Quote Originally Posted by tinythinker View Post
Mr. Happy said he noticed when he was with players (not the trust characters who are designed to take less damage) that damage seemed more intense/frequent and health bars were going down faster, so he asked Yoshi P about this during the opportunity for an interview. The relevant segment run from 3:12 to 5:57 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uFvDXs-rLk&

More or less from what Happy took away from the answer he received, SE wants healing to matter significantly more, but not to the point where healers never get a chance to deal damage in groups or to a point where new players or new healers are overwhelmed.

Plus from this link to a transcript from a different interview (emphasis in bold added):

Q: On to the Healers, Scholar seems to have lost a lot of DPSing abilities, we feel like this will be an adjustment where opinions will vary a lot. Can you go into detail on what the thought process was while deciding on changes needed to balance the Healers?

Yoshida: We believe trying to heal as little as possible and DPSing instead isn’t what a Healers role should be, so we adjusted all 3 Healers to be more balanced while keeping their original characteristics alive. Content can be cleared on any of the Healers, but Scholar in particular had a much bigger toolkit for attacking and player feedback on Healers always focused on the ease or difficulty of putting out DPS numbers. This is why we wanted to precisely redefine the role a Healer has while balancing all 3 and then giving them characteristics through their attacks. A big part was that we sorted out the remainders you had as a Scholar from being an Arcanist first. Please try to look at the changes as us trying to balance Scholar as a Healer and not just trying to lower the DPS output of a Scholar.
Not a tank but I've also heard that tank sustain/healing using AoE in trash pulls is also nerfed somewhat, which would further give healers more to manage. I would defer to people with tanking experience to verify or expand on this.