Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
Healing through damage dealt is, in itself, only a constraint, so what's the reasonable compensation? Would it, as per examples from other MMOs, just be "slightly higher combined damage and healing if/when everything's going right"? Or would it simply be some other utility feature of the job that has nothing necessarily to do with that constraint anyways?
I guess the answer to that I'd give is 'when you're playing good, your healing occurs naturally as you're doing your damage, you don't need to think about it because it's happening semi-automatically'. I say semi, because eg: with my SGE rework ideas, you'd have to press augments like Krasis or Zoe still. But they're OGCD, they don't cost damage to use, they just slot in as a weave and you carry on. In WOW terms again though, they're more akin to old Warrior's Heroic Strike, you can weave the button press OGCD, but it doesn't take effect until the next autoattack. So there's a difference in feel between it and something like Hamstring, which was a true OGCD.

One major thing is that, similarly to barrier healers atm to an extent, playing from behind on a 'damage to healing' healer can be rough. It's really hellish to try and stabilize as a Disc in current WOW, or a Holy Paladin. Which is why I tried to keep the lifeline of 'Prognosis/Diagnosis are MP free', so you have a reliable fallback if you need it. Playing well means you shouldn't need it, but if it all goes tits up, you're not up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

But one other reason to have it is just 'its a different style of healing', I guess. Why does Resto Druid layer loads of HOTs, when the sheer burst healing power of a GCD from a Holy Priest or a MW Monk do similar output, but without the 'wait for the ticks' thing? Different gameplay styles, more player choice, more engaging. Healing as a Resto Druid is very different to healing as a Holy Priest, is very different to Disc. Heck, just the fact that Holy and Disc are SO different, means swapping between the two can be nice just to spice up the gameplay

A phrase like 'heal by doing damage' can help be a vehicle for class identity. Like imagine the new healer had been Necromancer instead of Sage, with a heavy focus on keeping up debuffs on the enemy that cause HP drain effects, stealing enemy HP to fuel the job gauge, spending that stolen life force to heal allies. Now imagine that it played like 'WHM, but it holds a scythe instead of a staff', down to carbon copies of Lilies, Medica2, Asylum, Tetra, etc. We'd (rightly) be asking 'why is this WHM but with an edgy coat of paint', as we do re: Sage being conspicuously SCH shaped