A summary of healer issues

[ty_taurus]

First of all, all of your examples have thus far been, "it'd be nice if a DPS was looking at the party list and did <action>, but it's not required for any content where those situations actually arise."

Putting that aside, a DPS's first and primary responsibility is to deal damage. As such, there's no real decision making to be had. "What do I do for this GCD? Damage. What do I do for the next GCD? Damage." That is, obviously, beyond boring if all they have is one button. Thus, you give the jobs multiple buttons for dealing damage. The "meaning" of the job, if there's any to be found, is in finding the order in which to push those buttons to deal maximum damage, and then to actually do all that button pushing while under the stress of mechanics.

On the other hand, one might expect that a healer should, well, focus on healing. Reducing their damage kits down to one button is not opposed to that goal, nor does it, a priori, make their jobs utterly boring. After all, a complete and total clown fiesta isn't boring with current kits; "what do I do for this GCD?" is far from pre-determined. As a result, one might then assign blame to the game's combat model, where in high-end content, no one's allowed to fail mechanics, and there's no real randomness in outgoing damage, thus eliminating everything that might actually make playing a healer interesting.

I quite literally have wiped due to not having enough mitigation in the first tier of this savage when I was running PF as a SGE because of DPS not using Feint/Addle. Savage content is a group effort, so I don't really care if you're a tank, DPS, healer, crafter, gatherer, blue mage, whatever... you should be paying attention to your team. Perhaps I could've blown all of my cooldowns/barriers, but then I wouldn't have had them for later mechanics.

Finding the order in which to push your buttons while under the stress of mechanics is the definition of cooldown-based MMO gameplay. Any job that denies the player that functionality is designed antithetically to the genre that it's in. One of the luxuries of FFXIV is how forgiving 95% of all of its content is. Although there is a "right" order in which to use your skills, you can quite literally disregard that and press buttons at random and still clear almost everything available in this game. That is not hyperbolic. If you don't believe me, try. Run into your expert roulette, your alliance roulette, into an EX farm party even. Just take off any movement skills on your hotbar and press buttons as randomly as possible. As long as you're still moving to the correct locations, you'll clear the content.

This is why the argument of "it's too much pressure for the healer" dissolves into nothingness like wet cotton candy. Even savage will not ask you to min-max your healer DPS actions on launch week. It is expected that you will approach healing cautiously as you get a feel for the fight's mechanics and overspend on GCD healing. "But what if things turn into a clown fiesta?" Ok, then stop attacking and heal. I don't see the big deal.