I would suggest SE lean heavily on adding party support the Healers. Its a method to help the raid to increase their DPS without require healer to actually DPS. It helps make healer jobs more unique. And it helps make healer job interactive.

SCH
Give Selene debuff style abilities. Lower recast timer on fairy abilities but make the fairy gauge the resource to use those abilities.
Add Libra that would increases target's damage taken by 2-3%
Add Fey Wind type buff when Seraph is called; reduces weaponskill cast time and recast time, spell cast time and recast time, and auto-attack delay of self and party members by 3%.

WHM
Give direct buff spells like Berserk which increases Damage Dealt, Haste which reduce cast and recast of weaponskills and spells, Slow and Blind. Classic White Mage spells.

AST
Change the cards to buff jobs rather than DPS. This would be helpful all around rather than a small portion of the game. MND, DEX, STR, INT, Tenacity would be the best options to do this. Ewer can restore MP and add a passive 1% Crit Rate to all cards to off set the chance the job/card combo isn't available.
Keep and adjust Divination as it currently is.

[Synaesthesia]

Even as a casual Astrologian who would rather focus on healing, I'm really unhappy with the current iteration..

We lost all of the utility skills, that precious stun that was on a long timer, and the time extension skills that let you chain together different forms of regen or buffs to support your party.

In exchange, we received a very attention consuming card system used to only improve DPS with no other benefits, which instead of having a high / low feeling of reward when you got a good combination, now just sucks up your attention span in order to stay "damage competitive", which feels like a mechanic designed only to appeal to raiders and Square Enix's need to have a mathematically easier to balance system in order to appeal to the raiders.. Which it does not even do.

Healing is not signicantly more involved.. It's just weaving in another ogcd or two to offset the potency changes, and does not really require any additional thought or attention.

There is even less to do with downtime in this expansion beyond simply pressing malefic or gravity again and again than before, the card mechanic detracts from my ability to ensure that the party survives and feels unrewarding, and my enjoyment of the game as a "healing focused" healer has dropped substantially. The skill ceiling is lower, and now I have literally nothing to do during downtime aside from attack anyways.. Was this the intention of these changes?

Downtime is real, but now there are basically no options to fill it aside from more Malefic..

[Limonia]

WHM: While SCH and AST have both shields and regens, WHM doesn't and I don't understand why they didn't just give them Protect as an oGCD AoE shield.
Other than that, the GCD clipping is really awful. If I need to use Asylum or Divine Benison NOW, it feels bad to clip into my GCD because I couldn't wait for the next Dia, Afflatus or Regen. I end up recasting Dia way too early for that as well and that just seems counter-intuitive.
That the Afflatus heals are on the GCD is alright to me though.

AST: I love how all GCD casts are so short. But you constantly have to target your party members with the cards now and that can get annoying in hectic situations. Especially when Sleeve Draw is up. It also seems a little weaker in large dungeon pulls, as if you need to cast way more GCD heals.

SCH: I get why you can't use Aetherflow outside of battle, but it's still annoying in dungeons. Personally, I also would have liked it if they didn't just bring Energy Drain back. I liked having all stacks for healing. But we needed a way to use up stacks. So it's... ok.

I actually also don't mind that all three healers have the same DPS rotation now. But one more spell for each one would have been nice. And Glare/Broil cast like Malefic.

As you can see, I'm not so disappointed with the healers as some others are, but there are still many things that really need to be addressed.