What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[ty_taurus]

In all seriousness though, they need to give Healers SOMETHING. Like, literally something that is not just...HEALING. That's what makes Tanks more retroactive and enjoyable in some respects: They do more than what their job initially is intended for. With Healers though? It's just...one button. Two every 30s. That's mind-numbing.

"But healers are meant to HEAL" -someone, probably.

There is a base reason tanks are not designed the same way healer are : Tanking abilities need to have some cooldown, while healing ones need to have a solution where there is nothing left. Also, Tanks are physical melee jobs, and base FFXIV design en physical melee jobs is combo. While healer are mage, and mage base design in FFXIV is spam the same spell again and again, and dot. Even the SUM in HW was mostly Ruin spam. A bit less because bio and miasma were on 18 and 24s duration, but after tri-disaster you were going Ruin until bio fade out, and when going for Bahamut transe were Spam Ruin III.

In your exemple, Guard and Wall would be dead/trap actions. Even more dead/trap than Tank stance in SB or current gcd heal actions, while at least, healing GCD is extremely situationnal and mostly something you'ill see in progress/failure recovery than current boss routine.

What it would be nice to do is both reducing healing kits of healer, to make them more reliant of GCD heal, and giving some more engaging DPS tools outside nuke/dot. If they had to do mone thing is giving a more flashy burst phase (we are talking the current state of the game), because the other solution : making bosses hit so hard that healer cannot do anything else than healing is not gonna happened.

There's no rule that suggests melee jobs must have a combo or that ranged/casters cannot have combos. A pattern does not indicate requirement. I don't see how having 1 singular melee attack somehow makes it impossible for tanks to perform their job so long as the numbers add up, nor does having GCD traps like Guard and Wall. Healers have Cure/Physick/Benefic/Diagnosis as GCD traps, amongst a few others arguably and content is still clearable at all levels.

For the record, I'm not advocating for this style, but the question is about whether or not the game is playable and the content is clearable under this model, because that's all that seems to matter for healer design. Values can be adjusted to strike the right balance, but what matters is if the actual functionality of such tools allows the tank to perform the necessary responsibilities that are needed for any given fight to end in victory.