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

[ASkellington]

The pushback is generally from people that want more damage spells (yet complain about healing being trivial) and not wanting the solution to be "make healing non-trivial". People even have insisted it can't be done because it would require all past fights to be backdate changed...which is odd since (a) they've never had an issue with that before and (b) that's the way the game originally worked.

Yes the push back is more damage spells because

1 - Some fights would have to remade because even with less oGCDs, good healers are bored. Just because I'm more engaged at 70 than 90 doesn't mean I'm still PROPERLY engaged at 70. Bosses have too long of wind ups, not many of them target someone that ISN'T the tank, too much of their damage is avoidable and so most dungeons I'm STILL only healing with oGCDs in the 60-70 range. If you want more healing, the fights are going to have to change. Why is this a problem? Have you seen how long it took for SE to actually change them? If reducing the healing spells, and supplementing more damage spells is faster, then yes, I would rather add more damage spells.

2 - SE doesn't want to give the alternative: support tools. AST cards and BRD's change from SB to Shb speaks to this. They don't want to take the time to make impactful spells for healers to use outside of mitigation. Caster's are allowed to have an AOE sleep, but healers are stuck with Repose and NEITHER even work on the bosses. We can't even use either like a form of Head Graze/Interject. We don't even have an AOE Esuna! So if SE isn't going to give us any supportive tools, rather takes them away because if we don't use them then we're going to fail apparently, then all we're going to get is damage so we may as well ask for damage.

3 - EVEN IF SE decided to do the above, we will STILL have instances to where our dps rotation is monotonous. Especially in solo content where it is highlighted front and center. Support tools? Don't need them. Healing? Don't need them. What are we left with then? Broil/Dosis/Glare/Malefic and our DoT and w/e extra healing tools we use as damage because, while we don't need the healing at all we can still use the damage to kill the sponge (ES, Lord of Crowns, Toxicon, Misery, Assize). In group content, you're still going to have down time where you aren't going to be buffing or healing, so what is the excuse to not make all healer's dps tools a bit more engaging?

I replay plenty of fights I still find fun due to either wipefests if I'm lucky (Dun Scaith, Orbonne) or just because I don't have access to as many tools (60-70 fights), or even ones that are still relatively challenging (Amaurot, Dead Ends) at the "level cap", and I'm STILL pressing 1 way too much. And Amaurot actually hits hard.

All of this to say, SE doesn't design fights for engaging healing. DoTs are either Esuna'd and Esuna doesn't have a CD so if it is automatically reapplied who cares? OR hit like a ray of sun through a window glass and either don't need to be healed at all, or can easily be healing through with a simple HoT. Boss mechanics, as I've said, are way too spaced out (want a good example? Smileton is ridiculous with it) and again, don't usually hit random party members so you don't even have to do spot healing which would break it up. AoEs are too avoidable. Which usually leaves unavoidable raid wides and tank busters. Well tanks mitigate tank busters and they don't really hurt. And raid wides also, don't hurt. And both always come on a long enough cool down to where you have something up, even in lower levels.

We need more bosses like Diabolos or Ra La. The former has tank busters frequent enough in the second phase to where the tank CAN'T mitigate them all at 60 and the latter actually makes me cycle through all my oGCDs like a proper boss should.

That requires a major rework of too many fights for it to be feasible (and in some cases it doesn't need to be that drastic but you get the point) and I don't see SE even MAKING fights in the upcoming expansion like this let alone fixing older ones, which is why we ask for damage.