What I don't get is people who complain that WARs self-heals don't scale with oncoming damage but then turn people away from doing things that would go toward self healing by saying if they don't put as much HP on their bar as possible they're doing it wrong.

If you want the self-heals to keep going up, you have to put in the stats and the gear to do that. It's not something that just happens. You get out of self healing what you put into it. =/