There's no doubt that these changes are a sizable nerf to the solo healer in a cabal defense scenario that doesn't include any other PC defenders. Unfortunately, we couldn't come up with a way around this that we liked, at least not that wouldn't have taken far more time than we were interested in investing in the problem.

We left the various "non-spammable" healing abilities alone because while they might have some impact, there's a huge gap between them and a communer spamming rejuv or heal on a NPC. You're right though, healer first aid doesn't trump other similar abilities, and I'm fine with that. If we find out that a lone ranger is somehow keeping their outer healed faster than a decent mid-rank retriever can handle than we'll look into that, but I haven't seen that to be the case yet.

Right now all I can offer is two thoughts:

1) These changes wouldn't make me any less likely to play a healer, which I've done a few times in the past. But for what it's worth, I tend to prefer exploration and big group battles where these changes don't come into play as significantly. Likewise, my play times aren't typically such that I need(ed) to heal NPCs to be at all effective.

2) We went into this change knowing it was simple but impactful, and we certainly intend to pay attention to how it plays out. It might remain as-is forever, or it might not. I very much dislike rolling back a change or making follow-up changes too early or with too little information, but I'm not against doing so entirely. We'll see how it goes.