Don't get rid of Protect

[Serilda]

I'm not a healer so I suppose the tediousness of "once every 30 mins" isn't all that apparent to me.

It's not that casting it is tedious in itself, it's that you have to reserve a button for it and it has zero interactive thought needed. And the only time you ever need it outside of the start of a run is if someone dies - and in most cases, even if someone dies it doesn't actually matter all that much if you recast it or not. This has led to a situation where a lot of career healers simply write a macro in the game which casts Protect at the start then swaps it out for another, more interesting role skill instead for the rest of the run, effectively giving them 6 role actions instead of 5 since Protect only needs casting once. It's silly, and clumsy. It was a classic WHM spell, then the WHM version was just better via traits, then it was made equal for balance reasons, then it was stripped away from WHMs entirely and moved to the role system, then the community made it redundant even as a role choice through a simple in-game macro.

S-E blatantly have no idea what to do with it any more. It needs help. On the example you gave, one of the things I liked in FFXI was that you could cast it on other people (e.g. new players doing FATEs) which had a similar effect to the leftover Protect persisting after a dungeon, while the FFXIV version is strictly party-only due to its design. It made me feel cool as a healer to be able to give strangers a boost, but now Stoneskin, my only fallback, is also gone. There's so much potential for Protect to be less lame than it currently is without destroying balance

Anyway, as you said it's good to give feedback. I don't hate the idea of Protect, just the current design. The PVP version already exists so tweaking that to be balanced for PVE would be so easy to do, and so much more interesting in terms of interactivity.