Isn't playing WHM optimally going completely against what SE wants healers to be?

[Ghishlain]

Yoshida has also said a few things such as "disliking" Cleric Stance (this is kinda ambiguous and could mean anything), and stating that "healer DPS isn't factored into DPS checks for raid clears". Now, those statements have been discussed to hell and back and in some ways it doesn't matter what Yoshi says cuz it's obvious his team has no clue what the heck they're doing with healers anymore, but what I infer from that collection of statements is that the healer DPS meta wasn't really intended, the devs just have no idea how to "put it back in its box", so to speak. (At least not without pissing off the playerbase en masse.)

I personally always felt that YoshiP has gone on record to say these comments as a means to discourage disparaging remarks from the community towards non-DPSing healers. I do feel they have always recognized that the top tier raiders looking to push early clears based on other comments YoshiP has made and they know one of the most efficient means to do so is to have healers contribute DPS. It's easier for a healer who's doing 0 DPS to add another 500-750 DPS but much more difficult for a DPS who's already pushing 4.0-4.5K+ to add the same 500-750.

I've also always felt that if the development team truly wanted to shut down the healer DPS, they could easily do so in a significantly heavy handed way (ie, making it impossible to use DPS abilities in 4- or 8-player content and/or destroy DPS spell potencies). Of course this would basically crush the healer playerbase for a temporary period of time until players got used to the shift but if the community continues to be as divided as it is regarding healer DPS (you're damned if you do, damned if you don't), the developers may just be forced to resolve this in a heavy handed way.

I certainly hope not though - I enjoy how healing is done in this game overall and I like having that freedom that the other two roles don't normally have.

Really!? I wasn't sure if astro could solo heal. I'll have to give that a try; sounds fun...

Omega - Deltascape 4.0 (Savage) has been solo healed by a Nocturnal AST. It's certainly not for the faint of heart and requires a good coordinated group effort to minimize damage as much as you can but I've always enjoyed watching these sort of videos.

Just note that not all fights are conducive to solo heals as there may be mechanics that require two healers to resolve but it doesn't stop creative teams from trying to work around these challenges or taking the intentional handicap and seeing if they can survive the resultant "miss".