An idea about how to solve some of the healing problems

[Grimoire-M]

It's been mentioned many times before that avoidable damage should punish people with damage down debuffs instead of vulnerability debuffs. Healers shouldn't have to work harder to heal because other people are bad. The group as a whole would have to carry the DPS output though. I do think healers across the board should get buffs specifically for GCD healing and things like Esuna. Let's say you cast Cure 2. You're next Glare should be worth twice the potency now. So Two Glares would be the same as Cure 2 and then one Glare. It's such a simple concept to make healers have GCD spells that are worth using by refunding the damage lost. That alone would go far to make healing more enjoyable if you knew helping people wasn't a sure way to hit enrage. Then lots of avoidable damage would feed into good healer gameplay.

I do want to acknowledge a potential alternative that doesn't make sense without a little context, but: Max HP down debuffs (iirc Suppuration is what it's called?) would also work to a limited degree. The main thing is they don't affect raw healing throughput in any way, but they do affect mitigation. Needing extra mitigation to deal with Vulnerability stacks is a common thing, but that's only if you're getting oneshot. Vulnerability (and Infirmity, for that matter) also requires you to pay attention to sustained damage sources (I know there's not many, but not every avoidable mechanic applies Vulnerability either), whereas HP Down doesn't (unless you took so many you're getting oneshot by things you're clearly not supposed to. Something that Tanks will screw up too). And given non-healer roles have a surprising amount of surplus in this area, they can help save themselves. The difference between that and raw healing is some healers (Mostly WHM, if we're being honest) don't have the tools to mitigate everything, so this puts the load specifically on non-healers in certain compositions, or at least keeps Shields relevant.

Having that be the penalty instead of damage could be an option in some cases, such as P2S's acidic water. I don't mind P2S's water as is, but some rando eating a DoT feels like far more work than having to baby them extra at a specific raidwide window. Vulnerability ranges in-between and sometimes on one of those extremes and that's cause it depends a lot more on the context of the fight.

[Rilifane]

I'm a weird one there, but I think that's largely because I play support/healers in most RPGs I've picked up. Straight healing (especially in single-player RPGs) is an infrequent activity in most games. Looking back, I spend most of my time as a support role doing a variety of things. Cleansing debuffs, buffing the party, countering otherwise lethal enemy attacks with the anti-instant death spell, summoning stuff, disabling monsters to give the party a fighting chance against the encounter, and dealing respectable damage while doing so. I enjoy playing healers because they allow me to multitask. Managing four or five different things, fishing through my bag of tricks to keep the party chugging along until my next turn. FF14 doesn't even provide healers a remotely decent multitasking experience, so here I am raging away at awful design with hate hate haaaaaate.

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The first single player and MMOs I played had healers designed to be full-time multitaskers aswell and I'm still as drawn to that design as on the first day I played them. RO had you juggle 6-8 buffs with durations from 15s to 2min, some of them only lasting for one cast or a few hits while healing and debuffing, silence, slow or blind enemies with it's first release, not counting the skills that got added over the years. And the myriad of cRPGs the like Baldur's Gate series and similiar games never encouraged any pure healing; it was ineffective. It was so much better to buff, debuff, cleanse, disable, summon, attack and soak depending on the situation than just spamming the spellbook with healing spells. Nothing like throwing a mass confusion to watch enemies tear at each other.
FFXIV is the first MMO I've ever played that completely dropped the multitasking. It's full deeps mode with healing as sideline activity in case someone screwed up or to occasionally heal the pitiful damage we take.

If I have a toolkit that has synergies, interesting skills and some micromanaging, I don't mind spending a lot of time healing. I think it comes down to micromanagement, whether it's a healing kit or a multitasking kit. I prefer the latter but I can certainly see the appeal of the former, including for myself.
What I absolutely don't like is healing for arbitary reasons, meaning healing for the sake of something that is not threatening and instead just... there. Fill HP bar to X amount. Keep above X % HP for reasons. Heal to stack a buff.
How do DPS feel if a target is attackable but won't drop below 1 HP? They keep attacking it to build resources and because they're bored but it feels bad because they know it doesn't serve the purpose of the role they queued for. Now imagine if that happened constantly throughout the fight.
Or if a tank had to use an enmity combo not so they can tank but because the more enmity they have, the more damage one of their skill does, outclassing the weak dps of their enmity combo. The enmity thing is tacked on and completely meaningless.

PLD had this "higher HP = more damage" with Spirits Within and PLDs and healers hated it. And the effect got deleted (good riddance).
Having to heal without really having to heal because people are not in danger and just want more deeps just feels bad and boring. "Yes, alright, I'll press that stupid unnecessary heal button so you can get your shiny log ffs".

[AnotherPerson]

I certainly Acknowledge I may have overlooked HoTs however I would say is that I specifically came here because I knew that even if this suggestion was amazing (I'm not saying it is), it almost certainly wouldn't be fully formed and that I would have missed things. With that in mind I can think of a few changes to the suggestion that would allow HoTs to function and would also prevent healers from having to spam their abilities like crazy but still encourage higher HP states over lower ones. Firstly I would have a damage buff for players over a lower HP threshold, say 80% instead of 100%. Secondly however there would be a scaling damage buff based on peoples HP% however it would not scale linearly but rather logarithmicly. That way people at low HP would need immediate healing to help their damage but healing players over a certain HP% would yield increasingly diminishing returns to the point that it would almost certainly be better for the Healer to be DPSing. However this would also leave room for HoTs to tick steadily increasing the DPS of those players.

Sounds needlessly complicated and is just a convoluted way that doesn't change anything different from what we have currently.

For any solo MSQ instances or solo duties outside the MSQ, the reason why healing requirements are so low is because DPS is supposed to be able to clear them, but challenging enough because DPS doesn't have that many healing skills to fall back on if they mess up. At the same time, those instances are also made to have a decently high HP threshold so DPS can use their full toolkit. Healers would then be left to do nothing much, if anything as a result when they play well - thus largely ignoring majority of their healing toolkit. That suggestion doesn't do anything for this kind of gameplay, including HoH/ PoTD for solo instances when people want to grab the necromancer title for the job they want to play in.

The most simplest solution is to just... give healers something to do outside of things that could be optional. Mitigation + healing are all optional because damage comes out in waves and isn't always required. No matter how you change the healing formula, it's still not possible to make healers spam GCD heals and then call it "good design" because of these other factors. That's why people just recommend to expand healer DPS toolkit.