Eye for an Eye is no longer viable

[Riyshn]

The bit that annoys me about healers is they all had a esuna anyway. So why the hell did it need to take a role slot.

And protect could be removed entity from the game it wouldn't make any difference at all. So there's another role slot freed up

Esuna, yes. As well as Lucid Dreaming (Shroud of Saints, Luminiferous Aether, Aetherflow nerf). And Largesse (Divine Seal, Synastry nerf, Fey Illumination nerf). And Break (Stone, Stella, Miasma nerf). 4/10 healer role skills had to be removed/nerfed from all healers to be put there. I am entirely convinced that they just ran out of ideas for the cross-roles and stole the skills to round out the number.

Honestly, Protect should just be made a WHM exclusive thing, and make it a short duration mitigation buff. Keeps it in the game for flavor reason like Yoshi-P wanted, and stops all damage in fights from having to be scaled up to account for the assumption of having it.

[Pondera]

Honestly, Protect should just be made a WHM exclusive thing, and make it a short duration mitigation buff. Keeps it in the game for flavor reason like Yoshi-P wanted, and stops all damage in fights from having to be scaled up to account for the assumption of having it.

This is exactly why skill pruning is, and always will be, a horrible horrible idea. They start off and design a system that works, like how Scholar had Aetherflow and energy drain, and White Mage had the Shroud of Saints. Both were part of that class' identity and individuality, though they both fulfilled a singular function: MP restoration. There was no need to change this. Then they started thinking about how to "streamline" things, and now Shroud of Saints has been given to all healer classes and Aetherflow has been nerfed to accomodate Scholar's access to it. Protect is now an ability that can be skipped, despite the fact that, as you said, all the fights are tuned to tanks having 15% more defense than they would otherwise.Esuna is optional, but there are a number of fights where it is mandatory to have it, removing doom stacks for instance, or poison themed bosses. I'm really glad I found that macro because, without it, healers would be a pretty big mess right now. I REALLY hope we don't have to go through this once every expansion...