What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[ForsakenRoe]

I don't recall every detail of Roe's White Mage rework concept, but all it has instead is like 2 or 3 new actions that result in a relatively middling improvement to total damage output.

In total it was like 4 new buttons, not including 'lower level version of something we currently have' eg Divine Seal > Temperance. In terms of damage related things specifically, it was just two: Banish, maybe Cleric Stance as a 60s burst CD (but that one can be sacrificed if it gets us the other stuff) and a rescaling of Dia's duration but that's not a new button. The main point you address is, well, yeh the main point. WHM is the 'simple healer' in our designs not because it's damage rotation is one button, but access to powerful, on-demand, no-frills PUMP healing is direct, easy to understand, and feels good to use for a new player, the effect and feedback are immediate. They press PI Rapture and the ally HP bars fill by like 50%, that feels good and does not take a university degree to understand, that's what 'simple healer' should mean

Except Sage is only like that because healers are stuck in a pit of poor design.

Yep exactly this. If WHM still had Aero3, AST still had 2 DOTs, and SCH was still... SCH, SB ver, SGE would have had a lot more GCD variety to it's rotation. It's just common sense that if all three of the healers we have are one DOT, one Nuke, one 'extra thing' (Assize, EnergyDrain, Cards), that SGE would be one DOT (EDosis), one Nuke (Dosis), one 'extra thing' (Phlegma). No Toxicon doesn't count

We can't make WHM strong enough to compete with SCH without ruining WHM's identity™, so we are going to ruin SCH's identity to preserve WHM's identity™

something something 'the WHM was forced to do all the healing while the SCH was free to just DPS', followed by a chart showing that the SCH was doing slightly more of the HPS, albeit the overall HPS values being pretty equal

If they had just made the WHM changes of 5.0, in 4.3, along with how they did a massive overhauling of DRK (like making Shadow Wall not suck), that is to say, rework lilies to be a resource to spend instead of a proc CDR crap, Misery to refund forced GCD healing, the issues with how badly WHM was viewed would be a little less 'issue'. There wouldn't have been any way to deal with the whole 'AST is plainly better because lol AOE Balance' till the next expansion, but seeing the 'pure healer' experiment of 4.0 go down in flames as hard as it did and then doubling down on it is tone deaf in the extreme

edit:

Also, something different about you (character). Did you change your hair?

I logged off on Reaper or something non-healer after doing WT for the week, and having made all the crafted sets (but not doing anything with them re: glamour), it's probably just that you saw my character without her glasses on