How can tanking and healing be made more broadly useful in more "role-specific" ways?

[Reinha]

Healing and tanking has been handled very differently here than in WoW (which I'll use as an example), and I think the key to making tanking and healing less about dps is making them less overpowered in their own role and having less predictable encounters. Fights could have a degree of randomness regarding damage taken, damage could keep coming between mechanics and healing/tanking toolkits could be more limited and require active usage.

In WoW there are random damage hits on party members, heavier boss autoattacks, boss crits with a bigger impact, short cooldowns and random targets for aoe heals (consider a 10-15 second cooldown for Medica and Medica II hitting only 4 random targets), short cooldowns for basic tank mitigation (consider Inner Beast or The Blackest Night replacing tank stance and having to hit it every 10-15 seconds to survive basic damage) and less powerful tank buster cooldowns (shorter duration, less damage reduction). Tank swaps occur more often and the cooldown on Taunt (Provoke) is shorter. Healing in WoW is much less powerful than here and you actually use your single target heals on people, because aoe healing targets random people or eats a quarter of your MP and you don't have the means to recover MP as well as here. Heals are less powerful and Medica II equivalents are considered "raid cooldowns" (usually a 3 min cooldown) which get coordinated with other healers for certain mechanics. Having a raid wide cooldown on resurrections makes it more punishing to die in raids, so healers have to be on their toes for people's mistakes (small mistakes are often recoverable with some healer attention).

Healers in WoW can do damage but they lack powerful damage tools like Holy. Tanks do a decent amount of damage with their regular rotation (mitigation and damage are not mutually exclusive), but can increase damage with talent choices and gearing. Slowing multiple enemies and kiting them is also a thing which can be done to survive big pulls and make tanking more engaging.

What keeps the roles accessible to less than average players are the lack of near-death damage spikes and the focus on sustained mitigation and healing, and also the not very demanding dungeons and raids at the easiest difficulty. Danger in this game occurs when people aren't topped off in time for a big hitter, but in WoW danger occurs when people get lower and lower on health as the healers can't keep up with incoming (random and unavoidable) damage because they didn't find the balance between mana-heavy strong heals and cheap single target heals. I find that the latter approach can give a gradual increase in difficulty across different content and train people for end game, whereas the former kind of danger is either deadly for the unprepared or totally insignificant (like a dungeon tank buster which can be taken without mitigation and no damage follows it).

[NocturniaUzuki]

Forgive the perhaps unrelated introspection, but I've come to the realization that, after reading many of the responses on this thread, some of my own previous (and often controversial) arguments have been clarified.

Why am I so "obsessed" (as some people have called it) with unconventional gameplay?
Why am I so frustrated by the DPS-centric mindset?
Why do I think that the old Spear card was the best AST card in the game?

The answer to all of those really just comes down to my disdain for the predictability of FF14:

Much of the reason I run old content on MinIL is because a) I don't know the fights, so it feels more unpredictable, and b) most other people don't know the fights, so they get hit more, making my job as healer more adaptive.

I run content with freeform comps because I have adapt to the situation. If I'm healing, the aggro is often going all over the place as well, again making it unpredictable.

I dislike the DPS-centric mindset because it is essentially the product of the predictable nature of the game. "Why save your cooldowns for the sake of safety when you know everything that is coming? Just use it all to increase your DPS."

"Faster clears are always better." Except that the longer the run takes, the more chances there are for the unpredictable to happen.

Why am I so obsessed with 4-player Royal Menagerie? Because it's one of the few fights with a fairly hefty amount of randomness.

Mathematically, the old Spear is proven useless, from a DPS perspective; however I always argued that math could not account for unpredictability. Ultimately, when battles become very unpredictable, the question of safe versus aggressive healers becomes far more pronounced. And reducing cooldowns becomes a very potent tool for raising the odds of being prepared when in a very unpredictable situation.
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Annnnnnnyways, to try to pull this introspection a bit more on topic, the question of pursuing a less predictable form of gameplay I think depends largely on how the playerbase will respond to it. While players are quick to complain that things are too easy, and suggest that elements of randomness could alleviate this problem, I'm not sure how popular it would be, overall. How many players are prepared for the inevitable excess of wipes the introduction of randomness would create? It seems to me that the playerbase is strongly centered on predictability now, after so many years of it. The addition of randomization would certainly prove to be a challenge, especially for players with stronger memory, but weaker decisive reactions. Perhaps such bosses could be introduced as a new type of dungeon. Or perhaps trials could become the more randomized battles, while raids remain predictable. That in turn could cause a serious split in the playerbase, though.

In terms of ideas for new approaches, I'll throw another upvote on the Bardam's Mettle system, which was mentioned earlier. I very much enjoyed the second boss. However, it was still very scripted. Throwing in randomization would make it a lot harder. As kikix12 said, you can also do

A battle where survival ends up winning it.

. Memories of Cromm Cruiach from Vindictus spring to mind...