Quote Originally Posted by Fendred View Post
Yoshida mentioned in an interview that they get conflicting requests going both ways. Some players are adamant that they want healers to focus on healing and others want healers to have full on DPS rotations. In a separate interview, Yoshida mentioned that designing healers presented a particular challenge/barrier in that they couldn't really replace older healer abilities. They always had to add some new tool. I believe this is because healer toolkits are introduced to counter particular mechanics from different expansions and raid tiers. As a result, they can't just replace them without having to retest whatever they add against the mechanic the old ability was built to address. Additionally, this means its hard to make room on the UI for DPS abilities because they'd be replacing cooldowns meant to address something.

So, according to Yoshida,
1. The healer community is totally divided on the direction of healing jobs.
2. The healer toolkit is a backlog of abilities designed to address different boss mechanics introduced during each expansion.

Given what Yoshida said, I'd posit that if healers were rebuilt with DPS rotations we'd be in a scenario where healers are no longer built for the game they exist in (other than the current expansion). All the older raid content would have mechanics that the healers no longer have cooldowns to deal with because those were sacrificed to make room for DPS. They'd have to test four entirely new jobs against all the existing content just to do that.
You keep saying that DPS would break healing as we know it but it still doesn't hold up. For starters, SCH existed in both ARR and HW having half a DPS's toolkit and didn't have any problems in its ability to heal through the content. It was and has always been the top performing healer both because of its damage output and its incredibly effective healing tools. And it still had a fairly decent DPS library in SB. How can content that was designed when healer DPS tools existed break for restoring the concept of healer DPS tools? It makes no sense.

Even if we move into ShB and EW content were healers are broken and unfun, why do you assume that adding in DPS tools can only result in the removal of core healing tools that content was designed around having available? You don't think there's bloat in other areas that can't be trimmed or consolidated? I mean I went through and theorycrafted my own wishlist of healer reworks with all updated GCD rotations to give healers a fun and consistent form of gameplay throughout all forms of content without actually removing any major healing buttons and still found ways to drop the button total, not raise it. My way is not the only way, it's just me doing what I like to do for fun, but a professional design team should not have issues working around that. Sure it takes effort, but so does any amount of job change. If the idea of spending time working on and improving jobs is seen as a hinderance then why even have a job design team at all?