Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Saefinn]

People can and will still do the fights even if future fight design changes. ARR and HW have different fight design than StB and ShB so changing the fight design going forward doesn't mean redoing all previous fights.

It does if the chosen solution to fixing healers is to change encounter design.

Else it means healing remains dull as heck for existing content but not for new content.

Hence that's only a partial solution but IMO not adequate.

This would however, work in line with suggestion #1 I put, accept that downtime is a thing, give healers more to do and change future encounter design if need be.

Which is why my first solution IMO is the best one. Because they can keep existing content engaging enough, keep the skill floor low and increase the ceiling and if they want more heal focus moving forward they do it from encounter design and at the same time respects existing design. And arguably is the least laborious.

[Alpheus]

They should just make our responsibilities feel rewarding to achieve. Give healers damage scaling based on party health, allow their crits to build separate but identical stacks that restore MP (for dmg crits) or a in-combat only Direct Hit rate buff (for healing crits)or benefits that otherwise facilitate DPSing and healing and let them have diminishing returns so that you are motivated to keep both stacks high.

This can be extrapolated for other jobs, tanks get damage scaling with aggro with maybe a slight dmg buff that's separate for the off tank to make them utilize their off tank mitigations without being penalized on DPS for not being the MT. Melee DPS for positionals performed correctly, rez mages for rezzes granted, a personal DPS buff for DPS when they utilize their party buffs, give BLM and SAM some party or individual party member buffs so they can also have something similar. And make all these buffs short duration so that when a phase change happens it punctuates the fact that now the boss is serious and you have to do everything u just did but with everything exploding around you now.

If DPS is the only thing that truly matters then let it be the fulcrum that everything else revolves around and let it incentivize usage of the other parts of a job's kit, players remain engaged and take an interest in playing well with others because then they themselves perform better in a way that's highlighted with bigger numbers so that there's that immediate feedback.

TLDR: Give everyone a Greased Lightning kind of mechanic but one that is granted for playing well and utilizing everything your job has to bear. The point being to incentivize good play that isn't so binary ie: we did it!/Oh we died, cuz I dont think the Devs have it in them to change encounter design and make hard heal checks when throughout the lifetime of this game healers have been trying to get away with what's good enough (as healing is in all other games but its especially felt in this one as CC and other such busy work just isn't relevant at the higher levels of content)