Healers need an overhaul

[Sebazy]

Healers honestly deal too much damage. Yes encounter design doesn't help. Yes healer design could also be better. But even if all that were to change it would still not remove the opportunity cost of using a GCD heal.

I personally think it's less a case of healer's doing too much damage and more a case of encounters valuing damage above all else.

If you go back to a time when fights put more pressure on healers and the difficulty wasn't largely defined by the enrage check, healers weren't focusing on damage to anything like the degree they are now.

Fights used to dish out solid damage outside of key mechanics and this damage could often be highly erratic, it wasn't uncommon for one round of autos/mini busters from a coil boss to be almost entirely parried/blocked down to near nothing, only for the next to be a string of crits that wipes 60% of your tank's HP off in the time that you blink. It's a crazy stark contrast compared to what e have now where even Regen usually isn't worth the GCD anymore. Healer's had to play it safe and babysit the tanks to some extent or the tanks would just randomly get dropped if both dropped the ball for a couple of GCDs.

Another factor is enrage timers themselves. IMO ThordanEX is the gold standard here. It was perhaps the toughest Extreme in the game to this day, yet it's enrage check was incredibly lenient. A decent group at the time would merrily kill it with at least a full phase left to go, possibly 2. What made this work vs the face roll primals we see today was that the fight consistently scaled up in difficulty as it progressed and IMO actually having the full party survive to see enrage was a tougher challenge than killing the boss. A12S was similar in that again, you generally never saw a hard enrage, instead the fountains would usually wipe pugs if you didn't kill it before then. Both cases were a soft enrage done right. Much better than the 'I'm going to just lazily spam AoEs as an MP check for your healers' that we see in recent times.

Simply put, whilst healers deal a meaningful amount of damage, the current design philosophy on content and jobs will force that to be the priority above all else. If you want to change that without addressing the flaws in design, you would need to have healers dealing an irrelevant amount of damage which in this day and age is functionally 0. Given the kits and content we have right now, that's an absolutely horrible idea as you'll end up with healers standing around with nothing to do for minutes at a time in some cases.

Our damage relative to tanks has decreased steadily over the last few years, yet it hasn't diminished the value placed on our DPS one bit. Continuing to reduce it isn't going to change anything except make solo content even more boring than it already is.