Now I've slept I was gonna ask Ren if they'd be ok with WHM getting the changes I suggested back in my 'I hate the pure/barrier split' thread, that is, Dia becomes 12s duration, and Banish is added as a 15s standalone GCD. It'd be just one extra DPS action, but then it all came flooding back, I already have asked them that, ages ago. They still said that is bad changes for the class, and that they would hate it. I don't think they're planning on changing their mind even slightly, which is unfortunate. The idea that they're some kind of 'mediator' advocating for a 'compromise' is laughable though. The idea that we should leave one class out of four in the sorry state it's currently in, as 'compromise'. I'll tell you what is 'compromise', the designs I've made for WHM or SGE that allow casual players to have a VERY reliable fallback, if they start to feel overwhelmed. For example, my SGE design has Diagnosis/Prognosis be zero MP cost, so if the player misplays, they can fall back on spamming Prognosis to stabilize. Leaving one healer in a sorry state is NOT compromise. Leaving the healer skill floor as accessible as it currently is, is a very acceptable compromise, and one that I don't think any of us advocating for more complexity would argue against. We all want casual players to be able to enjoy the healers at a baseline level, because some may not ever progress past that point. But it remains baffling to me that 'WHM has to stay 1 Nuke 1 DOT forever' is a stance someone would not only take, but try to advocate is a 'position of compromise'.

I still can't fathom the answer to the contradiction though. If Ren 'doesn't care about parses one whit', how does the presence of an extra GCD to do damage with on WHM, tuned in such a way that you could fairly safely ignore it if you're not pushing bleeding edge content, negatively affect their gameplay?

In my suggested WHM idea, ignoring Banish entirely resulted in, thanks to my genius potency balancing, the current 'refresh Dia when it falls off, spam Glare' rotation being 98ish% the effectiveness of actually using Banish as part of the rotation. Players would still be able to clear EX with 'current rotation', heck you could probably get a week 1 'Final Fight of tier: Savage' clear with it, 98% is within crit variance I'm pretty sure. But it's something for optimization-heads to optimize, and if 100p Energy Drain is enough for them to argue to keep as part of SCH's gameplay, the idea that 'its not enough of a gain, people will complain it's just button bloat' is not true at all. But as others have said, the majority of players want to see cool VFX, and the actual numbers behind it don't really matter to them. If WHM got Purgation in PVE as a 2min CD, but AST also got a flat potency buff at the same time that meant it was still ahead in damage, most players on reddit or in NN would not be complaining WHM is ahead, they'd complain AST didn't get a cool animation too.

I disagree with some people going nuclear in here though, suggesting 'quit the game'. It's not the solution. However, if someone wants to experience the story and casual content by just pressing Glare, that's fine, they added Easy and Very Easy modes to help people through the story. They're adding Duty Support to help players through dungeons. And also, if you're gonna say 'quit the game' anyway, probably not a good idea to say 'play WOW instead', considering it's moved to pushing for healers to DPS when safe to even more than FF does. They have 'speedrun the dungeon' as a gamemode after all. I made that comparison image with the list of Holy Priest talents that affect RDPS in some way, I could make one for all of the healer specs but that'd take effort I can't be bothered to spend right now. Could say 'play MOP private server' though I guess.

I don't want to go nuclear, I don't want to tell players who don't want to interact with extra complexity on healers 'go play something else'. I will, however, say to them 'if you don't want to try to maximize your output on a class, don't do content that expects you to do so', and 'If you don't want to try to maximize your output, you are not even going to notice the changes I'm advocating, you can safely ignore them'. And also 'if you're in content that does NOT expect you to try to maximize your output, you can press whatever buttons you like, in whatever order you like, I really don't care'. I sign up for EX roulettes assuming they're going to take 25+min because of a Freestyle SAM, or a single-pulling tank, or a healer that stands there waiting for the tank to drop below 90% health (its a WAR and they have Bloodwhetting active).