Healers need an overhaul

[Nethereal]

I find the balance team has this thing where they give a job an identity(skill), tie a punishment to said identity in the name of "player choice" and then are surprised when it's not being utilized because the players are being punished for using said identity.

And from the lack of utilization they see: "Well the only thing people want is balance guess we should make everything balance." Instead of "Maybe we shouldn't have tied damage increases to utility."
Almost as if their hubris blinds them to their design failures. "Oh you don't want to use AST cards? Don't worry you won't have any cards to play with when I'm done with you."

And when they removed energy drain from SCH, trying to force SCHs to heal. "Why won't you heal!?!" and then when the backlash came they had to begrudgingly give it back only to release another class later with essentially the exact same skills(SGE) except in a different paint job without energy drain, "You can't complain about no energy drain if we don't give you energy drain. NOW YOU HAVE TO HEAL!"

With the way SGE was additionally touted as being the "damage healer" pre-Endwalkers release you would think they would've figured out you can't tie damage on healers to support skills, but no.
It's the same way all the other healers are and it's a level below the way healers were in Stormblood, every healer in Stormblood(save AST) had more damaging skills than SGE does and SGE is the "damage healer" what a joke.

The fact the healer has to choose between damage and support in a game where damage is everything is a hilarious oversight that the devs have continued to perpetuate up until just the last update to lilies making them damage neutral.
And they can't even give us the common courtesy of making Toxicon damage neutral.

It's as if they're punishing the healers for choosing the superior option, damage, every single time.
"How dare you play the game the way it's supposed to be played you're supposed to heal!"

It's somehow the healers fault the entire game is based around damage not the developers.

The complete disconnect the dev team has to healers is now so obvious to me looking back on these past few years. The first iteration of lilies for WHM was a perfect example of a punishing identity that served no purpose other than to simply exist. Nobody paid attention to it, most people wanted to figure out if they could actually turn off the bar itself instead of just minimizing it. They left it like that for so long hopefully not thinking: "This is fine, everything is working as intended."

Hopefully they get someone on the dev team that understands it's not the identity the players dislike it's the punishment they add to the identity.

Edit:

Oh yeah here's a snippet from a past interview with Yoshi.

We believe trying to heal as little as possible and DPSing instead isn’t what a Healers role should be, so we adjusted all 3 Healers to be more balanced while keeping their original characteristics alive. Content can be cleared on any of the Healers, but Scholar in particular had a much bigger toolkit for attacking and player feedback on Healers always focused on the ease or difficulty of putting out DPS numbers. This is why we wanted to precisely redefine the role a Healer has while balancing all 3 and then giving them characteristics through their attacks. A big part was that we sorted out the remainders you had as a Scholar from being an Arcanist first. Please try to look at the changes as us trying to balance Scholar as a Healer and not just trying to lower the DPS output of a Scholar.

Also Yoshi

Almost all healing spells the Whitemage had required you to cast, they had high healing potency, but you always where in a situation where you had to time your heals to the incoming damage and you had to precast your heal in most cases. You couldn’t start moving until you had finished your healing cast which left very little space for DPSing and the feedback we received indicated that this was causing more stress to the Whitemage players compared to players who played Scholar or Astrologian. Because of this our adjustments on Whitemage tried to focus on increasing possibilities for your next action and making it easier to move instead of just buffing DPS potencies. You can choose to use this mobility for DPSing or preparing for the next heal. In any case main focus for Whitemage adjustments were to increase mobility and give the player more freedom of choice for their next action. In addition, we felt like Healing Lilies were difficult to use efficiently, so we changed these to automatically start charging up once you enter battle. When a Lily is charged, you can use it for instant heals and increase mobility.