Regarding healers acting as DPS

[Seryl199]

Nobody posts a video of an 89 minute Fractal and says "look how good we are at this game".

(as long as it is not ridiculosly super-slow.)

You seem to have glossed over this line. You can absolutely be a good healer and not DPS. A good healer can save the group from a botched pull or a missed mechanic, they can be on point with mitigative abilities, shields, and pre-casted heal bombs and AoE's. I agree that a better healer does all that and DPS's too, but not DPS'ing doesn't make someone a bad healer.

Healers sit in a weird place, especially considering that the efficacy of a player's skill is measured in damage output. The mindset of a DPS healer is to do as much healing in as little time possible, and an absolute minimum amount of healing any other time. The healer's role, in this case, is to heal as little as possible. In other words, better healers, drawing from our previous conclusion, are the healers who heal the least. It's a strange paradigm at best. DPS healers exist to the extent that they do because their abilities are massively overtuned for a significant portion of content, they have few supporting abilities in their kit outside of DPS skills, and those few supporting abilities (namely CC), are entirely irrelevant in all instanced content.

As long as healers continue to remain under-taxed, with an often redundant amount of healing power when coupled with a proficient tank, and have no meaningful support abilities, healers will always end up with a certain amount of down time, resulting in healers off DPS'ing. I love pushing my classes to their limits, and since DPS is the only means to do it as a healer, I do it, and I enjoy it, to an extent. But it's far from engaging the actual healing role. We end up using our CD's to create borrowed time in which to DPS, rather than using CD's to combat higher amounts of incoming damage, or unique split healing situations, because such a thing hardly exists in most instanced content. Healers are unique in that they have no real rotation, and much of the role comes down to decision making, what tools to use in your kit when, and yet, there's hardly a choice to be made when most of your abilities can sit unused through much of many battles that don't offer raid levels of challenge.

[Risvertasashi]

The healer's role, in this case, is to heal as little as possible. In other words, better healers, drawing from our previous conclusion, are the healers who heal the least.

There are some healers in my raid LSs that absolutely have this attitude. Their attitude towards DPS (or even tanks) who play with less than absolutely perfection--tell them to git gud and kick them. This isn't just dungeons either... Thordan EX can be solo healed so why take 2 healers when you can have 5 DPS? That's the sort of argument they make. And if they ever stand in something, even if it's not (immediately) lethal--kick 'em.