Quote Originally Posted by TaleraRistain View Post
Clerics in EverQuest say hi
Heavens forbid they use Hammer, Vow of Valor spells, or start Warding/Turning undead... As healers, those clearly aren't really part of their toolkit! Also, that's a game with enough classes to pick and choose certain ones for certain dungeons only. As Cleric was...

Quote Originally Posted by Elamys View Post
did you actually play the same world of warcraft i did because what?
Take a look at the Mistwalker Monk healer. Apart from one minor CD, Mana Tea, its mana recovery IS melee DPS. Holy Priest healing partly benefits burst damage as well. In WoD, Holy Paladin's filler damage also prevented targets from critting. Since Vanilla, its damaging debuffs supplied raid healing. Healer design has always had some expectation that direct damage will outweigh healing for certain globals.

That said, I'll agree that highest difficulty raids, both through mana concerns and far more consistent damage output make DPSing where not directly converted to healing (as per Legion Discipline priest) a relatively rare event, such as when burning particular adds between raid damage spikes. It and XIV are day and night.

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The sad thing is, as long as we continue to have incompetent healers who can't keep the party up even when refusing to DPS (and when they are properly avoiding and mitigating damage), the only way left to extend from the lowest denominator is through DPS. You could obscure that by allowing downtime to be spent instead of short-term or capped buffs to increase someone else's damage instead, which depending on the balance point and your and their skill and gear levels will either be inferior or obligatory, but short of actually forcing all healers to meet a certain margin of "got good", there's always going to be excessive downtime for the average to skilled player.

That... or start adding difficult tiers. >.>