A summary of healer issues

[Renathras]

we do agree on these two points. i wouldnt call them "levels of play" but yes, more variety in healer gameplay loops is overdue.
and yes damage patterns need to change. if we had sustained damage on top of the usual spikes that would be a lot more fun.

I say this with all sincerity: I'm glad.

aero 3 was used in single target too, and fluid aura still dealt damage. ... and youre right, healers were never super dps intensive, but for some reason people love to pretend like returning to 2-3 dots would tear the fabric of society or something??

I'll have to find some archive of the potency somewhere, but I was thinking Aero 3 was a DPS loss on one target? It has been literally years, though, so I may not be remembering right. I still miss that animation (and Stoneskin/SS2)

people back in stormblood said they liked whm because it was simple and straightforward.

Compared to SCH and AST.

this is where i think we disagree.

Somewhat, though I think less than you might think. Personally, I hate DoTs. So the solution to healers being "Just throw some more DoTs at them" seems iffy to me. Not to mention the Devs said something about DoTs being computationally intensive on the server backend and that was why they wanted to move away from them on SMN. Me personally, I'd rather have a 1-2-3 rotation with an oGCD (think MCH's core rotation with Gauss Round) instead of 1-3 DoTs. It's also why, if we really are just forcing DoTs on healers, I would rather one Job that has just one, since I personally hate them so much. But this is ALSO why I personally propose having a DoT healer, a DPS rotation healer, a 1-2-3+oGCD healer, and a Glare+Dia WHM. Having it spread out that way would allow people who like each style to have one they can enjoy playing.

Some other sub/roles already do this well. For example, Ranged has a rigid rotation (MCH), proc heavy (DNC, sorta like RDM), and DoT heavy (BRD) Jobs in it. I see no reason why this isn't possible in a slimmed down way with healers with something like AST being rigid rotation (the better to weave cards between), SGE being proc heavy with a DNC/RDM(caster phase) level rotation, and SCH leaning into DoT gameplay. Just add Glare+Dia WMN as the fourth and we've got a quartet that has at least one that would appeal to players of any skill level or complexity desire. The vets could gravitate to whichever flavor of complex suits them more and your Cure 1 spammers (which I've never personally seen, at least not since ARR - I'm not saying they don't exist in a game with 5 million players, but I feel they're more rare than how often they're thrown around in arguments...) would have their Job over in the corner that they could still clear content at passably.

EDIT:

the reason healers are so bad now isnt just because theres so much downtime OR because the dps kits suck. its because theres too much downtime AND the dps kits suck. both problems need to be fixed.

Going back to the very first thing I quoted you as saying:

We agree.

I've been saying this for a while. My personal solution would be less downtime. My secondary solution would be to shake up 3 of the DPS kits. Fair enough?