Healers need other ways to contribute to party DPS instead of boring filler spells.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

SE claims they don't really want healers to DPS in this game, and that they don't design content with healer DPS in mind. So it's highly unlikely we'll see any changes to the basics of how healers DPS.

I think either way something is going to have to give. SE needs to either make healer DPS a legitimate, supported thing with the abilities to reflect it, or they need to make the actual healing part take up more of your time. This whole setup of "you heal for a little bit then spam Stone/Broil/Malefic because there's nothing else to do" is getting really really old.

I would personally rather they go the second route, because I signed up for healer, not for Green DPS.

While I thoroughly enjoy the concept of healers contributing damage compared to simply being heal bots, SE went too far in the opposite direction in their pursuit to make everything easily accessible. To emphasise this point to someone arguing healers need to stop being green DPS, a friend and I purposely queued into Phantom Train Normal and elected not to touch a single DPS ability. I even ran out of range before using Assize just to assure the only time I ever did any damage was to kill my ghost. I was literally useless. At no point in the entire fight did either of us require a second healer. The damage proved so laughably low, I could have gotten up and made lunch and no one would have realized. We promptly played normally on a second run and both spent approximately 80% of our time DPSing. That is utterly absurd. I know Sigma Normal is somewhat dated, but this were possible on day one.

Yoshida has gone on record lamenting how Warriors refuse to use Defiance. Much in the same capacity as healers, I say, "Give them a reason to care about something besides damage."

[Elamys]

While I thoroughly enjoy the concept of healers contributing damage compared to simply being heal bots, SE went too far in the opposite direction in their pursuit to make everything easily accessible. To emphasise this point to someone arguing healers need to stop being green DPS,

well, yeah, that's not good either. the problem is there's going to need to be a real shift in either how damage is dealt in this game (unlikely to happen) or how SE approaches healers to DPS (also probably not going to happen). My preference would be the first, but since it seems unlikely at this point that they want to even touch this, I'm just assuming we've got another expansion full of boring healing coming up.

Not here to say healers shouldn't DPS or that it should even be completely removed from the game entirely (I used to get a lot of satisfaction out of maximizing my DPS uptime), just that the game needs to really look at healers more.

[Selvokaz]

The fact that AST don't have spells that invoke various arcana to debuff enemies either single target or multiple targets is baffling to me. They have arcana to buff party members but can't do the opposite to the enemies? Weird. Where the opposite of the normal arcana happens to a enemy or all enemies depending on what royal road effect you have. You could simply have a new ability called reverse arcana to achieve this. Now the AST has another way to contribute to the party's dps without it needing to be dps herself.

Why can't white mage learn a new chain of spells that invoke the forest spirits/elements to debuff various stats like str, intelligence, and so on. We know the stats must exist for the enemy as DPS Casters have a role action that lowers intelligence.

Scholar seems the most busy healer since it comes with a lot of utility from arcanist base class. So I doubt it needs much.