I'm surprised people still expect anything more than a pure healer out of SE. I honestly don't think it's such a bad design for some of the player base, and I'm willing to bet this is exactly why SE has ignored the vocal player base on this for so long (read: players who don't care about optimization and wouldn't stop to give feedback VS players who would < us). It makes sense in the context that WHM is basically your starter healer since the others are gated behind content. It also makes WHM one of the most comfortable healer to level etc. etc. Of course the class needs design changes but their narrative can be sound.

Anyways, I think this will give WHM a bit of extra DPS. Not really sure that's going to be enough though. Next to that this just smells of "we need to rework the class, wait until 5.0"