Healers need an overhaul

[Shurrikhan]

My point is that you can already do all these things right now, you have the freedom to make any of these choices right now. Why don't people make most of these choices? Because it loses them damage. That's log mentality and it's damaging the healer role, if you need to heal, you heal, it shouldn't matter if it loses you damage as damage shouldn't be your main focus in the first place. Making more and more heals damage neutral only feeds into this log mentality and hurts the role further, even now you'd sometimes see healers that do literally no healing if they have no free healing available, they'd rather let the party die than cast anything that loses them damage.

Making everything as damage neutral as possible also removes the need for choice. You say you'd have more choices available, yes, you would, but all the reasons for making those choices will be completely removed. Why consider your next move when they all do the same thing? If you cast a damage neutral Cure III here to top up the party, what's the difference between that and using an Afflatus Solace under Plenary?

It still seems really strange to me to call wanting to optimize damage "Log mentality", especially when in modern fights so many of the mistakes that could cause a wipe to enrage are not undoable through healing...

...Which, as Ren, Zebra, and others have said earlier, is the core of the issue: to paraphrase, Healers' healing has shockingly little agency anymore. There is a very low ceiling on the kind of rDPS we can produce by indirect means beyond "no one died to unavoidable damage".

And while we could additionally try to fill that lack with support spells and other more interesting downtime skills, I think at the base of all else, we need first/also to have the means of producing more effect for our party through our core healing tools themselves.

Now, I agree that job design should be changed, too, in addition to encounter design. I'd love to see fewer redundancies within our kits (partly through trimming or consolidating some tools and revising them for more versatile use cases; partly through revitalizing what remains thereafter), and enough complexity outside of healing as to still be stimulated in environments with low healing requirements.

That said, on the premise fixes to either one would reduce the urgency or reasonable ambition of fixes to/within the other... I might have to recommend encounter fixes first, if that were at all pragmatically possible (which... it may be, if we could just figure out a broadly applicable method). That is because then we can make sure that we're not simply 'apologizing' our way out of a core kit/role issue, and instead are building on a solid foundation.

Now... on the other hand, if we're only allowed bandaid fixes because the devs are utterly unwilling to bite the bullet and actually give decent space for skill expression within the healing component of healers... then, yeah, kit changes are unfortunately the only reasonable path to go. But, limiting our suggestions to what we expect the devs would actually do is akin to an oath of silence altogether, so...

A variety of outcomes means more than 2. I didn't say only 1 choice has to be right, I said that I want to see choices that are wrong for each situation, we have no wrong choices that doesn't lead to either a failure of your job or losing damage. I'd rather see options that are 50% wrong or 75% right, not a 0% or 100% binary pass/fail condition. That's why I said that damage refunds is the way to go, not full damage neutrality. Damage refunds also give room to grow as you can fall back on refunds until you've fully planned out the fight, in which case you get to see your damage go up as you're rewarded for your experience (in other words, a skill ceiling).

My point about full damage neutrality removing the reason for choice is that, if you've been given a bunch of tools to deal with a situation, but they all lead to the same result (party alive, no damage loss), then there's no reason to even choose. Choice in that case is an illusion, it all brings you to the same end. The only thing stopping you from doing a Swiftcast Medica now instead of an Afflatus Rapture is that the Medica loses you damage. If that Medica no longer lost you damage, you can choose whether you want to use that Afflatus Rapture or a Swiftcast Medica, but the meaning of the choice is lost.

Agreed. I'd much prefer this.

That said, I don't honestly even care that, well, anything gets damage-refunded. Any "damage-refunding" is, in balance, almost certainly all being pulled from the same budget of expected potency-per-minute anyways (the more 'refunded' potency, the less potency per actual attack to compensate).
Lilies made sense for damage refunding only because they're WHM's form of free healing that allows WHM to stack multiple soft-utilities (mobility, weave space, MP conservation) atop that usual oGCD damage-neutrality, which is honestly kinda awesome as a little twist of design (especially when adding the bit of the fun of the redemption method itself, Misery), but they're no basis for broader damage-neutrality anyways, as getting those Lilies into the kit came at cost to free healing within the kit by other means (e.g., typical oGCDs) anyways.