Quote Originally Posted by Sebazy View Post
You've probably seen me rant and rave about the glory that was Warrior Priest in Warhammer Online many a time, a big part of what made it stand out over other more traditional MMO healers was that the entire class was not just a damage refund, it was damage positive. Using the right ability in the right moment was a net gain on resources and potency per minute over simply standing back and mashing a heal. It sucked you in, the more you understood it, the more dynamic it became and the more it rewarded you.
That's fair, but a couple things:
  • What was the balancing point for the Warrior Priest? How much of this "damage positive" refunding did it rely upon just to match other healers? (How much of a disadvantage did it face outside of its ideal situations, and were those situations more finnicky than those of other healers?)

  • What were the mechanisms by which a Warrior Priest could achieve damage neutrality or better with its heals? Were those situations spammable?
For something spammable, as we typically mean by "GCD heals" in discussion of balance (wherein Solace/Rapture are the single outlier), to be able to achieve damage-neutrality (let alone be something around which the kit must be balanced, through "damage positive" returns), those opportunities, at least, must not be continuous (at least to your average, even if skilled, Savage raider, etc.).

But how do you limit them? (Not a rhetorical question.)

If heals naturally scaled with incoming damage, you could use a refund mechanism on a burst healing skill that does not scale with incoming damage in order to allow it a degree of scaling, much like The Blackest Night does.

But when they're all of flat value? Sure, you could make a heal uniquely scale with incoming damage while the rest do not, but then any refund mechanism for getting a good use out of it just makes a situation in which "the rich get richer; the poor get poorer," purposely unbalancing it.

Or, perhaps you have the refund mechanism trigger when it doesn't meet parity... but then you're just squishing the fail condition of that action, which will likely --in balance-- take some of that retained value from its would-be peaks. Given that we could already tighten balance between jobs without squishing the fail condition of a skill unique to them (by just offering that more distinct job alternatives), that doesn't seem worthwhile either.

Quickened Aetherflow was a great trait
It also wasn't a refund mechanism, though. It was simply a trait which, in effect, reduced the CD of Aetherflow from 60 to as little as 45s, and punished you for not spending your last AF at least 5s before the skill would finish cooling.

(Yes, it originally did 10s at a time, but only at a 20% chance, and that was changed within a single hotfix/minor patch, into the 100% chance of 5s from 4.05 onward until it was removed.)