The role name "Healer" should be changed.

[Shurrikhan]

Actually, rather than changing the names of the roles, I believe it would be in the development team's best interest to create additional roles to avoid broadening the current roles' definitions too much. Particularly, I think adding in a Support role, at the very least, and moving some existing jobs into it, might help fine-tune the definitions of the roles and may allow them to better balance the roles. In this case, jobs in the Support role would be equipped with a moderate amount of power in DPS output and relative power in other area(s), depending on their focus. A job in the Support role might have a secondary role associated with them.

I'm not sure how much deeper we can go, though, beyond creating role overlap such that, say, taking a turtle-tank and a high-utility-tank, or, playing tanks in those manners, over typically more efficient jobs or behaviors, and replacing one or two of your more generalist DPS picks with ones capable of supporting resource-sustain, mitigation, or healing would allow for a solo "pure healer" over two "effective healers". Granted, as long as that's mostly a matter of behavior, rather than job choice, or at least each job in a given role has an equal amount of compositional flexibility, I'd be fine with that.

But, I don't think we have enough room for an entirely new role, especially as only one or two parts of that "Support" would actually complement or supplement a given comp well enough to allow for actual diversity in playstyles. Nor do I think adding a further enforced role would be healthy for the game.

[Veis_Alveare]

Ok, where have you pointed out that I'm wrong? Simply telling me I'm wrong doesn't make it so, and if you're unable to indisputably exhibit that I am wrong, then you best be right. However, hopefully I don't have to scream into your ear for you to get that regardless of your perspective, it doesn't change how you optimize the healer toolkit. Tell me, what am I stating that is blatantly false? Best be careful to make sure that it isn't just your opinion.

Sure, everyone's objectives in PvE are the same: Kill the enemy, and win. So what? That does very little to prove your point, as this objective is an umbrella that all roles fall under, and if you are keeping the tank and DPS from eating the floor, you are still contributing towards making this happen. However, I'm not going to go back and forth with you all day over what should be elementary basics for you; because I can tell you this, if a player hits the mat and you could have prevented it, then you're not paying attention to what you should be doing. They are going to look right at you.

If you want to go off on a tangent about being a green-DPS, then this tells me your frustration has little to do with me, and more with healer design in FFXIV.

And no, not all jobs are created equal, and a current issue we do have with the game is SEs attempts to homogenize the jobs within a given role. Everyone does have the responsibility of contributing as much damage as possible, but tanks and healers have other responsibilities as well. And we can continue this 'DPS or heals first' debate if you wish, but that is even more redundant than the healer DPS debate, which has been buried for a long time now.

Okay, so I guess youre sold on being belligerently argumentative. That's cool, it doesn't make you correct though.

I pointed out youre wrong because, in the absolute most basic sense, you're using the word 'primary' incorrectly.

Your primary responsibility is to facilitate the victory conditions of the instance. In this game there are no instances where the goal is to heal a target to a certain amount of HP or anything, if there was everyone's job would remain the same though - to win.

You do this by using your whole kit, unless you're a lazy freeloader which we have established that we aren't nor are we talking about them.

You're just jumping to crazy extremes to try to justify your points but all this b.s. about not letting people die to avoidable damage and stuff doesn't matter since I never said that you should do that. Sometimes it is the right decision to let someone die to avoidable damage, be it because they're a mechanical detriment while alive or just a resource drain from repeated deaths. It isn't all that uncommon either. I had it in trial roulette literally this morning, a tank provoke war on Ravana that killed my cohealer and two dps with cleaves. I let the guy die so that we could get things back online then raised him once it was safe to do so. With weakness even when he would voke the other tank could take it back immediately and so we didn't have a spinning blender of a boss.

You can keep strawmanning if you want, at the end of the day no matter what role you queue on your objectives in any content are the same. Clear x room, slay y boss, repeat. It is never "heal these people" that's just a thing we sometimes do to facilitate our actual primary responsibility of killing the enemies before they get us or we run out of time.