What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[ty_taurus]

I think this is something you fundamentally misunderstand about your solutions that are "you can just play badly and still manage" and why that really isn't a non-rigid, flexible, accommodating solution.

But I'm not actually arguing that the average player intentionally play poorly. I'm saying that players can do what is comfortable for them, whether that's optimal or not. The average player doesn't do things like drop their GCD or sit on cooldowns and think "dammit! I'm losing damage." That's not how I looked at my own performance back during ARR and HW when I was not a midcore player and would regularly stop casting altogether to play my cards, or might not reapply DoTs until I needed to reapply all of them as SCH. I wasn't measuring my performance up to what is possible of my job, I was just doing my best and enjoying beating content like extremes or some of the coils. Whether or not the average player is able to use 2 or 3 new DPS spells as optimally as humanly possible is not going to make or break a community of players. The only reason intentionally not using DPS ever came up was as a bargaining chip specifically for you and select few who seem repulsed by the prospect of additional DPS buttons at all, regardless of how easy or challenging they are to use.

I've also tried before to argue the concept of a healer that spends their GCDs setting up and activating party-wide buffs instead of attacking, and in order to stay competitive with the other healers, generates personal damage indirectly as a consequence of setting up your buffs. That way there could be a healer whos engagement stemmed from the experience of supporting most of the time and attacking as little as possible, and that seems to me like a great way to create a healer specifically for players who want to master and perfect their job without having that optimization having to come from attacking enemies, but as you mention at the bottom, was pretty much rejected outright.

To me, that doesn't sound very rigid, as it sounds the opposite of rigid. It sounds far less unyielding to me than "7, 8, 9, and 10 only; you can play as a 4, but you'll be doing poorly" does.

If we say that Ninja is a 10 in this example, I cannot agree that WHM with 2-3 additional attack spells makes it jump from a 1 to a 7. I would generously describe 2-3 extra spells as a 4. It would be more accurate to say that what I'd like to see would be something around a 4|5|5|6 spread to a 4|6|6|8 spread. The 4 should still bring value that the other healers do not have, and the DPS should still offer some opportunities to get extra damage out of using the right things at the right time, but it's overall straightforward and forgiving on the healing side.

7) As Roe pointed out: I have

That's fair; however, the reason why I don't recall this very well is you've made several posts in the past about different interpretations of each of the healers, often with different "what if"s attached, including "what if we make WHM complex and leave [this healer] in a state like this instead?" There's nothing wrong with making theorycrafts like that, but because the reasoning behind those different takes would change based on the topic, I don't feel that I have a strong understanding of what you'd collectively be content with or what was just experimental to see what people respond to. Something like having Holy buffed after every third Glare is certainly a fine step in a better direction, and I am always on board to give uses to buttons that are currently restricted to AoE only.

If we were to say that is 1 additional action of DPS variety, what if anything would you be willing to add to that?