Observation: if you're balancing DPR potentials, then no wonder a dedicated healer is so valuable! He reduces enemy DPR by virtue of not having a high DPR himself, and he boosts party survivability through his healing capabilities. He's actually better at his job than a healer with potentially high DPR output[1] would be.
[1] Unusable due to opportunity cost in lost healing.
DPR output was obscene in high level 3E/
Pathfinder. The game wasn't built for high level play. It completely collapses with the stupid level of powerful options for high level players.
DPR potential is only one concern of the many concerns during encounter design. My encounter design process is very tailored.
Healing damage is only one aspect of being a great healer. The more important aspect is effect removal.
Generally, when creating a healer we looked for the following:
1. Group healing to reduce downtime.
2. Effect countering. Not being able to counter effects such as not having
invisibility purge or
dispel magic created huge problems.
3. Survivability. If the healer can annihilated, that is a problem.
4. Ability to heal burst damage. I had a cleric that could take a player from -10 or so to 300 hit points in one round. She could quicken the
heal spell as a 6th level spell. A nasty round of critical hits could be countered by powerful healing.
The group healer mitigated many problems the enemy created. When you lack the ability to eliminate those problems, you really feel it. If the cleric is spending time DPRing, he misses out on countering effects that debilitate the party. That's what I never understood when all the folks were telling us they didn't need a healer to survive. We kept trying it, but an enemy played well can usually rip a PC party apart and vice versa. The better tactic was the ability to counter their tactics rather than try to DPR race them. If we tried to DPR race them, we might win. But often half the party or more was down or dead. Once we started using a dedicated healer/effect remover, we usually ended with no one down or dead.