Exile healing crystal exploit?

I've found something on Exile that seems like an exploit, but I can't find anyone else talking about it.

If you stand on the path opposite your healing crystal that is inside your base, you can get close enough to receive its healing and mana regen. This makes defending one's right-side path trivial. Fight, lose some health or mana, run a few feet back, heal up to full, and run out to fight again. This is of course less of an issue when playing Conquest as you have the other crystals there as well, but it's a pretty big deal in Fortress.

The reason I call it an exploit instead of a strange intended, or unintended feature, is that it doesn't always work. Either light can use it and dark can't, or only some heroes can do it. When I've tried using it as dark with certain heroes I can't get it to work, and on light with other heroes it does. Unfortunately, I haven't done enough testing to determine which it is. However, both cases are game breaking.

If it only works for light and not for dark, then light has a serious advantage on that map, such that when playing with friends I would ban using it, and I would avoid playing dark online completely.

If it only works for certain heroes, that is also game breaking as people will learn to only play the heroes that can take advantage of this.

So, has anyone else discovered this? Do you know if it's a light/dark thing or if it depends on the hero?