A question: What makes a Healer "easy/simple" or "hard/complex"?

[ASkellington]

What makes healer easy? Its simple really. We have too many healing tools that the game doesn't make use of and lack of interactions with them all. Someone already pointed out AST, but I'm going to use it since I know the class so well.

Collective Unconciousness (CU), Celestial Opposition (CO), Earthly Star (ES) and I'll even put Horoscope here are all on a 60 cooldown with raidwides (both in dungeons, raids, and EX) coming in at AROUND the 60 mark. That means I usually have 3-4 heals up every raidwide and can usually use the same one for the same mechanic - there fore, its boring.

Further, CU and CO are just regens. I hit a button and it HoTs. CU has the benefit of also having a mitigation on it, but in 90% of content I don't need the mitigation, so why would I use CU which requires my party to stand it in when I can press CO instead? It makes it a dead skill in most content. Another point to being boring. I want a choice between my abilities and I want them to matter.

Then there is the problem of lack of interactivity. Take Synastry for example. Its an ability where you can press it on one person and if you heal another, they get 50% of the healing, yet, it only works on Benefic and Benefic 2. A.Benefic doesn't apply the HoT to the person, (though it does, apparently apply the initial heal), and it doesn't work with Celestial Intersection (CI), Essential Diginity, OR even Exaltation because those are healing ABILITIES and not healing SKILLS. For what reason? Do explain SE. Making Synastry work for all of our single target abilities would make it more interesting.

I'm going to ignore Noct Sect's interesting mechanics were AST actually have been able to stance dance. But that too would make healing more fun and interactive.

What I am going to end on is an example:

My AST at lv70 vs my AST at 90.

At 70 I have ES, CO, CU, ED and of course my GCD abilities. Vs at 90 I have all of those, 2 charges of ED and CI each, Macrocosmos, Neutral Sect, Horoscope, Exaltation. At 70 I need to space out my healing. Maybe even saving one of my oGCDs for a specific mechanic meaning that if I need to use them earlier due to party member's mistake I have to supplement that tool I don't have for something else.

Where as for at 90, it doesn't matter if I use ES on cooldown for damage. I have 5 other tools that are just as good. Or, worse, I have 3-5 tools I am not using because no one is taking damage because the fights are undertuned for how many healing tools we have.

That is why I believe healers are so easy. Because it isn't just AST that suffers from this problem. All four do in some respect.