Predict the endwalker healing meta!

[Laphicet]

Oh no i can't believe he got you too!

I know you hate it when we say it but this is unfortunately going to be a...now wait for it... WAIT AND SEE kind of thing. And even if the most optimized groups don't run healers that doesn't mean healers have no value outside of that. Not everyone playing this game is going to be playing at that level, for those people having a healer or two will be welcome.

You missed the point of what I was saying. Right now you can easily solo heal any hard content so long as there is no healer-targeting mechs that place stack markers or such the like on two healers. Even then you can still do it but the mechanical complexity increases to such a point it would invalidate the DPS gain for most parties. A big thing though is that you can't do a zero-healer party for most hard content, even with iLVL bloat, the outgoing damage is just too much.

The reason I say zero-healers or solo heal is my prediction is that they are buffing both Healer kits on the healing side AND tank self-heal abilities for all tanks outside of DRK. And with this bloat to these support kits, plus increases in RDMs healing kit and SMN having more ready access to shields, I think you would be able to cut the healer out of things completely provided there's no role bucketing via forced healer target, at least during farm. And with the increase to healer potencies and just more bloating of healer kits I do think you could easily solo-heal during prog with anything but WHM, and WHM could do it with a high-piety build and some ethers. This does assume they won't be increasing outgoing damage, though... but historical record shows that if anything they'll be reducing outgoing damage, so I'm pretty confident in my predictions.

EDIT:
However, there is one big thing keeping solo heal from becoming a thing for higher-end stuff. And that's FFlogs. You see, FFlogs puts anything that's not 2tanks2heals4dps in a category called "non-standard". Non-standard parses don't get added to overall ratings and are basically nonexistent when it comes to your personal records IIRC. This makes it so that a good chunk of people running end-game stuff, parse chaser types, are actively disincentivized from using these non-standard comps as these don't carry as much weight as standard comp parses. If this were to be changed then you'd see a lot more solo-heal parties and maybe even some attempts at no-heal parties even in current content. But for now it's a niche thing that can speed things up greatly in some content.

And like I said before, there is the issue of healer-targeting mechanics going random if there is no healer to target. So all they would need to do is put one very-punishing healer-focused mech in every hard fight and solo heal becomes much more scarce due to the increased coordination required.

It could also be made so that you have to have one shield and one regen healer to get the full "different party members" damage and LB bonus, but such would be a bit vindictive to do and also doesn't matter to people just looking to farm things and get clears... such is moreso a thing for parsers.