Why don't we have more DPS abilities ?

[Kabooa]

It's funny how much the overfocus on balance in numbers in raids has reduced healer design space in particular. Back in older MMORPGs you had a single game that had these four healers:

* A pure healer, with a cleric stance like thing they had to go into or out of to even be able to deal any damage at all really.
* A buffer, who could actually heal a fair bit but... indirectly. Like you could give someone very short buffs to their absorption or so, like external 40% DRs. In return, weaker heals and damage was also indirect via buffing people. Since all your buffs were casted + short, you were quite busy.
* One healer that gave their own health away via a mix of heals and HoTs, and then constantly had DoTs on enemies to drain health back to fuel this. High overall output, but fragile if there's ever a gap.
* Lastly a healer that designated a target and then went melee, causing healing around them and on that target.

Were these balanced? Not in the slightest. Were they fun? Hell yeah!

...Warhammer?

Because I can tell you that in almost every scenario, Chalice off hand healers were superior. The others could get the job done, but you almost always, without exception, wanted the Chalice healers.

[Carighan]

...Warhammer?

Nah, super-simplified description of the Cleric, Shaman, Blood Mage and Disciple in Vanguard Saga of Heroes. The game flopped hard, but it had some really intelligent design choices that would not work well with where modern MMOs as a genre went but are still extremely smart in a vacuum.

To make some of these designs work, the game did some wild things. For example, you had a defensive and an offensive target at the same time. So a Blood Mage would use graft skills to heal their defensive target while performing various drains on their offensive target without having to swap targets. Funky stuff. Disciplies needed their defensive target to designate where their healing from their attacks goes. Though to be fair, the Monk in WoW recycled a lot of that concept but sadly also massively watered it down a bit later.