Originally Posted by
Schadow
He indeed answered the question. The question itself was badly formulated. Too bad he only actively responds on Twitter though where there are much more detailed posts on the forums that are unanswered, that makes me more sad to be honest.
He answered the HPS meter question, yes. HPS alone is not enough to measure healing power. It's indeed the amount of HPS, Healing Done, how long you can keep healing until you oom yourself (duration), cooldowns and surviveability. Let's break it into account.
HPS - No need to tell you, it's bad.
Healing Done - Often mistakingly directly linked to HPS, but during downtime, HPS goes lower. If your active time is higher, your healing done can be higher then from somebody who is lower on active time (although rarely, unless one died).
Duration - How long can we go on doing our normal priority rotation before we go oom. And in that case, it's very easy. We need a high amount of spirit and a decent amount of crit (as we else severely lack throughput) to be able to heal longer then 5 minutes. Some fights tend to last 10+ minutes and we need to be prepared for such fights.
Cooldowns - Argueably the best thing we provide is Healing Tide. Spirit Link and Ascendence require still that we are stacked (yes, Restorative Mists has a range, as big a range as Chain Heal has, which is 13y). It heals good, but after 3-4 ticks, it is near useless, as any other healing cooldown that can be replaced with us can do the same thing. Maybe not as fast, but we're talking cooldown wise here and then we are good.
Surviveability - Hmm, we got Astral Shift on a 1 minute cooldown. That's good. Or Stone Bulwark for an absorb. That's also not bad. Plus if we're specced in PE, we have a 10% dmg reduc buff from the earth elemental if it channels. Not bad. Not good, but not bad either.
So indeed, it's not all HPS. But it is what we lack severely. HPS and Healing Done. Period, you can not deny that. And if we're lacking one part and one thing that's good from us that can be replaced by any other class their cooldown, but maybe a second slower? Oh, well, fuck it, we take him in as we need better healing.
I know you linked me that post before, but I do not agree with that. I simply don't as every healer can do that and even better. The point is not how we are supposed to heal, the point is more that we have to be able to do that. And with shitty throughput, we can't. Not even our "ohshit" Ancestral Swiftness button with Greater Healing Wave is able to fully top a person from low health if it doesn't crit.