Quote Originally Posted by Seraphor View Post
Can't disagree more.
It reduced button bloat because it removed a skill you rarely use (once every 30 minutes) in favour of skills you use much more frequently (adding more fun to the job). And while WHM may have a lower skill count than other jobs, I'm talking about all healers, Protect was after all a role skill.
There was absolutely nothing fun about waiting around for 10-30 seconds at the start of every duty for the Healer to hit the Protect button and then forget all about it.
Having extra skills you have to spam in combat isn't inherently more fun (as we see with DRK vs. WAR); it's just preference whether you'd rather have a job with the 'random bullshit go!' meme or not. There's nothing inherently 'fun' about waiting for tanks to turn on tank stance and scholars to summon the fairy at the start of the duty but it's such an incredibly tiny delay in exchange for some amount of desperately-needed playstyle variety.

Imagine if every skill had a 30 minute cooldown and you just had to spam Cure the rest of the time. Such fun!
That would be button bloat, loads of pointless skills just taking up space instead of using that space for useful skills.
I can imagine lots of situations, I'd prefer to imagine one that actually resembles having one more buff and one fewer spamskill, like we were talking about, though. Also you haven't said what the 30-minute skills are, so I can't decide whether they're useful or not. A 10% damage reduction (that I can toss on newbs while questing to be friendly) certainly sounds much more useful and fun to me than 'remember to mash this oGCD on cooldown'.