Should healers be designed like tanks?

[Semirhage]

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.

I think a big part of this is the war of attrition between healer kits as the years have gone by. All my many, many issues with horrible FFXIV healer design aside, you're right in a practical sense- keeping everyone alive is the true DPS gain.

But when you have, say, Astrologian, who has a crapload of completely free cooldowns that don't cost DPS, are more than enough to cover any outgoing damage, and don't interrupt your damage in the slightest? Playing a job (*cough* WHM *cough*) that has to use personal DPS-negative heals (especially when said personal DPS is the only thing that your job brings to the table, and even more so before DPS-neutral lilies) while the other healer job gets to fart out lossless heals whenever they want, you start clamoring for something similar.

The gordian knot that keeps the discussion focused on personal DPS loss is just how many absurd instant and free heals the healer kits have, and the fact that the largest number of them are on the jobs that are theoretically designed to need them the least.