It’s obvious that the current Heal will stay, with on-target aiming, because it’s easier for IMC to balance around.
The whole Re:build update tackled a lot of things that IMC wanted to address, and one thing is the removal of tile-based magic.
As you can see, a lot of skills that worked as tiles/or tile-like (e.g. Heal/Cure/Guardian Saint/Healing Factor/Safety Zone/Deprotected Zone/Zombify/Foretell/Ein Sof) were either removed from the game or changed into a targeted/AoE buff and/or debuff.
This way it’s easier to balance around it because the tile nature required to add higher benefits to the skills since they were clunky/ineffective to use in a lot of cases.
And while it is sad to see the removal of what mainly made the Cleric Classes in TOS unique, it just didn’t work out with IMC as the game developer.
I guess this is the silent confession that they were unable to bring a good solution for the whole system to the table without overhauling “everything”.
Not that it bothers me too much regarding this aspect of game play, because it made some skills really bad for actual use(e.g. Deprotected Zone).
Other issues that are as prevalent as ever are still suffocating the game system regardless of the current attempts to reform the game.
The whole Re:build is more affecting general game play instead of rebuilding the game systems and their interactions.
Depends, but I guess you’re right. TOS will become more difficult, which is good, because it was pretty boring outside of Velcoffer/Demon Lord hunting.
Might be even interesting if less players are maining Clerics and/or willing to invest 1000s of attribute points for some comfort endgame slave.