A summary of healer issues

[Shurrikhan]

You know, something occurred to me earlier that I’d be very interested to know the answer for. I really wonder what the healer population would look like if FFXIV did not feature the ability to change jobs and you were locked into your choice. That would completely eliminate non-healer mains from ever filling that role, and likely would’ve forced out former healer mains that swapped to DPS or tanks.

I'd guess that the number of healer parses and standard composition parses would drop significantly but not to the point of a crises, while the portions of each healer job relative to each other wouldn't really change (except slightly insofar as it became known ahead of time that the likes of AST would be underpowered or the likes of WHM would likely become overpowered in the upcoming expansion based on the pre-patch notes / job guide website changes).

snip

Aye. Again, I basically see the heirarchy of available/maximal complexity in that regard...

Least: Hard CDs
(These days there's scarcely really even a difference between 1-charge and multi-charge, as you just bank as able until the raid buff window, effectively acting like you have only 1 charge until then.)

-Mid-: Soft CDs
(This would be like "Deals 65 potency. Additional Effect: Deals up to 650 additional potency based on charging time, which has a maximum of 30 seconds." [Read: Dia in single-target.])

-Most: DoTs
(They do everything soft-CDs do, but also have additional complexity in multitarget situations that are not yet mass-AoE situations and require TTD (time-til-death) estimation.)

And yeah, plugins have for quite a while now provided (highly filterable, even) Enmity List DoT trackers and the ability to place a mock-cooldown (standard darkening and wheel) or [further-]charge (ring, no darkening) indicator over DoT actions to reveal the time until their respective durations end on your current target if one is selected and hostile, last target if not.

There's no reason the base/default game couldn't steal that idea for use by everyone who wants that functionality.