Is it fun?

[ItMe]

Pure healing is demanding, even if by "pure" we're only talking about 50-60% healing uptime instead of the more extreme 70-80% some games had.

Damn that sounds wild!
What MMO(s) had 70-80% healing uptime?

[Grimoire-M]

Damn that sounds wild!
What MMO(s) had 70-80% healing uptime?

Arguably every single old-school MMO did if you count mid-fight MP resting as part of the strategy. A good number of korean MMOs (RO and similar) also just let you go hogwild on spam once you reach certain breakpoints and expect you to do so if you want to deal with some of the BS the harder content offers until you outgear it. Buffing was still king in most of them.

[Rilifane]

Damn that sounds wild!
What MMO(s) had 70-80% healing uptime?

RO, Flyff, WoW and Rift in their earlier stages plus pretty much every somewhat older asia MMO like Perfect World etc.
RO and Flyff had a different combat system and you spent the majority of your time juggling a myriad of mini buffs while healing but letting some of them fall off was just as dangerous as sleeping on healing itself. Depending on your leveling partners and areas you spend more time healing or debuffing enemies but dpsing on healer wasn't a thing unless you were specifically build for it but then you were more of a somewhat self-supporting caster that partnered with actual healers rather than dpsing while filling the healer role.
WoW and Rift both had very tight mana management, fast and strong heals were reserved for emergencies. You spend the majority of your time constantly precasting heals and canceling the cast last second if it would overheal while keeping regens and buffs up. Not just in endgame raids but regular dungeons too. It wasn't because people were bad and uninformed either, it played the same on WoW classic. The way to go was steady, efficient healing so you had the resources for emergencies, strings of crit hits and general bad luck with random mechanics (like a dps getting shot in the face 3 times in a row from something that targets anyone at random).
Even now the Disc priest, which mostly heals through dpsing, spends more GCDs on healing than any decently played healer in FFXIV.

[Almagnus1]

RO, Flyff, WoW and Rift in their earlier stages plus pretty much every somewhat older asia MMO like Perfect World etc.
RO and Flyff had a different combat system and you spent the majority of your time juggling a myriad of mini buffs while healing but letting some of them fall off was just as dangerous as sleeping on healing itself. Depending on your leveling partners and areas you spend more time healing or debuffing enemies but dpsing on healer wasn't a thing unless you were specifically build for it but then you were more of a somewhat self-supporting caster that partnered with actual healers rather than dpsing while filling the healer role.
WoW and Rift both had very tight mana management, fast and strong heals were reserved for emergencies. You spend the majority of your time constantly precasting heals and canceling the cast last second if it would overheal while keeping regens and buffs up. Not just in endgame raids but regular dungeons too. It wasn't because people were bad and uninformed either, it played the same on WoW classic. The way to go was steady, efficient healing so you had the resources for emergencies, strings of crit hits and general bad luck with random mechanics (like a dps getting shot in the face 3 times in a row from something that targets anyone at random).
Even now the Disc priest, which mostly heals through dpsing, spends more GCDs on healing than any decently played healer in FFXIV.

That's one of the things I missed about WoW healing, especially WoW vanilla. You played a healer, but you were rarely DPSing because you were punished WAAAAAY to harshly for it.

[SieyaM]

Damn that sounds wild!
What MMO(s) had 70-80% healing uptime?

Back when I was playing EverQuest Healers spent all of their mana and uptime healing, the damage spells they had were incredibly weak and were not worth the mana cost to bother with. The only exception to this was Clerics using their damage spells against the undead, which they had a line of spells specifically to damage undead enemies that were incredibly cheap for mana and effective. No modern MMO though would ever give a class or job such specific abilities, since it means that for certain situations you would require certain classes for things.

[Truen]

Back when I was playing EverQuest Healers spent all of their mana and uptime healing, the damage spells they had were incredibly weak and were not worth the mana cost to bother with. The only exception to this was Clerics using their damage spells against the undead, which they had a line of spells specifically to damage undead enemies that were incredibly cheap for mana and effective. No modern MMO though would ever give a class or job such specific abilities, since it means that for certain situations you would require certain classes for things.

I disagree. In Everquest Druids and Shamans have huge dps abilities and can very easily sit in a group and contribute significantly to dps /w either dots, straight dps, and even things like snares/slows.

[SieyaM]

I disagree. In Everquest Druids and Shamans have huge dps abilities and can very easily sit in a group and contribute significantly to dps /w either dots, straight dps, and even things like snares/slows.

Druids and Shamans were not what I remember as being dedicated healers, they were more healer hybrids. Especially druids, I don't remember anyone recruiting them just for their healing abilities, it was mostly their snare abilities that you wanted them for. Clerics particularly are what I remember being the class that healing was it's only job.