A summary of healer issues

[TheDustyOne]

Figured I may as well add my 2 cents to this.

While I'm primarily a tank main, I did enjoy casually healing a lot back in Stormblood, mostly with Scholar. Maintaining multiple DoTs, spreading them like an infection with Bane, finding the right opportunities to weave in my oGCD heals, it felt good to be able to play it at least somewhat well. Now current Scholar just feels like a shadow of its former self.

Of course it's not just Scholar, I did dabble in Astro a bit back then and liked the cards, being able to manipulate their durations, giving tanks with mitigation allergies a Bole, seeing Monks run out of TP with Arrow (I regret nothing ). Now it's all just a weaker Balance card with the time manipulation removed.

Anyway, enough of my history, my biggest problem with current healers isn't just the lack of a DPS rotation; it's that the kits are fighting amongst themselves and lack interactivity. oGCD heals are there to effectively make your GCD heals useless outside other players screwing up too much. Using GCD heals is punished as, despite those being the introductory skills you're taught as a new player to rely on, they eat up GCD time you could've spent dealing damage. And that damage kit is just 2 abilities, sometimes a token 3rd GCD or an oGCD, but primarily it'll be your nuke + DoT, or the singular AoE nuke in dungeon packs. The end result is that we end up spending most of our time casting a singular spell, sometimes interlaced with an oGCD heal whose sole reward is letting us press that singular spell even more. There's nothing exciting about it, there's very little interaction, and it actively makes a large portion of our kit sit unused for most fights, especially in casual content.

A few things I would personally do:
1) Make the individual healer DPS kits more varied. Nothing extravagant, we don't need a complex 15 button DPS rotation, but at the very least we need 3 or 4 active buttons to keep an eye on in a short duration, like a buff to maintain, an extra dot to maintain, a debuff to maintain, another oGCD damage ability that rewards uptime, a gauge to build and a couple of abilities to spend it on, procs, etc. There's a lot you can do here to make every healer feel different; White Mage could be the healer equivalent to Black Mage, a spell that starts a buff timer similar to Astral Fire (sans MP interactivity) that increases our damage and lets us use our powerful nuke so long as it's up, and Dia having a proc. Scholar could have Miasma and Bane back, along with Fester as an oGCD attack. Astro could have Dancer-like procs where casting Malefic will proc a stack that can be spent on another, more powerful spell. Sage could build up Adderstings with Dosis to spend on a powerful nuke that could also be used with Eukrasia to apply a debuff. All four healers should offer something different besides Nuke + DoT.

2) Cut down the amount of oGCD heals. This one's probably more a personal pet peeve, and I'm sure a lot of people here are fine with having a lot of oGCD heals that we prioritize over GCD heals. But as I said earlier, I feel like these mostly exist to make our GCD heals redundant and so a large portion of the kit ends up feeling like bloat outside emergency situations. I'd rather oGCD abilities focus on altering the effects of our primary heals, abilities like Neutral Sect, Plenary Indulgence, Deployment Tactics, etc. I'm quite happy with.

3) Make GCD heals less punishing to use. I'd personally do this by looking at the individual DPS kits of the healers, and deciding how best to "refund" the damage lost from using our primary healing abilities. I mentioned in another thread the idea of giving Scholar Fester, making Fester's potency equal to Broil, and having a GCD heal like Adloquium refund a charge. White Mage already shows that a refund system can work, just that it needs some creativity to make it feel unique amongst the healers. Speaking of White Mage, I'd rather scrap the Afflatus heal spells and just make Lilies affect all the base healing spells, at least then I'd have a reason to use Regen, Medica II, and Cure III.

Thoughts? Probably got a bit rambly there, and I'm sure more dedicated healer mains would be able to better pick apart my deductions and why my ideas won't work. But hey, just giving my 2 cents on healers as they are now and what I'd like to see.