Quote Originally Posted by Semirhage View Post
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.
Haven't played that one tbh, so I can only talk about my experiences with World of Warcraft, but I can say that even nowadays, most healer classes do even less than half the damage of a dps. Combined with the ressource starvation it basically encouraged the pure healer mentality because healer dps was just not that good and pretty expensive. Like, back in the day you barely could even level solo as a healer spec, you were oom pretty much immediately and would basically just auto attack with a wand, which wasn't feasible in raids though because mana-regen would only kick in if you are inactive for a few seconds. And yeah, it was pretty much purposeful design choice back in the day, because early devs probably considered it more tactical when you had to manage stuff like threat and mana, which are basically just encouraging passivity. But I think you also bring something else up which played into it:

Compared to todays average players, oldschool MMO-Players where just plain bad at the game, the skill floor increased by a crazy amount over the years, through ressources and information becoming more readily available and people generally becoming more skilled at video games. Again, WoW is a great example because we have the comparison of back in the day and nowadays through classic: There was this meme going around for years, that classic had been pretty much the pinnacle of hardcore raiding and that retail has become casual compared to it, due to how few players back in the day actually could beat the raids. Classic hits around and it turns out, the game is piss-easy. People would pull off dps numbers and speed kills which would have been considered mathematically impossible back during the day, simply because theorycrafting, understanding of the game and personal skill have increased so much over the years.