Quote Originally Posted by Iedarus View Post
The simplest change would be to shave off unnecessary heal buttons and give unique DPS buttons. With the existence of Protraction, it's clear the devs are running out of ideas for ways a Scholar can fill a health bar; they are so adamant on the "no healer dpsing" philosophy despite the hardest content in the game requiring healers to dps. As for Aetherflow, I honestly think they should just give it the hammer. Sage has a significantly better version of it so Scholar needs something else to set it apart that doesn't cause conflicting ability interaction.
I actually like Protraction conceptually, however, I have a couple issues with it:

1. It doesn't last long enough. Increasing max HP can be a a really unique form of mitigation as it's essentially a refillable barrier, but that value needs time to actually benefit from that functionality.

2. I think it suites the pure healers better. As I mentioned, it's essentially a barrier in concept--one that can be refilled through regens, perhaps. I think it would feel a lot more interesting if pure healers didn't have any barriers, but could instead extend max HP and allow their regens to more effectively keep these max HP "barriers" in functionality refilled as a way to approach the issue of needing mitigation. Meanwhile, barrier healers shouldn't have max HP extension buffs, but just have their much larger barriers.

That said, I also think a concept ForsakenRoe brought up in another thread in the past about putting the healers on a scale from pure to barrier, where WHM is the dedicated pure healer, SGE is the dedicated barrier healer, SCH could be the barrier healer who could be a pinch pure healer with Eos or play more into their mitigation role as Selene, and AST balances the two roles evenly. Meanwhile Healer #5 we get in like 6 or 8 years from now would be a pure healer who could be a pinch barrier healer in some fashion, like with the SCH example of having Eos fulfill some pure healer duties. It's certainly one way the healers could develop in a more satisfying way.