How can we really define Healers?

[Risvertasashi]

My problem with "defining healers" is that healers generally have a weird design in the game, They do pretty good damage for a "healer" role so a DPS such as Red Mage or dancer having a strong "healer" utility isn't really really a bad thing in my opinion?

Healers do crap damage and it's gone down, relative to other roles, as expansions have progressed onwards.

It's still optimal to DPS because of the gross abundance of resources (time/MP/job-specific/etc), and because SE makes DPS checks so tight that - in high level content - it can still be difficult to impossible to beat the DPS check without the lowest damage people contributing.

I much rather have healers be a sort of spec option for general designs lets say "RDM/PLD/DNC" could theoretically spec into a Healer role with selectable abilities (that would generally hurt your dps), this would apply to other roles possibly having tanking specs or dps specs ect, I feel like allowing jobs to be more flexible instead of forced into a single category would be pretty fun, but I know it wouldn't really happen, because it would be too drastic from the rigid formula we got, I think the general rigid design really doesn't help a lot of jobs in Identity.

I like design that makes Jobs more flexible, Current red mage can't replace a healer in healing in hard content, i think it becomes a problem if it could (with current design anyway), I personally would like looser "roles" like "PLD has to be a tank" "RDM Has to be a DPS" "Sage has to be a healer" Obviously this would cause a lot of imbalance anyway so again it wouldn't happen I just wish it was less rigid then current.

And games designed like this often leads to the death of healers outside of specific bits of content that really need them.

FF14 already doesn't need healers in dungeons and much other content. Take away the role requirement from the duty finder by allowing anyone with a "heal spec" to do it, and it's dead.

I think my "favorite" example of this was Secret World - wherein people would want you to take a heal spec for perhaps 1 of 5 fights in a dungeon, and just be pure DPS the rest of the time.

Now, the trend in MMOs overall is to delete healers, but, yeeeah, I don't want it here. We've gotten close enough as it is.