I’m a big fan of healing classes in MMORPGs, indeed playing a healer is my preferred role in group content. For general gameplay and soloing I always prefer to be playing a class that has a good measure of self-healing, as well.
Over the weekend I played a session of Neverwinter with my husband for the first time in months, and I got to play Devout Cleric again. I was reminded that it’s one of the most fun healing classes I’ve played in any MMORPG. You have a healing component (or other support buff element) to most of your spells, plus a channeled, targeted heal or damage ability for emergencies. A basic aspect of the class, though, is the Astral Seal spell that you can cast with no cooldown.
Astral Seals triggering with attacks
This core spell marks a target hostile so that any ally hitting it receives healing based on the damage they deal. It’s an interesting “hands-off” example of healing. I can help to keep everyone in my group’s health up by marking targets with this Seal and there’s no limit on the number of targets beyond my time and ability to target different enemies in a given melee.
Holy chains, attack!
As with all the classes, the Devout Cleric has impressive graphics for its holy-themed encounter and daily abilities. I tend to favour the
Divine Armor daily power: it give allies a damage shield, so it works well in concert with the Astral Seal mechanic as it gives them a breathing space to self-heal through damaging opponents.
Shields up!
The closest class gameplay-style wise I can think of is the Chloromancer in Rift, which is the oldest example of a ‘healing through damage’ mechanic I’ve encountered in online gaming. I’m rather partial to Neverwinter’s take on this playstyle, however, and I do so love the graphical effects of this take on the D&D Cleric.
GamingSF 
I was initially quite intrigued by this different style of healing and I’ll admit that in a big heroic encounter it can still be fun to watch the little green numbers fly everywhere, but in harder group content I found the cleric play style sorely lacking and very disappointing. Abilities like Astral Seal provide so little healing as to be redundant when compared to a well-geared character’s self-healing, and if someone takes a direct hit they either die instantly or are in such acute danger of dying that they are better off chugging a potion than relying on anything you could possibly do.
The best you can do is provide some shields and buffs, but those aren’t really measured anywhere that I can see and I often find it hard to tell whether what I’m doing is any help at all. Situations like me dying and the rest of the party continuing the fight just fine without a healer for another ten minutes until the boss is dead seem to support the idea that healing doesn’t really matter much at all, and it’s just utterly depressing to feel so useless.
I’ve enjoyed it when I’ve healed, but then I’ve only really played my Cleric in premade groups so the other players were a known quantity. I seem to remember Chloromancer had a similar issue with a lack of “oh ****” buttons, if a player is CC’ed with a DoT on them then it becomes hard to keep them healed-up.
EverQuest cleric has a heal-through-damage spell that goes back at least to 2002. I used it a lot when I was a full-time cleric there. It’s only a small part of the healing process there, though.
Vanguard, which had the most interesting healers in any MMO I’ve seen, had several versions of “heal by damage”. The Disciple, my favorite MMO class ever, was a main healer capable of keeping a full group healed by kicking mobs in the face!
I really need to get a main healer going in some MMO again. I used to live for the heals once – seems so long ago now. I’ve found myself going into Water as a GW2 Elementalist an awful of late and pretty much going full heal in zerg fights. That’s a sure sign I need to play a proper healer again…
Ah Vanguard, I made a disciple, but didn’t ever get to play it in a group. So you haven’t tried Druid then? My husband’s elementalist seems to spend a lot of time in Water-Water (as Weaver), which is testament to your recent comments on the expansion’s content difficulty levels perhaps…
I was gonna ask if you’d ever tried the VG Disciple also, but now I see I don’t have to š
I created one but probably only levelled it to 4 or so, so not really. Druid was the class I ended up playing the most in a levelling pair.