they’re trying to find a happy medium between more action oriented games where there is no targeting and you only hit what your blades/projectiles hit (think God of War or Devil May Cry) and more traditional MMO combat.

Personally i’d rather see it move even more toward action combat with no enemy targeting either, but i think this is definitely a step in the right direction.

i just hope they allow complete keybind customization, because i’m not a big fan of the double tap to roll… i’ve been playing the Korean game Continent of the Ninth (check it out on Youtube, far and away the best combat of any online game ever made).. and they handle directional rolls with Shift+direction, and it’s so much quicker and smoother than trying to double tap… i just hope i can modify the keybindings to suit my style.

You can already get a sniff of this in DCUO [DC Universe] in an extremely simplistic form. I guess the main reason this happened in DCUO is to make it console friendly [where you can't click on avatars] .

So in DCUO, a single target heal is always “heal most injured member in your group [or yourself] who is within range” .

AOE buffs/heals is again “everyone within range” of either YOU or the stationary object [i.e. like a healing fountain which is summoned] .

The “range” part is the most important, because a healer are now forced to actually make sure they are in range of enough group members to pull off the AOE , and ensure they have a member with lowest HP in range for a single heal. (So a melee “spike” healer next to the tank while the DPS are further out of range can be considered a tactical advantage).

Yes this is not really very precise, GW2 looks to make the concept quite more tangible. However the advantage already noted in DCUO is the fact that as a healer you can now play like a DPS and forced to be more aware where everyone is physically.

The problem is time. As Van Hemlock once joked “A new MMO? I haven’t finished the last one yet.”