It makes absolutely no sense why healers can’t have more things to do during the insane amounts of downtime the game gives them. If not direct dps, then at least like, gcd buffs, debuffs, abilities that indirectly contribute to dps, w/e.

Current design is extremely (maybe an over exaggeration but it is quite bad) antagonistic towards newer/struggling healers. With so much of their potency thrown into a single skill there’s a massive amount of pressure on them to be hitting it as much as humanly possible.

They can’t DoT the enemy and focus on healing because of how much potency they’d lose from not spamming Glare etc, and they can’t buff the party in any meaningful non-cool-down way so they’re still doing ‘something’ contribute damage wise.

Then there’s things like Scholar’s Energy Drain where it’s like, they constantly go on about how they don’t want healing and damage to coexist but then there’s this skill that literally makes you choose between one or the other. Its only 100 potency and only makes a small difference overall, but at the same time with how much importance it’s given for being one of the only optimisations left on the job, surely it’s just going to pressure newer healers into being like ‘need to use this for damage like everyone says!’

Giving healers more than literally one button to contribute isn’t going to make them suddenly become unplayable; if anything it would just alleviate the pressure new healers feel to keep spamming the same button. And giving healers more varied ways to contribute with actual gcds beyond ‘deals direct damage’ is only going to draw more people to the role because it’d be offering options that otherwise simply don’t exist right now