Should healers be designed like tanks?

[AmiableApkallu]

"Should healers be designed like tanks?"

I think this is the wrong question to ask. As I said elsewhere:

If you want to ponder the design philosophy of healers, start with the design philosophy of combat.

Damage comes in two forms: avoidable and unavoidable. Nominally, healers exist to mitigate incoming damage and restore HP after damage hits.

A party playing well reduces avoidable damage to zero. DPS playing well reduce the amount of time available for damage to go out (mobs and bosses die sooner rather than later). Tanks playing well make it more predictable who receives damage (the tanks) and reduce it (mitigations). In other words, a party playing well works to eliminate the reasons for having the healer role in the first place, a profound sort of anti-synergy that tanks and DPS do not suffer from.

Thus, healers and their kits are designed to accommodate some amount of mistakes and some minimal level of player skill, including that of the healers themselves. To arrive at a different design, you'd necessarily have to recalibrate how damage goes out in combat and recalibrate the minimal skill level required to clear content.

The game already has 15 jobs designed around DPS kit/rotation + oGCD abilities. That's not the problem with redesigning the healers. The problem is the wide variance in content and player skill that healers are expected to cover for.

To make this concrete: What does the redesign of Raise look like?

This would largely solve the issue of heals being damage negative while making the game's design a little more consistent.

Imagine an honest-to-God heal check: the party wipes if the healer doesn't cast a heal, and lives and clears if they do cast. Calling that heal "damage negative" is absurd. Clearing means you dealt more total damage than when you wiped. A marginally higher DPS rate is irrelevant if the party wipes to HP bars hitting zero.

Necessary heals are indirect contributors to DPS rate and total damage delivered. In a game where all that matters is getting the enemies' HP down to zero before people give up (or the party hits an enrage mechanic), you wouldn't cast a heal if you didn't think it would contribute to that goal in some way, shape, or form.