Coming back to WHM

[Deceptus]

If you're looking to be decent you'll want to map most of your abilities. You can probably take Cure, Repose, Fluid Aura, Rescue, and maybe Esuna off your bars. Everything else should be on there and used regularly.

This is just terrible advice. Why would you take cure off your bar? Hurr durr you don't use your basic cure Deceptus!. . . Until you get synced down.

And Take Esuna off? What are you smoking?

My advice: Don't forget about Holy. It's an on demand hallowed ground like mitigation that is available every single pull that has the advantage of doing damage as well. Swiftcast the first one if you're not feeling comfortable with the timing and your tank is melting. Cure II and then do another.

[Jaelommiss]

This is just terrible advice. Why would you take cure off your bar? Hurr durr you don't use your basic cure Deceptus!. . . Until you get synced down.

And Take Esuna off? What are you smoking?

My advice: Don't forget about Holy. It's an on demand hallowed ground like mitigation that is available every single pull that has the advantage of doing damage as well. Swiftcast the first one if you're not feeling comfortable with the timing and your tank is melting. Cure II and then do another.

Cure and Esuna are two of the least used abilities that WHM has.

If you get a low level dungeon there's plenty of time to replace Cure II with Cure before any healing is needed. There's no problem removing it from hotbars if you're looking to save space.

Only a slender portion of debuffs in the game can be cleansed. Out of that minute list, a half dozen at most are worth the GCD it takes to cleanse. I'm struggling to think of an instance in ShB that requires it. For the few duties where it does matter, it's trivial to place it on a hotbar temporarily. Last time I can recall needing it was Orbonne, and even then it was optional if the tank popped a strong CD and was relatively topped off.

While it's certainly odd that those healing spells would be some of the least used on a healer, the reality is that they simply aren't necessary the overwhelming majority of the time. Ideally everything would be left on the hotbars, but if someone is unwilling or unable to include everything then it makes sense to drop less used abilities first. In my experience healer LB3 gets used more frequently than Cure and Esuna.

[Silver-Strider]

"In your experience....".

Not everyone has your experience and OP is someone that has taken a long hiatus from WHM so his experiences will be much different as a result. He isn't fully aware of the changes made to WHM, such as the replacement of Stoneskin with Divine Benison, the introduction of Thin Air, etc. so he's going to have to familiarize himself with all that before anything else so telling him to remove Cure and Esuna is going to be a problem if he doesn't learn as quickly as you did.

From MY experience, I still use Cure quite often due in part to the fact that, while WHM does have the best MP sustain in the game, there are moments when PUGs are PUGs and I have to manage my MP at least somewhat cautiously due to the amount of rezzing I have needed to perform. Take a recent run of E4N I had, in which everyone other than the PLD and myself was about as useful as a sack of potatos since they were dead the majority of the time. RDM yeeted himself off more than a few times, the BLM took Turret to the extreme by standing dead center of the arena and refused to move, the 2 Dancers would always Standard Step a hundred miles from the Boss and never used Technical Step or even Closed Position, AST was too busy playing with his cards to heal or pay attention to mechanics, and I swear the WAR was using Onslaught whenever it was on CD, resulting in him running directly into his death more than a few time. It was annoying, and I did stop attempting to rez after scrapping the AST and RDM up for the 3th time and neither one bothering to help rez more people but I was really hard pressed on MP at that point that I was just using Cure 1 whenever I didn't have a Lily up for Solace/Rapture and all my oGCD were spent.

I'm not saying that WHM couldn't drop Cure 1 in a static setting when you're fully knowledgeable about everything but to someone that has more than a little bit of rust it might be best to shy away from that type of advice.

On topic, WHM has received a far bit of changes to its toolkit.
Stoneskin 1+2 have been completely removed. Instead you get a oGCD single target Shield called Divine Benison that has a flat shielding value instead of scaling on the Health % of the target.
Protect is completely gone now.
WHM has a new mechanic called Lilies. They are used to fuel Afflatus Solace and Afflatus Rapture, which are pretty much instant cast Cure 2 and Medica. Every use of a Lily ability will Fuel the Bloody Lily which allows the use of Afflatus Misery, a beefy AoE damage spell.
Thin Air is also your best friend as it makes all your spells for 12 seconds cost absolutely nothing at all and is why WHM is King of Healer sustain.

[JowyAtreides]

In my experience healer LB3 gets used more frequently than Cure and Esuna.

Tongue in cheek, but maybe if white mages used Cure and Esuna there wouldn't be a need to healer LB3

To the OP, just play it, you can always try against striking dummies or unsync a dungeon solo to see how it feels

[Sylvain]

Tongue in cheek, but maybe if white mages used Cure and Esuna there wouldn't be a need to healer LB3

To the OP, just play it, you can always try against striking dummies or unsync a dungeon solo to see how it feels

You can't heal people jumping into one shotting AoE

[QooEr]

cure 1 absolutely sucks in any content except low level cuz its basically the only heal you even have.

[Liam_Harper]

Cure I is only useful in leveling roulette. Once you hit 30 you should forget it exists.

Your oGcd's and lily heals are very important. For dungeon healing you want to make use of Asylum at the end of a pull, open with Holy for the stun, Beni and regen your tank and spam Holy fitting in Tetra/Bene/Solace as needed. If you have 3 lilies, it's ok to burn a couple in-between to prepare Misery for the next trash pack.
For boss/trial/raid healing, you Regen less often in ShB, aim to Tetra/Solace/Beni them first, Regen if those are all on cd, Cure II is a last resort. Lily heals again, are great. Rapture has a wide range and a significant 500 total Potency with Plenary which you should make good use of. In general Medica II is better than Medica if your group won't die within 6 seconds and results in far more potency. Plan your asylum if the group has to stack/is stacked but it's fine to just Asylum the tank, it's a solid 800 potency free ogcd heal with heal buff. Cure III is hard to use in pugs due to limited range and often unnecessary in Normal content even in a messy run. Generally Assize and Presence of Mind on cd for dps. Lucid on CD, aim not to forget it.

Also a little more advanced but make good use of Weave windows. Regen, Lily heals, Swiftcast spells and Dia will give you a window where you can fit 1-2 oGcd abilities without clipping, making it a great time for things like Lucid, Beni, Asylum, Presence, Assize, Tetra, Bene, Thin air, Plenary. If you can't weave these and need them, just clip them though.