Quote Originally Posted by Alahra View Post
I don't think anyone would argue that. They're fine with the way healers DPS now and aren't changing anything (whereas they are apparently not fine with the way tanks forgo Fending accessories and are making changes). That's ultimately what was meant by it being an "unintended, emergent" thing.
Bingo! That is exactly what I meant.

My perspective is that Healer DpS is "Nice but not Necessary." Healers heal and any damage they put out is a bonus. I will never complain about a Healer DpSing unless I die. (and even then I will be asking what I did wrong as a tank first)

They seem to have naively assumed that the playerbase wouldn't DPS much on content in healer—this is likely in part due to the fact that they seem to playtest material on jobs the testers do not normally play (they talked about this in a preview or interview regarding the dungeons added in 3.1), which is a rather way narrow way to do it, of course. They should ideally test both with career players for various roles and those who are uncomfortable.
An incredibly large number of devs tend to get blinded by their own knowledge of how they intended things to work and can quite often miss how players do or see things. Even Devs very experienced with certain classes can miss possibilities and problems players catch since they know how everything is "supposed" to work and might miss how things "really" work.

The interview you are referring to was actually talking about how they were expanding/changing their playtesting methods. The example being "going in with a player who had not fully mastered tanking in non-perfect gear and having the DpS who was in perfect gear go full throttle." In many ways they were admitting they needed to change how they did things previously.