Healer changes

[Semirhage]

This thread also does pretty well Summary of Healer Issues

There are absolutely places where veteran healers disagree about the direction things should go, but the largest divide isn't among vets. It's between vets/perceptive newer players and non-healers/the devs/a variety of people from lower-skilled healers to people who just have a frankly outdated hard trinity view on how healers should play.

There's a predictable set of ideas Sylphies put forward that's in line with healer design decisions and sound remarkably like the devs' opinions, and they fly in the face of how the game is designed. The thing is, Several of them aren't technically incorrect; they just completely lack context or misunderstand the approach skilled healers take to encounters. You hear a lot of unhelpful and silly things said around here.

"Your primary responsibility is to heal! You should be healing!" We are. It may sound counterintuitive to someone who doesn't spend a lot of time playing healers, but the goal of a skilled healer is to minimize healing while keeping everyone alive; you don't get a gold star for finishing an encounter with everyone at full HP with mega-shields on top.

"But you should get your fun from healing!" ...what healing? We can run Expert roulette dungeons with no healers. FFXIV's design leans into making most damage avoidable as a reward for doing mechanics correctly. This is an excellent way to do things. It's a reward that's easy to see, and it's not role-specific as far as making you feel good for executing properly. Tiiiiiiiiny problem, if everyone's constantly avoiding damage, what are you healing? You can't add a ton of unavoidable damage on top of the avoidable damage. Square doesn't want content being so punishing and difficult that everyone dies unless the healer is really on top of it all the time. The other solution is improving downtime activity, but Square has balked at that. It could "scare" new players! Having more to do in downtime than cast Glare, how frightening.

One of the issues with offering specific suggestions is that the healer role is beyond restoring one ability or tweaking one potency to make them actually fun to play. The philosophy behind their design direction is the cause of the boring choices that keep getting made here. "Oh healers are pissed? I dunno, give 'em a new healing spell or something, they like healing right?" Think of it like defaulting to bath bombs as a gift for a girl you don't know, when she's got a whole shelf full of them. Not only didn't she need it, but it's also a sign that you've got a fairly one-dimensional view on her personality.

I've done a touch of hijacking over on the DPS forums, and it's mostly because I'm sick to death of non-healer mains saying "eh whatever, healers haven't been fixed because you guys must not be wording your objections right".

There's about 6+ years worth of telling the devs their healer design philosophy is incompatible with fun in this game in hundreds of different ways. Hundreds of suggestions for job tweaks. Hundreds of suggestions for overhauls. Many of them require just an update to the healer role without needing to upend how they design the rest of the game. None of them have worked. They still send us gift baskets with bath bombs every year. "But you're a girl. You like those. Why are you looking at me like that? Oh I get it, maybe you don't like the scent on this one."

EDIT:
Those screenshots above from the Website That Shall Not Be Named? Those aren't just numbers you'll see from a rank-chasing ultra optimized high skilled healer. That's what average players look like. I had a grey clear of UWU that essentially looked like that.