Why would a group choose a heavy armor Templar?

Because he'll be the last one alive to give you your soul gems after a Zerg melts your faces off.

For what it's worth I've been in multiple battles this weekend where I survived for more than 30 minutes near the front lines or on top of a keep wall. I'm able to continuously heal everyone around me at least 3 to 4 times before I'm out of magic. And when I'm out of magic I'll use my stamina based powers to attack things, or just sneak for 30 seconds until my magicka comes back.

I will never understand why so few view their own survivability as important aspects of being a healer.

Lastly, if you cannot at one time or another perform every aspect of the trinity yourself you will struggle mightily in TESO, especially if you solo, and doubly so if you play PVP.

But then how does this hold up against a DK using the same armour and 2H weapons? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say they do more damage, have better damage mitigation and offer better crowd control because of the skills given to them in their class trees.

I'm by no means out, hell I've ordered the physical imperial edition for ￡90! But its very disheartening to see the classic sword and board paladin type role shelved. It does leave me wondering where the heavy armoured sword and board types like me are left, perhaps I'll end up being some crazy dunmer hermit wandering Vvardenfel with my packguar babbling about times gone by and how templars were once the perfect balance between heavy armour and magic use.

For what its worth I get facerolled much faster on my fully heavy armoured Templar than a DK does also wearing heavy armour due to the great versatility offered from their damage mitigation spells given in their class trees.

There's your problem. Don't think in absolutes when it comes to classes. All of them can do everything, your class choice defines the style of your chosen role.

I currently play as a Heavy Armor 2h Templar going down the Aedric spear line and I tear thru people.

well if u havnt used biteing jabs use them , they are amazing and I have only played a dk to level 5 , and they dont have a dps move that good from what I have seen.

DKs seems to be good tanks , and aoe/dots , biteing jabs is a lot of quick damage

Enchant your armor with Mana regen and + mana, wear a few piece of light armor and get the mana passives. Boom - you now have good mana and regen.

I don't see my Sorc wearing Only light armor, or investing all in mana. he will need some heavy armor and some health. Opposite for the Templar.

From my limited Templar experiences they have great DPS and can heal. Sounds good to me.

So the compromise to playing TESO is that if I want to play as a classic Paladin/Templar type role (sword and shield, heavy armour and spell heals) I have to accept that I'm going to be majorly gimped and no group is going to actually want me for any PvE content especially when people start rolling with DPS meters and see that they would be better off with another class that better fills one of the roles in the trinity?

You may be right, and maybe I'm just wierd, but I've had no issue with either my survivability or being able to keep others alive. And, funny enough, I'm an XBox guy playing on an old PC with no mouse on low def settings. Basically I've made TESO as hard as possible for me and I was still in the top 500 in my campaign almost completely due to healing.

I guess the best way I can answer is that I'll take a good gamer with a wierd build over a min\maxed guy with average talent any day. If they're both equally talented then what they do shouldn't matter as much as how well they do it.