Quote Originally Posted by Semirhage View Post
I have never played WoW.

I've still spent the vast majority of my time not healing on a healing class in every single RPG I've ever played, MMO or no. This fantasy of a healer that primarily heals with only scant time to maybe occasionally do damage or support came, as far as I can tell, from thin air.
Its more of a relic of oldschool mmos, where healing was ressource intensive and your job was basically to preserve your mana/mp over the full duration of a fight while keeping everyone healed. Like, back in the Day in WoW you had to intentionally use lower ranks of your spells to preserve mana and regularily afk during downtimes to let mana regen kick in. Tanks where also much, much more squishy compared to modern FF14 and Retail WoW tanks. So pure healing was a thing during a time when limited ressources and constant chip damage wouldn't allow you to dps, especially since healer dps spells were usually also pretty weak, often due to equipment having seperate stats for offensive and healing spells.

These are now relics of the past and MMOs are generally much more fast paced and action oriented nowadays with little enforced downtime, healers offensive capabilities also have been massively buffed in modern MMOs to allow solo-leveling at a convenient pace and with aggro becoming less and less of a game mechanic with the big mainstream mmos, the focus was shifted more towards mitigation for Tanks, which also meant that their defensive capabilities became much stronger than during earlier times. All of that lead us to where we are now, were healer dps became organically a thing because it was understood as the best way to utilize the naturally decreasing healing uptime during optimization.