People need to stop talking in extremes. There's no binary of 'does not press damage button EVER' vs 'Is a 99 parsing damage god', there is an entire scale of skill levels in between. If someone is skilled enough at healer to do damage now, adding new buttons to the DPS rotation is going to throw them off for a bit, yes. Keywords, for a bit. With practice they will get comfortable with the new rotation, just as DPS have to every time there's a new expansion, and a new rotation to learn. Frankly, the idea of 'we cannot add new buttons to healer DPS rotation because it'd be too much for players to handle' is insulting, not just to vets who can definitely handle it, but also to the casual players you're trying to be the champion for, because some of them WOULD be able to handle it given they practice, and these 'protect the babby players!' sentiments just keep them in the nest, and stifle their growth.
Also, if someone says 'why arent you healing' when you are doing healing, if they aren't dead, ask them 'but did you die?'. The only HP that matters is the last one. I don't think I've EVER been told to 'stop damage and heal' like this.
There's two main schools of thought on how to make healer more interesting as a role: Add more damage to heal, or add more damage skills to use. We've seen this tier what happens when there's more damage to heal: even more 'fairweather' healers quit because they cannot keep up. I, and many other people asking for change, have said many times: We think adding more damage skills to use is the solution to this problem, because it allows the 'healing side' of the kit to remain as easy to access as it currently is. New healers would not need to feel stressed, because they can ignore the DPS stuff entirely when they start. As they play through the NINETY LEVELS of story, they can start to experiment in dungeons (doubly so now there's trusts that won't yell at them for mistakes) about when they can afford to maybe throw a DOT in here, a Glare in there.
No, the real issue I think is the players who flat out refuse to improve. The ones who get snappy at anyone who dares to suggest any change to their playstyle. Not even 'hey did you know you can do damage', I mean if you suggest 'hey try using Regen instead of Cure 1, it heals more for the same MP cost' and they say 'shut up I know how to heal'. The other issue is players who defend 'strawman casuals', as you are doing here. These 'casuals who can't keep up with having new buttons' do not exist in the numbers you are trying to imply. Yes, there is a non-zero number of them. But there's plenty of casuals who COULD keep up with the new buttons, if they were given the chance to practice and improve. All posts like this are misguided in my view. You're like a mother bird trying to keep the chicks in the nest. They never learn to fly if they don't leave the nest. By insisting that we can't have anything that could require the player practice and become more skilled, you're just advocating for a specific skill ceiling to limit everyone, rather than the skill ceiling be decided by the job's design. And ironically, we can see what happens because of this smothering attitude: This tier, where players who were not skilled enough to handle heavier incoming damage. Because SE kept them in the metaphorical nest for all of SHB, and EW's first tier. So when this tier came along and asked more of the player, many couldn't keep up, and so quit in frustration.
The training wheels have to come off at some point.
We used to have that, it meant healers HAD to play some THM to get Swiftcast, or melee HAD to play DRG to get Blood for Blood. This would be the same, forcing people to play classes they dont want to, to get 'essential' extra skills to cross-class over.
I suggested a change to WHM that adds one extra GCD instead of Glare every 15s and changed the DOT to be refreshed every 12s instead of 30. Other people have suggested other things, whether for WHM or other healers, but all of the suggestions are not DPS level intricate rotations. At most, it's 'give SCH its DOTs back'. This mentality of 'oh the healers are asking for more DPS complexity? Surely this means they're demanding super technical stuff like DRG buff/life alignment, or RPR double communio', like no man I'm asking for ONE extra GCD on WHM and rescaling the DOT duration so the class feels more bursty.