Protect is a waste of space and should have died with Stoneskin

[Pomo]

One day this game will have a "press one button to win," button.

That's what happens whenever wow starts leaking. Having said that, I want stoneskin and Stoneskin 2 back.

[Greven]

I agree with OP, remove actual protect, call "Divine Benison" "Protect" and it's done

[IhzaMhaskova]

The problem is that protect and esuna are cross role instead of just being standard. Imagine if they took away our Raise spells and forced us to use a cross role slot. That's how I feel. The bigger issue is how healer cross roles are a game of getting back what we lost.

Instead of removing things from the game entirely, both esuna and protect should be standard just like Raise. Replace them with better, more unique cross roles.

Every healer DID have an Esuna action.

They removed the SCH/AST ones and ripped Esuna from WHM.

It's funny how we can take 5/5 role actions and still feel more incomplete than when we took 1 or 2 or 3 role actions before 4.0.

[Jade3173]

My suggestion is that Protect be made into a Magic version of Palisade.

Casters already have this, it's called Apocatastasis.

On topic a bit more, the idea of the PvP Protect does sound cooler to me than the set and forget version we have now. The macro is cool and all since it lets Healers have an extra role skill even if other roles don't get that. But the simple fact that we even have a macro out there to do it should give the dev team an idea of what we think of the skill. With Weakness/Brink of Death no longer lowering our HP, it make Protect even less useful than it originally was.

[IveraIvalice]

As much as I like protect I do think it's a bit unnecessary mostly because healers have probably the best selection of role abilities and we can only use maybe half of them.

Here's my suggestion for protect and it may seem a bit different (unless someone already suggested it and I didn't see)
Make protect an aoe buff that is always around the healer within a certain radius. Basically as long as you are within a certain range of the healer in your party then you will have protect, if you leave the radius you lose protect.
You know how people say if you leave your healer they can't save you? Well if you leave your healer you won't be protected. The range should probably be larger then the range to heal but all of that can be up for debate, and as I mentioned you only get protect from the healers in your party not just every healer running by in open world

[Ilyrian]

I know you're right OP but I really like the spell effect – can we just make it baseline for all healers instead? And Esuna – really... what were they thinking?

[BillyKaplan]

My guild ran some tests and from what they say, Protect is about 30% difference in damage. Removing it outright would likely require a re-tuning of the entire frigging game.

[Tridus]

That sounds far, far too high. I never put it up when people die (because of the macro) and the difference is nothing like that. Nobody without Protect would ever survive anything that brings people with it close to death if that were the true number.

[Kerwin]

4.0 decluttered the battle system by dropping Stoneskin, which makes sense when it's just cast at the start of a duty and quickly falls off the tank, with dubious benefit for the party.

I personally stopped reading there because you have no idea how to properly use stoneskin as a PLD. I agree Stoneskin II was useless cause it could only be casted outside of combat. But the pure mitigation it brought to tank utilities was king.

There was nothing better then a PLD stoneskining themselves before a major tank buster in combination of SCH/AST shield, Shelton and any other defensive cool down (Rampart/Sentinel, etc.)

It was very very useful.

[Connor]

I think Protect is cool as a spell, but I agree with what others are saying in that it doesn't add anything interesting to playing a healer.
I think the PvP effect of Protect would make it a lot more interesting to use in normal combat personally