Quote Originally Posted by Welsper59 View Post
Does that really need to be said though? I mean, we all know this already. The OP already knew this. If a human being has a properly functional brain, you can put it together that you can do more, so they would know this too (eventually) lol. The design mention is incredibly relevant here for this context of the subject. The OP is uncomfortable having to DPS because of the fact that a lot of people have an obscured belief that it is INTENDED (see mandatory) for healers to always DPS alongside using heals. For something to be intentional, it had to have been designed with that in mind. That claim that healers are intended to DPS is 100% false. So this is completely relevant for this topic.

There is zero content ever created in this game with the design that a healer must DPS, at least when done as the devs intended. Yoshi-P also mentions that healers should DPS if you need that extra output, but it is never a part of their raid design. So raids are covered on that. Now, as I said previously, look at all other content in the game. Think of a single group activity that is, by design, mandatory for healers to DPS to be successful. If a player wants to DPS as a healer, then please do. It helps a lot. But strictly looking at it from the role and how content is created, it's not a requirement (yet). That was the point for the OP on the matter, because he didn't want to DPS as a healer, which is fine as long as your group activity doesn't require it to be successful (which would be doing something NOT as intended).
I see what you are saying, but I personally don't find words like "intended" and "mandatory" to be relevant here. What matters to this discussion is the "meta," if you will.

The devs could release a statement tomorrow revealing their grand design that any sort of behavior be practiced or abstained from, but it wouldn't do a thing to change the way that players interpret game mechanics.

Also, you can do a lot of horrible and incompetent things and still complete 99% of the content in this game. I really wouldn't use completion as the bar against which to measure whether or not a behavior is "mandatory" when playing decently isn't itself remotely mandatory in most situations.