The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Shurrikhan]

The odd thing to me about that, though, is I feel if they were really worried about that, they'd make all GCD heals generate a damage neutral resource.

Consider you'd still be getting 1 Misery per 60 sec natively from Lilies, and that's literally how Lilies are used now. I'm not sure this would really change anything in that sense. If anything, it would make it more casual friendly since the people using more hardcast heals would refund that damage with Miseries. Super-casuals aren't thinking in terms of optimal, so they wouldn't be thinking "I should heal now when it's not needed so I can Misery in the buff window". So it wouldn't change their gameplay at all. This is actually a change that would MARGINALLY allow for a SLIGHTLY increased skill ceiling under very specific situations (a non-casual doing high end content where Misery drifted getting it back on-track) while not harming casuals and being such a niche case for optimization that the mid-core wouldn't be disadvantaged. I think it's one of those "more dps buttons/rotation" changes that doesn't cause a problem.

Honestly, it'd work better with WHM since it's designed more for GCD healing. SGE with Toxicon would be nice (not sure broken or not...), but you are correct in that it has oGCD healing.[/hb][/hb]

Sure, they might not know why more veteran players are yeeting heals into the overhealth abyss, and might not therefore copy that well/sensibly/directly, but it's still going to be confusing for them if every GCD heal is DPS-neutral but through bankable refunds that then get spent during damage amp windows and therefore creates this really twisted up optimal play that they'd have to figure out at some point to progress deeper into mastery.

And in the meantime, precisely because wasteful healing to prep damage is unintuitive as all heck (especially when it's not simply an exact analog of any other source of [already bloated] free healing), it's only widening the gap (and suspension of otherwise more reasonable instincts) between new and veteran players.

I don't think true DPS-neutral heals outside of CDs are a good thing.

Some refunding? Sure. But not outright lossless casts.

:: And ideally (to me), incoming non-burst damage would be higher and oGCDs and Lilly spells (unless we wanted specifically to give WHM an MP advantage for "prog champ" status) both would have MP cost enough that there wouldn't be any wholly "free" healing anyways that WHM would need to match up again skill-per-skill.

I think the problem is the Devs, as we all seem to agree, don't see "lost damage GCD" in the way the playerbase does. They don't see GCDs as a resource/meta-resource. Misery just turned out to be a happy accident, it seems. Does explain why it took them so long to make it damage neutral. They didn't get that was the calculation players were actively making.

They STILL seem not to, exactly.

I could have sworn they (Yoshida and Starfox, in one of the first LLs) noted exactly that factor in explaining why we were seeing double-SCH so often even in T1-4 (rather than only as a fix to Infirmity in T5, since Lustrate at the time healed for 25% HP regardless of anti-healing debuffs). Since SCH had effectively auto-regen and a much less wasteful 3/4s of a Bene every minute, instead of 1 per 5 minutes... yeah, SCH was kicking WHM's butt overall simply because WHM had to drop significant damage (and mana) to do any healing while SCH didn't -- i.e., a gap in oGCD output. It wasn't particularly unknown or undiscussed even back then. It was ostensibly part of their reasoning behind adding Tetra and Asylum (or simply, a greater increase in oGCD throughput to WHM than to SCH).

And, because nontraditional compositions were also more common back then, it seemed like, if anything, people were more aware of this idea that the point of healers, and even healing itself, was ultimately clear speed (via cheese, permissible uptime, etc.) instead of solely reliability.