Quote Originally Posted by dezzmont View Post
I am not going to disagree a lot would need to change to make healing more resource based, but I do think you overstate the 'AFK healer' issue. Other action MMOs do a good job of making healers both DPS and heal while everyone is mostly dodging abilities and make healing feel non-trivial. This is not some unsolved design issue plauging more modern MMOs. In GW2 you can run out of healing and you don't 'go afk' when you top someone off. You don't even do that in WoW, I have played and mained healer in WoW for ages and the idea of a healer running out of mana and AFKing is sorta outrageous, for one running out of mana is unusual and indicates something else in the raid went wrong, and for another you have tools that do not use mana. It is fully possible to have a healing focused job with limited healing resources that does not ever go AFK. I mean Astro already kinda is that with bad mana tools and a lot of focus on oGCD healing.
I've played a number of games where healer DPS tools were generally regarded as a waste of MP that could be spent on healing, either to improve survivability in the fight or to reduce downtime before the next fight, and thus we had a lot of AFK healers. True they could separate healing and DPS resources to make it resource-driven without encouraging AFK healers, but I don't see SE doing that. The reason why I brought those up is that every time healer DPS stuff gets brought up, there's always those healing purists who feel that healers should NEVER DPS, that they are a HEALER and HEALERS HEAL and that's what they are for and should focus 100% of their attention on, and if DPS options get nerfed they should never complain because they are a HEALER and are to HEAL and aren't there to DPS.

I was basically stating WHY healers focus on DPS in this game, and why it's tightly coiled around how the game functions as a whole.