A summary of healer issues

[AmiableApkallu]

3) Make GCD heals less punishing to use. I'd personally do this by looking at the individual DPS kits of the healers, and deciding how best to "refund" the damage lost from using our primary healing abilities.

I disagree with that take on healing.

It's one thing to argue that healers should DPS when they're not healing and that their DPS kits should be more involved than one-button spam. That, I agree with. It's quite another to treat healers actually pushing a healing button for a GCD as some sort of burden that the game needs to design around. That's precisely the interesting question: is the party's continued DPS best served by me throwing another stone or by me casting a heal?

I might even go further and say that WHM shows how not to "refund damage." The goal should be to reward thoughtful, necessary use of an ability, à la SGE's Eukrasian Diagnosis or DRK's Blackest Night. Finding an optimization for feeding the Blood Lily when everyone is at full health just feels silly.

[ForsakenRoe]

à la SGE's Eukrasian Diagnosis or DRK's Blackest Night.

EDiagnosis loses you 330 potency, because the toxicon it gives is only 330. to be damage neutral it'd have to either be 660 (holy crit variance batman) or be OGCD which is... why isnt it OGCD? doesnt really make sense why it had to be on the GCD. anyway as it stands, getting toxicon charges is in the same boat as 'dump lilies outside of raidbuffs to power a misery in raidbuffs' but worse, because you want to put up diagnosis'es when the boss isnt targetable, in order to not lose damage in the first place

TBN i hear people complain that 'oh if i use TBN too much i dont have the mana to dump edges in raidbuffs' but im not a tank main anymore so im not 100% on how that works, but the point is, you cant really make things 'refund damage' because of raidbuffs. if you make it damage neutral, people will find a way to move the damage from 'outside' to 'inside' raidbuffs, as we see with misery. if it's 'slightly weaker so the raidbuffs compensate the rest of the way to neutral' it just means the way to use it is to put it in raidbuffs which hampers how players can use it effectively. the solution is imo to make it neutral like misery, and just accept people are gonna find ways to get creative with how to eke out more damage from their skills, it just adds more interesting-ness to the otherwise bland role

[TheDustyOne]

I disagree with that take on healing.

It's one thing to argue that healers should DPS when they're not healing and that their DPS kits should be more involved than one-button spam. That, I agree with. It's quite another to treat healers actually pushing a healing button for a GCD as some sort of burden that the game needs to design around. That's precisely the interesting question: is the party's continued DPS best served by me throwing another stone or by me casting a heal?

I might even go further and say that WHM shows how not to "refund damage." The goal should be to reward thoughtful, necessary use of an ability, à la SGE's Eukrasian Diagnosis or DRK's Blackest Night. Finding an optimization for feeding the Blood Lily when everyone is at full health just feels silly.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, I probably should've added that such refunds should be time and/or resource gated like lilies currently are, it sounds stupid that someone merely spamming cure and regen would be casting near back-to-back Misery just because they got rewarded for bad spamming. I very much agree with you that it should reward thoughtful healing rather than just spamming heals.

As for finding optimizations like feeding Blood Lily, I don't think that's a major issue and would depend on how they handle refund mechanics. I'd rather take ForsakenRoe's position of just accepting that some people are going to get creative and find interesting ways to take advantage of it. Considering how much the skill ceiling has caved over the last few years, a few people here would probably welcome it. Hell, feeding the Blood Lily during downtime is something I like about current White Mage.