Plate Healing is broke as hell right now. You basically have to heal in Leather (if you can get the right stats on it) or Cloth which generally has the right stats on it. At low levels (under 20) I would wear plate for the defense and use a 1 hander and shield to be more tanky and do more DPS.

Once you hit the 20ish range you make a decision on which armour route you are going to go and make the switch to either type and then make a decision about sword and board or healing staff. I have a Templar I am leveling up right now and its not particularly enjoyable form an time sink perspective when you are soloing. You really need at least one other person with you doing either the tanking or the DPS to expedite leveling.

Most, in fact almost everyone didn't roll a healer to start b/c everyone was focused on the land rush/level rush. Hence we are woefully short on Healing. We can't all be ganksters and have no healing. Some of our members are going to have to bite the bullet and roll either a healer alt or once they hit 50 start leveling a healing template on there main.

I get that people want to kill other players and they want to be able to level and have versatility. This isn't a 2 week sprint, its a multi month to year(s) long marathon. You can't be a high calibur rolling death squad without the class/group dynamics. The sooner people start acknowledging this fact the sooner we will have the sustained PvP ability.

Don't make me have'ta Troll ya Bro!