White-mage is doomed - and why

[Shurrikhan]

and yes maintaining buffs or even debuffs might not be interesting to you but again it doesn't mean it wont be fun for another and also we have 3 healer that suppose to cater to different playstyles

I'm not opposed to buffs on WHM just for their being buffs.

But neither is 'had buffs' whenever virtually every backline supporting caster 'had buffs' a decent basis for identity.

"Honoring the classic" merely gave us an additional GCD cost after rez in which to put up Protect. Sure, we could reduce Protect's duration so that isn't so 'cast once and forget about it until the target's death', but would that be any more... fun? At best, it'd give us some faint thing to do during downtime... while taking up valuable button space for a modest to-be-maintained defense bump.

Alternatively, if the "Protect" or "Shell" or "Reflect" that you wish to have honored are not meant to function as they did before, why call them that? And what becomes the issue with the likes of Stoneskin or Benison or any other means of protecting against, shelling against, or potentially even reflecting some more immediate and timely amount of damage? (Though, let's be clear: if anyone deserves a reflect, it would probably be SCH or, at a pinch, SGE, not WHM.)

they could create a whm that is good and fit ff14 while still honoring his other iterations in a way.

You do see how vague (to the point of meaningless) this is, yes?

What specifically is it from WHM's other iterations that you think WHM should uniquely lay claim to (in exclusive possession or in advantaged iteration), as opposed to SCH, SGE, or AST? Most of what exists in its previous iterations are not going to be "good and fit" in FFXIV, and merely 'having buffs' is not going to suddenly generate further WHM identity unless it goes some different way with them (which prior iterations can only differentiate as far longer duration and/or "less interesting than on SCH/AST/SGE").