The Healers should be reworked? New player perspective.

[Sebazy]

...and about when those things changed into what the modern playerbase is, Cleric was removed. Specifically for that reason - that it was dividing the community and that there was a big disparity between Healer damage outcomes which gave the Devs headaches to try to balance around. It didn't stop Healers from being plentiful UNTIL people got good enough/the game got solved enough that people started cussing out others in casual content for not using it. And what happened? ENOUGH Healers were quitting healing that the Devs took note and removed Cleric (as a toggle). In other words, this very thing happened before with the more modern playerbase.

By the end of HW I clearly remember wildly overblown threads loudly proclaiming 'HEALERS MUST DPS' or 'HEALERS MUSTN'T DPS' all over here and reddit.

I also clearly remember WHM somewhat frequently getting excluded in PF for Extreme and Savage content. This peaked around the skip soar or disband Zurvan meme days around 3.5?.

I don't remember seeing an exodus of healers though and I highly doubt that cleric was removed specifically for that reason. By all means cite your sources that confirms otherwise but IMHO that's a Stretch Armstrong tier reach.

I don't think you're far off though, just cut out everything after the bit where people were cussing each other out over the thing. My suspicion is that it got removed because it was so divisive and it was directly at odds with the casual centric direction Yoshida wanted to head in.

Regardless, done with this one. If you're going to tell me how I played both now and years ago then there's little point continuing this conversation.

[Shurrikhan]

By the end of HW I clearly remember wildly overblown threads loudly proclaiming 'HEALERS MUST DPS' or 'HEALERS MUSTN'T DPS' all over here and reddit.

I also clearly remember WHM somewhat frequently getting excluded in PF for Extreme and Savage content. This peaked around the skip soar or disband Zurvan meme days around 3.5?.

I don't remember seeing an exodus of healers though and I highly doubt that cleric was removed specifically for that reason. By all means cite your sources that confirms otherwise but IMHO that's a Stretch Armstrong tier reach.

The consensus back then was pretty consistent: Cleric Stance was an easy but stupidly annoying mechanic, in no small part because it badly punished Spell Speed (since it'd effectively increases the cooldown past 2 GCDs' time) and the un-stance didn't queue properly. It added virtually nothing despite a high cost to QoL.

Was it causing healers to quit healing, though? No. After all, that was what they were used to from level 2 onward.