D&D and the MMORPG

[I'm A Banana]

City of Heroes/Villains allows choosing powers based on a heroic archetype and astonishing amounts of character costume design (and eventually multiple costumes). After that, almost all customization is on what additional powers are gained later on and how one sets up the not-gear bonuses to improve their powers, but pretty much everyone tries to improve powers in the identical way as everyone else.

I was kind of a fan of Guild Wars in this respect, because the powers, even within the same class, were quite varied. You'd have a "deck" of 8 powers that you could use at any one time, and you could switch 'em out on the fly, but getting those unique powers and using them at the right challenge was part of the customization of the character.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Hold on, Warcraft monsters don't focus on healers? Tell that to my Tauren Shaman. OH WAIT YOU CAN'T BECAUSE HE'S DEAD AGAIN. (I know this is a bit of a tangent, but I really seem to draw more aggro for healing than for hitting. Is it just me, or are all those hyenas and crap smart enough to kill the medic first?)

The aggro formula for WoW and EQ1 (and CoX, now that I think about it) views healing as a taunt, but not nearly as high as it would be with a human DM, IMO. Your filthy tauren savage can get away with a lot more healing than he could if a human was running the combat. In D&D, if you effectively doubled or tripled a player character's hit points with healing, the monsters would splat your healing character dead just the same.

But consider Onyxia. As smart as she is (leaving out her storyline so as not to spoil it, since it's kind of neat), she knows what healers look like. When a raid shows up in her lair, the smart money would be to fire those single-target fireballs at all the priests, paladins, shamans and druids first thing, and shrug off the scratches from the other characters until that's accomplished. Every Onyxia raid would last 5 minutes and end in failure, though. So she's dumbed down instead.