The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Archwizard]

On the one hand, I can understand why healers have such simple damage rotations: in theory, you may have to interrupt any complex combos to heal the tank or party.

In practice though, this argument tries to have things both ways. At this point in the game, all healers have so many oGCD tools (versus relatively limited healing requirements) that you rarely have to use any GCD heals outside of downtime, so your rotation is largely DoT, filler, and up to 2 cooldowns, with the place of any actual healing taken by oGCDs.
It's even to the point where the WHM experiment of "emphasize GCD heals with the Afflatus series" fell apart this expansion, and was hardly of value due to the strict timing requirements that GCDs impose. Hell, they even released SGE with this type of design in mind!

That said, with 4 different healers who follow 4 different philosophies, there is no "one size fits all" solution to healing -- or rather, in spite of the homogeneity of their attack rotations, we should avoid such a solution.

For instance, look at Astrologian, arguably the busiest healer thanks to its cards/seals. If we create a system where AST has a more complex rotation, even just adding 1-2 more buttons into the existing mix, we have to weigh that against its already high APM versus other healers, and consider whether the cards should be treated as an existing complication to AST's damage rotation by the same standards as any theoretical evolution to other healers'.
And obviously, regardless of which direction it takes, we can't account for the cards as having their own equivalent when weighing it against WHM or SGE.
Basically, "Is AST already engaging enough to the level we want out of all healers? Would we just be adding more for the sake of adding more?"

I think the most difficult of the healers to balance would have to be WHM however, despite its seeming simplicity.
If the devs truly wanted to make a healer whose powers focus on GCD healing to inform its limited damage arsenal, that solution is quite simple: all you need to do is trim down its direct healing oGCDs and emphasize effects like Plenary Indulgence that enhance GCD heals instead (for instance, transfer Synastry over since it's a waste on AST anyway). The issue however is balancing all of that lost damage uptime -- the intention of Afflatus Misery -- without creating a solution where you're tossing meaningless overheals during downtime just to charge up some mini-LB as now. You can't really say "just give it more damage oGCDs so it loses less to GCD heals" because then you run into players who will continuously attack to the detriment of WHM's healing role while still reaping the oGCD attacks.

Oh, and the solution to SCH will probably require trimming a lot of its healing tools, not least because of how bloated it is. But also, consider how many tools it has for its faeries that are mutually exclusive, and how much potential was lost when Selene was turned into an Eos clone.