How do you define (meaningful) choice?

[Post]

As has the same damage kit in 6.X that it did in 4.X. WHM has the same damage kit other than it lost Aero 3 and it gained Misery. How were they "a blast to play in that era" when they had effectively the same DPS kits?

What else changed?

I'd say WHM's gameplay has been bollocks since StB, frankly. The reason it improved going into ShB is they basically didn't touch it aside from their dumb lillies in StB, except that they drastically changed Cleric Stance. Most people probably don't agree that it was fun to play around, but the old stance-swapping Cleric Stance certainly added a lot of 'execution complexity' to healer gameplay. WHM most especially was affected by this considering the rest of their toolkit has always been "press button, directly heal targets" where SCH and AST have always been at least a little more involved to do their role itself.

WHM did not improve because the number of offensive actions is superior / inferior now or during ShB. In fact, its gameplay has become less "meaningful" (in the sense of 'if you make an error, there's consequence') with:
-The universal healer 1.5sec cast (removed the need to consider Dia / Lillies as movement or oGCD weaving tools when trying to optimize your play)
-The huge radii of healer actions (removed the need to consider positioning or in many cases timing to 'pass' healing checks)
-The removal of Stoneskin means that there's nothing for WHM to do in downtime besides burn lillies, and its ability to prevent one-hit-ko damage on players is limited to benison, Aquaveil and Temperance, all of which have a cooldown (AST also had this problem exacerbated by ShB and EW).
-The combination of Assize into an offensive AND defensive action with the removal of Cleric Stance (even if that were reverted, the number of free actions and range of those actions is so huge that there's even less of a reason to use Assize to heal with today than during HW)


This game's pretty much built around 'execution' given how little choice we get regarding gear/stats/skills and other traditional RPG stuff. Everyone's taste on this is going to be pretty different for what feels good, and usually as someone plays longer they're going to feel more comfortable and possibly even bored if the game doesn't keep them engaged in other ways. For many healers, ShB and its continuation in EW has hit that point, because the only decision in the game we really get to make that affects the gameplay itself is 'what job am I going to play', and thanks to ShB and EW and their universal changes and overly cautious balancing, that matters even less now within the healer role.

As it is, I just /random 4 what healer I'm going to play so I at least get some variety.

Edit: I think that change for forcing players into arenas has been around since late StB, Vetch. I don't recall exactly, but whenever they added the option to enter the arena after you've been locked out, I'm pretty sure it's functioned the way it does now since then. Honestly, it might even be a bug. Maybe we're NOT supposed to be forced in if we select no or don't make a selection. At the very least, I've seen players forced to skip cutscenes in SV ages ago by that change, and when CLL was added (5.3 sometime... 5.31? 5.35?) we were definitely in the time that the arenas behaved that way.