Quote Originally Posted by linayar View Post
The simplest solution is to remove DPS healing and mitigating abilities, at least reduce (if not remove) tank healing abilities (but leave them with mitigating abilities), and increase the damage for DPS (and to a lesser extent tank) relative to healer. The downtime between heals for healers would be reduced naturally just because the fight would go faster and there would be more need to heal and less need to deal damage because it would be a smaller percentage of party DPS.

Either way, hard to do or not, nothing they've done INCLUDING making healer damage abilities simpler (which actually encourages people to deal damage in between healing) says that they actually want healer to deal damage less and just be a "pure" healer. So I still say it's more about simplifying the role rather than a simple don't-do-DPS directive. Anecdotally, when I see that it's not uncommon for healers in roulettes (especially for full party and alliance, less so on light party) to be high on the enmity list (granted, healing also increases enmity), I don't think the game has ever said that healers should not deal damage.
It would reduce downtime only marginally. I've spent enough time in PFs where absolutely nobody used Addle/ Feint/ ranged mitigation and even tank raid mitigation was sparse at best if used at all and all it did was force to hardcast here and there but usually still single digits for a ~10min fight. And in casual content, those skills don't get used at all.
All it would achieve is that healers get even more frustrated than they are now because they're getting even less bang for their bucks but they'd still try to squeeze out dps where they can. Even if it was a 10 potency skill, people would spam it. It's not just out of neccessity that healers spam dps skills, it's because nobody wants to feel useless by standing around more than half the fight without anything meaningful to do. Literally anything is better than standing around.
Heals are insanely powerful compared to incoming damage and good healers use skills like Neutral, SS or Cure III once in a blue moon even though they are powerful because it's simply overkill.