The destruction of BLM

[ddwarbird]

You might want to look into a little-known MMO called 'World of Warcraft'. Of the 7 Healer specs available to play, 3 are explicitly designed with 'do damage as part of your healing gameplay' in mind (Disc Priest, Mistweaver, Holy Paladin), and the other four have talents/abilities that massively feed into allowing you to do damage on the side while your HOTs are ticking/people don't need healing (Resto Druid can Catweave and have up to like 6 DOTs active at once potentially. Holy Priest has Empyreal Blaze to blast out heavy hitting Holy Fires and its new Hero Talent tree, Archon, allows it to use their not-Assize, Halo, a lot more often which deals damage that adds up. Resto Shaman has a talent that makes their Healing Rain (Asylum but a GCD and can have 100% uptime) also deal damage over time to enemies in it).

The only healer that is remotely close in DPS design to FFXIV healers is Preservation Evoker, with a nuke (Living Flame, which also functions as their Cure1), a 30s CD (Flame Breath), a gauge spender that competes for healing resources (Disintegrate) and a 2min burst damage attack (Deep Breath). But even then, Flame Breath can be augmented with a talent that makes it take 80% of the damage it deals, and apply that as healing to an injured ally. Or a talent that makes it so that when you hit enemies with Flame Breath, your Living Flame hits X more targets on the next use, with X being equal to the enemy count hit by Flame Breath (up to 4 bonus targets iirc)

The idea that 'healers heal and that's their whole thing' is a cancer that should have stayed dead after Cataclysm's healing requirements were received so... divisively. M6S has conclusively shown that this playerbase simply isn't prepared for the idea of 'healers heal'

That may be true with modern WoW but I don't remember it being true of Classic or BC. I don't think its unfair for healers to ask for more things to do, maybe something that isn't just being a back up DPS.