Sage's Phlegma 1/2/3 should be a ranged attack

[Rongway]

People in here bringing up uniqueness/identity and the availability of Ikarus to deal with it.

It's not even that. All healers, casters, and rangers should be parked closer to the boss than many healer, caster, and ranger players seem to be comfortable with. The biggest error in OP's post is not "Phlegma should have longer range." OP's big mistake is "It's a bother having to approach the target to do this attack skill before running away to a safe distance again where healers belong." Healers don't belong at long range because if they're at long range

1. they don't cover the tanks, and sometimes melee DDs, with their AoEs
2. they have to run farther to get out of cones
3. they have to run farther to get into donuts
4. they have to run farther for stacks

Long range is not a safe place to be. Rangers and casters don't belong at long range because of the same reasons except replace (1) with "they won't receive AoE heals". This is not a unique problem to sage. I've been at the edge of my AoE range almost not hitting the tanks and melees and still had to ask rangers and casters not to stand so far away from the boss because they're not getting AoE heals. I still would have had to ask that if I were playing any other healer because even after the expansion of many actions to 30y every healer still has 15y actions and none of them want to waste resources or GCDs single-target healing stray DDs when they would have been healed to full by the AoE heal if they just weren't out of range in the first place.