How can we really define Healers?

[Recon1o6]

Healers are the same way they've been since the start

Primary role: clear the encounter by damaging the boss and keeping the party alive through unavoidable damage
Secondary role: heal the party through avoidable damage and res the dead.

You cannot clear any msq duty without doing dps. Nor can you do it as a healer if you let your comrades kick the bucket. SE won't give us the echo so we have to heal ourselves.

[Hysterior]

1. Change the name "Healer" to "Support" so it doesn't give the impression that you are just healing (because at this point we all cast more DPS skills than healing ones)
2. Improve our DPS "rotation" or at least skill variety so we are more similar to tanks (A proper DPS rotation to follow but some actions linked to our role on top)

Make it happen in 7.0. Thanks!

[Risvertasashi]

Just thought this comment from the recent live stream might be of interest to the discussion here:

Q2: For this Savage, there seems to be a serious lack of healer participation going on. My question here to you is: Are you aware of the reason and is there something you will reflect on, and if any are there plans to address this issue (that is within the means and intention of the dev team), and if there is, may I know the plan to address the issue?

YoshiP: (Super long paused followed by a long "hmmm") Things to reflect on......things to reflect on? Well for one I did read something written on Matome (Summary) sites, something about "Green skin"※......Hmmmm? (another long pause) ...n...nothing much I can say about that... But we also experience situations where there is a serious lack of tank participation and this seems to depend on the timing and situation...(another long pause) If I have to make a comment about it, I think the reason would be because it's a high difficulty content, and there are other factors which contributed to this issue....well, this is hard to answer...I mean there's also the request we got from players that asks us to create more situations that require healers to heal, and among other things that is asked of us...(another long pause) So in this case, due to certain circumstances and certain "wall" which caused deviations (biases?) to occur, and this is definitely a thing after operating this game for a long while, but as for the state of healers right now, I think it's just an extremely......I mean this simply is due to the healer population in general as well as the population of raiders participating in this tier...but if I have to say anything on this matter what I am able to say at this point is "please give healers a try", and that's what I want to convey, since this is a game where you are allowed to handle multiple roles, and when you try playing a completely different role you'll definitely find something interesting through that experience....hmmm...well we will need to observe the situation a little more...yeah.

※ - A meme referring to "actually a DPS job in a healer skin"

Q7: This is a question regarding the fourth floor of Savage (P8S), the Savage content, which includes the DPS check required, is definitely a challenging content, the healing check for the second half of this battle was really tight and compared to Dragonsong Reprise (DSR), I feel that there are certain parts in the second half of the battle contains healing check that is required which is comparable to what Ultimate would require, personally I welcome the increase in healing intensity but it causes the parties to be lack of healers when it comes to PF recruitment (be it progging or weekly clears) so I wonder what is your thoughts and opinion on the matter?

YoshiP: Ok I mean as I said before (and this happened before), if I give an answer to one question, it won't work on the other one (for some reason). Ok, we are told that (healers) are free, which is why healers tend to focus on firepower instead, and we should give healers more situations where they need to heal, and we increased the healing work required here...well I mean for the entire expansion and we did it but as expected this happens....so what are we supposed to do now hahaha...oh god if any I should be the one trying to discuss with you guys here. Aaaaaaahhh I mean yeah I knew this will definitely happen (long sigh). Well I mean I thought we've achieved quite a good balance here....(long ponder), Well yeah I mean if I have to start decreasing the difficulty and I'll get comments that it's too lax (laughs). Well I will need data...either way we did indeed increase the intensity for sure, although this was the balance that was asked of us......I mean this is personal disparity, yeah, there are healers who are completely fine with this tuning, and there are other healers who would go "this is too hard I can't do this".

Yeah I apologize but please allow us to continue ponder on this matter and find out what is best and this is what we can do here.

[Anxin]

Wouldn't that just lead back towards tactics in which partys let certain dps, back in the day I think it was BLM, ignore mechanics to fish for higher dps output?

Perhaps, but this would require the DPS and the healers to coordinate again. People always fish for higher dps output; that is, after all, part of the puzzle of encounters. I can also see healers griefing parties by disrupting the boss's script in ways to get "lols". However, I just wanted to point out that there is a lot more SE could do beyond the current range of thinking without changing their encounter design philosophy. Namely, introduce control-skills that have impact. That said, I believe that philosophy is part of the problem.