Quote Originally Posted by RopeDrink View Post
The whole 'it's not my responsibility' spiel is a lazy defence mechanism. Even in all the older, classic MMORPG's, just being a Healer doesn't mean you stand there picking your nose when you have nothing to do (and they had a lot more healing gibberish clustering up their archetypes and convoluting the process compared to FFXIV, which is quite simple - at least for some classes).
In TERA, healers are encouraged to remain "out of combat" for as long as humanly possible for better mana regen and faster movement speed (healing someone in that game does not place you into combat, only damaging an enemy does). In WoW, the only healers that actively contribute DPS are Disc Priest (a class that is literally designed around that concept), and Mistweaver Monks (if they take the talent spread that lets them maximize "fistweaving" - a process the devs have also nerfed considerably since Warlords of Draenor). To say nothing of the borderline sleep-inducing gameplay of original EQ's Cleric, which has already been lovingly derided a bit by others in this thread for its tedious "Meditate" concept.

In the interests of fairness though, Spiritshaper in Revelation Online has a huge DPS focus, and most healers in Wildstar are expected to use at least one support move in a raid that has a secondary DPS effect (though I'd hardly call that "healers dpsing", it pretty solidly falls under support). Aion (a close relative of TERA) also had one or two healing classes that were more offense-oriented in general, though I've only played the game cursorily so I can't say to what degree that DPS is used in their endgame.

You could always make the argument that "standing around" for the purposes of resource regen is dull gameplay (I'd agree, within reason), but I think having enough mana tools to completely self-sustain in a dungeon/raid environment COUPLED with a very powerful mana battery class (BRD/MCH) takes all the thought out of careful ability usage and conservation planning...and leads to why healers have such insane DPS output even at the Savage level. The game can't be designed around having a BRD or MCH to get through content, but virtually no one raids without them and that's part of the problem we're seeing in regards to healer DPS.

It's kind of funny, the weird perfect storm of overpowered healing throughput, controlled scripted raid damage and relatively negligible mana concerns that came together to make "Cleric Stance or Bust: The MMORPG" lol.