Surely the fact that SCH was super DPS heavy in ARR, while WHM was left to 'healbot' in stuff like First/Second coils (Final was where people started DPSing a lot more I think), proves that 'healers should DPS' WAS always the accepted paradigm the community ran by? Consider it from another angle: we use our OGCDs to minimize how much GCD healing we have to do, as that costs our damage. But back then, could it not be argued that the reason WHM was defaulted to 'healbot' was not 'because the fights were designed for it', but because it was perceived to be the 'optimal DPS setup', allowing the SCH to maintain almost 100% Cleric Stance uptime, while minimizing the risk to the party (because the WHM was never going to be caught out in Cleric at a bad time)? It's no coincidence to me that the moment HW launched and healers got more OGCDs to work with, the push for 'more DPS' got stronger even in casual content.

My first account I started in 2.5, and I remember hearing how different healing was in FFXIV, how we were actually encouraged to throw rocks or DOTs at enemies if we were safe to. Contrast to WOW at the time, where I got yelled at for Flame Shocking stuff in WOD, I thought 'hey this sounds cool' and would throw Aeros on whatever I could, when it was safe to. Never got to 50, came back in 3.2 and played SCH and DOT'd the hell out of everything, great time would recommend. But yes, the whole thing about 'people weren't optimized' is actually 100% accurate. How can I know? Look at Classic WOW. EVERY raid, cleared in the first day. Even Naxxramas, the infamous guild killer, fell over in sub-24 hours, because it turns out people back then were just suboptimal as hell. If we had an 'ARR Classic', knowing what we do now, every raid would fall over. Second Coil 'Savage' wouldn't even have to exist, as people would have been good enough to do the original pre-nerfed versions.

Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
Agreed.

The one thing that's clear is the encounter design and Healing kits are dissonant with each other. There are several solutions to this - changing encounter design, changing Healer kits, changing the Healer paradigm to Healer/Support - but they really need to pick one and start designing around it instead of sticking with a weird hybrid thing that conflicts with itself.
Yeh, and of the three of these solutions, 'change healer kits' is by far the best solution, both in terms of ease of implementation, and effect caused by the change. Problem is people asking not for 'change healer kits', but 'change healer kits, except for WHM who should remain left behind to fester in the current design, which is, by the very fact we're trying to move away from it with the majority of the healers (75%), accepted to be flawed in some way'. SE already has enough things to half-arse, we don't need to give them an excuse to half-arse a role rework thank you