Quote Originally Posted by Tint View Post
That never was actually a thing. Protect could only be used on party members and people did not invited people to their party just to give them the buff.

However, I miss Protect and the moment at the start of a dungeon when everyone was waiting for the buff to be applied. Was a little sense of group bonding.
Healers have lost a lot of things from the transition into Shadowbringers, but I think we get too caught up on the smaller things that really didn't matter. Protect was not a tool that added substance to healer gameplay. The most you really did with it was remember to reapply it on a raised party member, but the idea of a 30 minute buff that's designed to always exist on the party may as well not exist at all. If you have a race where every player gets a handicap where they start 10% closer to the finish line, then it's not a handicap. All you did was move the start line forward. If it were something that healers had to be cognizant of in order to maintain on the party through some type of gameplay interaction, that would be a different story. But set it, forget it is not meaningful gameplay.

I think we're largely fond of the old healers because they had meaningful gameplay loops. They had more DPS tools, more mitigation, more utility, and that's what we miss. Things like Protect and old Cleric Stance may have been there too, but they're not what made healing fun, and they're not what we're ultimately longing for.