Is it fun?

[Grimoire-M]

Damn that sounds wild!
What MMO(s) had 70-80% healing uptime?

Arguably every single old-school MMO did if you count mid-fight MP resting as part of the strategy. A good number of korean MMOs (RO and similar) also just let you go hogwild on spam once you reach certain breakpoints and expect you to do so if you want to deal with some of the BS the harder content offers until you outgear it. Buffing was still king in most of them.

[Rilifane]

Damn that sounds wild!
What MMO(s) had 70-80% healing uptime?

RO, Flyff, WoW and Rift in their earlier stages plus pretty much every somewhat older asia MMO like Perfect World etc.
RO and Flyff had a different combat system and you spent the majority of your time juggling a myriad of mini buffs while healing but letting some of them fall off was just as dangerous as sleeping on healing itself. Depending on your leveling partners and areas you spend more time healing or debuffing enemies but dpsing on healer wasn't a thing unless you were specifically build for it but then you were more of a somewhat self-supporting caster that partnered with actual healers rather than dpsing while filling the healer role.
WoW and Rift both had very tight mana management, fast and strong heals were reserved for emergencies. You spend the majority of your time constantly precasting heals and canceling the cast last second if it would overheal while keeping regens and buffs up. Not just in endgame raids but regular dungeons too. It wasn't because people were bad and uninformed either, it played the same on WoW classic. The way to go was steady, efficient healing so you had the resources for emergencies, strings of crit hits and general bad luck with random mechanics (like a dps getting shot in the face 3 times in a row from something that targets anyone at random).
Even now the Disc priest, which mostly heals through dpsing, spends more GCDs on healing than any decently played healer in FFXIV.

[Almagnus1]

RO, Flyff, WoW and Rift in their earlier stages plus pretty much every somewhat older asia MMO like Perfect World etc.
RO and Flyff had a different combat system and you spent the majority of your time juggling a myriad of mini buffs while healing but letting some of them fall off was just as dangerous as sleeping on healing itself. Depending on your leveling partners and areas you spend more time healing or debuffing enemies but dpsing on healer wasn't a thing unless you were specifically build for it but then you were more of a somewhat self-supporting caster that partnered with actual healers rather than dpsing while filling the healer role.
WoW and Rift both had very tight mana management, fast and strong heals were reserved for emergencies. You spend the majority of your time constantly precasting heals and canceling the cast last second if it would overheal while keeping regens and buffs up. Not just in endgame raids but regular dungeons too. It wasn't because people were bad and uninformed either, it played the same on WoW classic. The way to go was steady, efficient healing so you had the resources for emergencies, strings of crit hits and general bad luck with random mechanics (like a dps getting shot in the face 3 times in a row from something that targets anyone at random).
Even now the Disc priest, which mostly heals through dpsing, spends more GCDs on healing than any decently played healer in FFXIV.

That's one of the things I missed about WoW healing, especially WoW vanilla. You played a healer, but you were rarely DPSing because you were punished WAAAAAY to harshly for it.

[EthanMoonkin]

No. Shadowbringers ruined that for me.

I recently watched some savage raid content from Storm blood and got really sad thinking about how fun it was to play as a healer back then. Sure it wasn't perfect, but there was so much more to do in your downtime. Dots to manage, extra DPS skills to add, even extra utility skills in niche situations.

Now, healers have more healing skills then they'll ever need, low class identity, and mind numbingly dull DPS rotations.

This is something I am hoping(but not expecting) the devs to change in Endwalker, or I'll be leaving the game again, possibly for good.

[Ultaniku]

I can say I still enjoy scholar, I mean it’s not the most complex and it can be spammy, but I’ve loved scholar and that loves still holds true. I like healing even if it can be boring in my downtime so yeah I still say it’s fun for me at least.

[SieyaM]

Damn that sounds wild!
What MMO(s) had 70-80% healing uptime?

Back when I was playing EverQuest Healers spent all of their mana and uptime healing, the damage spells they had were incredibly weak and were not worth the mana cost to bother with. The only exception to this was Clerics using their damage spells against the undead, which they had a line of spells specifically to damage undead enemies that were incredibly cheap for mana and effective. No modern MMO though would ever give a class or job such specific abilities, since it means that for certain situations you would require certain classes for things.

[Truen]

Back when I was playing EverQuest Healers spent all of their mana and uptime healing, the damage spells they had were incredibly weak and were not worth the mana cost to bother with. The only exception to this was Clerics using their damage spells against the undead, which they had a line of spells specifically to damage undead enemies that were incredibly cheap for mana and effective. No modern MMO though would ever give a class or job such specific abilities, since it means that for certain situations you would require certain classes for things.

I disagree. In Everquest Druids and Shamans have huge dps abilities and can very easily sit in a group and contribute significantly to dps /w either dots, straight dps, and even things like snares/slows.

[SieyaM]

I disagree. In Everquest Druids and Shamans have huge dps abilities and can very easily sit in a group and contribute significantly to dps /w either dots, straight dps, and even things like snares/slows.

Druids and Shamans were not what I remember as being dedicated healers, they were more healer hybrids. Especially druids, I don't remember anyone recruiting them just for their healing abilities, it was mostly their snare abilities that you wanted them for. Clerics particularly are what I remember being the class that healing was it's only job.

[Kazukiyashuo]

I see a lot of people talking about the balance of healers and how they can make them all play evenly, but I never see people asking the better question. Are they fun to play? I have been playing healer more since the queues are faster and I enjoy it well enough but it seems over the years the more we moved towards balance of the healers, and other jobs, the less fun they become. When you log in and select your character and the world is loading, are you genuinely excited to get in the world and play your job? Or are you thinking about what kind of DPS numbers the job has and if you should just change to something with better numbers? The fact the people change back and forth between jobs nearly each patch because of the numbers suggests to me that no one is really enjoying the way each job plays, most are just doing the math and playing what has the highest DPS.

Yes all 3 healers and im sure the 4th one will be very fun to play. They are all have unique kit and if u enjoy healing u will enjoy healers. I dunno from world ur playing but in my world many ppl playing healers. Whm seems to be the most popular

[IceBlueNinja]

Other than the boring card divination watered down sleeve draw mess we have atm, ast still is fun to play with its powerful regens/shields and short spell casting. Still would hope of a miracle to get stormblood cards back, I felt alot more busier with ast compared to now then. Still enjoy healer atm least ast, other 2 not quite.