Quote Originally Posted by Colt47 View Post
Healers are problematic anyway just because of having to target something other than opponents. Think about it: If an enemy attacks a player in this game, the enemy is usually auto targeted so there's no need to think about having to move and click the target or tab to it. For healers, there is no equivalent for players. If someone is getting hit by a monster, the fastest way to swap to the player is sometimes to target the monster and then do target of target. Then you have to pick out what healing skill to use, which typically means prioritizing OGCD heals first before those with mana cost and/or cast times. That's before including the decision to use something that cuts MP costs down or allows instant casting like swift cast.

Cutting back on the total needed healing skill bloat and giving healers a similar design to tanks (only for healing) probably would help with the popularity, but I think the player targeting aspect would make them more complicated to run than a Tank under any kind of situation.
With the GCD being around 2.5 seconds, the time a player has to switch targets is quite generous. You can start casting a GCD action and switch targets comfortably before you are lagging behind your GCD usage. Weaving oGCDs might require a bit more attention, but even with controller, flipping through the 4 other players in the party takes at most 1-2 seconds (Consider that you will always flip through 4 targets at most even in 8 man parties if you start from the bottom or the top of the party list).

I'd say target switching from Tank to Enemy is quite seamless, even with a controller (I'd argue its even faster on a controller as it just requires 2 inputs: Pressing down on the pad, which switches your target to the first member of the party list and then pressing the appropriate action button.)

That being said, fumbling with your target has happened to me on occasion, especially when I play as an AST, which is a problem that is not really expanded by more DPS actions, as you currently are constantly switching between DPS and Healing anyway. It would just increase the variety of the DPS actions you'd press rather than the frequency of healing downtime.