Quote Originally Posted by Granyala View Post
To be perfectly frank: I don't think constant pressure would feel much different, I come from WoW, where healing is (was? been a few years) designed more as a full time occupation. It can be fun, it can be intense (esp at lower item level when every extra heal puts you in conflict with your mana) but in easier content it feels no different than damage spam. Whether I mash the Cure II button or the Glare button is pretty irrelevant to me.

Content needs to engage and that only works with mechanics that require you to think and react. You could design a boss with mad pulsing AoE, so the healer would be healing like there is no tomorrow to compensate for it but it would not be more engaging or fun than designing the boss w/o the pulse and let the healer DPS between the spikes.
Closest experience I can use is FFXI around the time that ToAU was released and TP burn parties became more commonplace. I remember being in exp parties and literally doing nothing but spamming Cure spells. It's experiences like those that has me try to let healers know that they don't have it that bad, and you're right; it really isn't any more engaging.

However, I will say that I do feel engaged when my heals are pushed. And by pushed, I mean I have to use my GCDs on them. This alone brings several more factors into play. An example of this is when a player is at critical HP with an incoming attack that will finish them off if they are not healed, and you have no ogcds in the chamber. That attack is going to go off in 3.24 seconds, which means your window to start casting is extremely small. Basically, if you focused on DPSing at all, that player is dead and the penalty is a cost to the group's MP whether the raise comes from a healer or DPS job capable of raising. Not to mention the insane drop off of rDPS every second they are down.

It's easy to say that healing is akin to a game of whack-a-mole with all the ogcd heals healers have at their disposal. Someone needs a heal, push a button and done. That is not engaging in even the slightest. "Increasing mobility" is an adjustment that directly affects DPS output, and this mindset is indicative of where it is placed with the devs: Damage. The way I see it is the healer role design is in direct contrast with encounter design; placing them in a limbo that is not deserved.

It is just crazy to me that everything and anything that has allowed healers to feel engaged in encounters continues to be stripped from them. I don't even know what else they could take away other than give tanks and DPS the ability to sustain themselves, which we are not far off from.