An idea about how to solve some of the healing problems

[Rilifane]

I'm a weird one there, but I think that's largely because I play support/healers in most RPGs I've picked up. Straight healing (especially in single-player RPGs) is an infrequent activity in most games. Looking back, I spend most of my time as a support role doing a variety of things. Cleansing debuffs, buffing the party, countering otherwise lethal enemy attacks with the anti-instant death spell, summoning stuff, disabling monsters to give the party a fighting chance against the encounter, and dealing respectable damage while doing so. I enjoy playing healers because they allow me to multitask. Managing four or five different things, fishing through my bag of tricks to keep the party chugging along until my next turn. FF14 doesn't even provide healers a remotely decent multitasking experience, so here I am raging away at awful design with hate hate haaaaaate.

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The first single player and MMOs I played had healers designed to be full-time multitaskers aswell and I'm still as drawn to that design as on the first day I played them. RO had you juggle 6-8 buffs with durations from 15s to 2min, some of them only lasting for one cast or a few hits while healing and debuffing, silence, slow or blind enemies with it's first release, not counting the skills that got added over the years. And the myriad of cRPGs the like Baldur's Gate series and similiar games never encouraged any pure healing; it was ineffective. It was so much better to buff, debuff, cleanse, disable, summon, attack and soak depending on the situation than just spamming the spellbook with healing spells. Nothing like throwing a mass confusion to watch enemies tear at each other.
FFXIV is the first MMO I've ever played that completely dropped the multitasking. It's full deeps mode with healing as sideline activity in case someone screwed up or to occasionally heal the pitiful damage we take.

If I have a toolkit that has synergies, interesting skills and some micromanaging, I don't mind spending a lot of time healing. I think it comes down to micromanagement, whether it's a healing kit or a multitasking kit. I prefer the latter but I can certainly see the appeal of the former, including for myself.
What I absolutely don't like is healing for arbitary reasons, meaning healing for the sake of something that is not threatening and instead just... there. Fill HP bar to X amount. Keep above X % HP for reasons. Heal to stack a buff.
How do DPS feel if a target is attackable but won't drop below 1 HP? They keep attacking it to build resources and because they're bored but it feels bad because they know it doesn't serve the purpose of the role they queued for. Now imagine if that happened constantly throughout the fight.
Or if a tank had to use an enmity combo not so they can tank but because the more enmity they have, the more damage one of their skill does, outclassing the weak dps of their enmity combo. The enmity thing is tacked on and completely meaningless.

PLD had this "higher HP = more damage" with Spirits Within and PLDs and healers hated it. And the effect got deleted (good riddance).
Having to heal without really having to heal because people are not in danger and just want more deeps just feels bad and boring. "Yes, alright, I'll press that stupid unnecessary heal button so you can get your shiny log ffs".