Why is the healer class basically a one spell dps class?

[Halfgeeek]

...why? Healing has a limit to its usefulness. Damage does not. As currently designed, damage is the thing healers contribute toward their skill ceiling after the healing is settled. If you hardcap that with cooldowns, all you're doing is killing skill expression. What do you do when the healing is over? /dance?

This only works in games that have
a) significantly more frequent and/ or higher incoming damage
b) the option to chose your party comp without hard or soft restrictions

FFXIV has neither. Damage is infrequent and fairly low even in savage with the exception of the occasional heal check on the last boss and party comps are usually set to 2 tanks/ 2 healers/ 4 dps because of mechanics targeting both healers and tankbusters that need a tank swap.
So having unlimited healing but limited dps is exactly what we should not have. Even in fairly messy runs I spend less than 10% of my GCDs on healing/ ressing, if you flip GCD and oGCDs, I'd spend most of my time picking my nose unless they nerf heal GCDs so hard I need multiple casts for every scratch - which would just replace one 1 button spam with another because of the way how skills are designed.

This i agree with, as I said, the devs have gone down this rabbit hole of OGCD healing and their encounter design not requiring constant healing has turned healers into DPS with some heals on the side.

I'm used to MMO healers focus on healing, since the group content in games I have years with, the damage incoming is very high and constant.

Folks here want a more complex dps rotation for healers, because they are forced to be dps most of the time. There's a clear disconnect in the healer design and content that is going to require a total revamp of EVERYTHING if:

1) Making healers have a complex DPS rotation and still able to heal hard content

or

2) Making healers heal the majority of their grp gameplay instead of dpsing