if the healer was decent, yes it did require it. Because it was really the easiest way of doing it. I mean, come on, we didn't wear vit accessories as healers in seal rock because LB's were easy to deal with. But even in 3.0, it wasn't expected to solo a healer; you could drive them off because they could run to the next objective and didn't turtle anywhere near as much.

As for the germans, no offense but if you think its hard to burst a healer down now, you try it when you need to use 3x the abilities just to do a decent burst, or dealing with BLMS that mass sleep you or mass cometeor spam. I played it from the start of HW, and no it was not better. People complained just as much then.