What if Tanks were treated like Healers?

[Eorzean_username]

People playing Healers don't do so because they want to be a third-rate DPS with a DPS rotation and none of the damage. If people want a DPS rotation, they want DPS damage, otherwise they're doing far more work for far less benefit, and when people play Healers, it's because they DON'T want to generally do damage, and 2 or 12 damage buttons doesn't really make much difference anyway other than annoyance factor.

It's probably more complicated than this, if you look at games like WOW or SWTOR or (etc), where Healers have "a lot" to potentially do during Healing down-time, and many of them take some amount of pride in doing so — despite often contributing even less DPS, proportionally, than XIV Healers do.

As has been said elsewhere, players sometimes "like" things "just because they like things" — and trying to tie it too closely to an excessively-scientific logic, reasoning, or egalitarianism can sometimes end up of veering way off course.

eg: Does Holy Paladin in WOW receive a significant numerical payoff from mixing it up in Melee range with their DPS tools? As of right now, no... not really.

But it's still there, and they still do it, because it feels cooler than standing back and lobbing purely-ranged healing.

Same for the pretzel-charts of shapeshifting that a Resto Druid might engage in to try to really maximise their Mythic+ contribution — it's usually not coming anywhere close to a "real DPS", but there's no reason not to once all the correct HOTs are rolling, and so they have fun(?) doing it anyway.

(And so on)

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I think that people are too quick to characterise what "Healers", collectively, want — in all directions — possibly because Healing / Support roles seem to attract a very diverse group of mindsets compared to, say, Pure DPS roles (who are usually content to just focus on their own business and maximise damage).

This may, in fact, contribute to the what-seems-to-be intense confusion that the XIV design team is constantly contorting themselves into when trying to further or adjust Healer design — They want to make "everyone" happy, while also ensuring that "everyone" is welcome in "every" piece of content... something overambitious in the best of cases, but especially-difficult when dealing with how broad the range of mindsets are in Healer/Support-attracted players.