Quote Originally Posted by T-Owl View Post
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.
I played MMOs back in ~2006, old(er) school Korean grinders. I remember that healers were "supposed to heal" and /sit when not healing. I just popped mana potions and started blasting out damage at least half the time anyway. My damage spells in my MMO of choice did about half the damage of a black mage-equivalent's spams, plus I had defense debuffs, stuns, and binds that were worth their weight in upkeep. I encountered people who said I was "healing wrong". Oddly, it was never people in the parties I was keeping alive while simultaneously throwing out damage.

The healing and sitting dynamic has always either been a purposeful design choice (which...yikes, why on earth would sitting around doing nothing just for mana on a regular basis be *fun*?), or something unskilled healers did. I've never, ever played a single player RPG where my "pure healer" didn't spend upwards of 80% of their time debuffing, dealing damage, etc. HeALeRs ShoULd HeAL ONLy in my experience has always been a line from people who are bad at healing.