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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6088547" data-attributes="member: 37579">There are plusses and minuses to both. But at the end of the day the results are the same: less lasting damage and more encounters per day. The point of combat healing is always to prevent people going down, because then they lose and action and the party's collective DPR drops. Healing is reactive. You need to take the damage first. But it's finicky as you cannot heal before they reach a certain amount of "damage" or you overheal, which is a waste. And there's always a risk of a couple lucky strikes between the healer's turn that can drop a non-injured-enough character. DR is pre-healing. So even if someone is not-injured-enough for healing, they can still take some DR. It prevents those lucky strikes from dropping the character. Plus, picking which ally to pre-heal is strategic and fits the theme of the warlord. So it compliments the playstyle of the class. They're a top pick because of the power bloat they've had compared to other classes. Which is really class neutral and more to do with warlords getting an extra book of powers and some extra articles. Divorced from powers, going with just the class itself, the warlord heals via surge+d6. Almost every other class heals more or gives a bonus. There's a little perk. The exception being the shaman that heals two people at once, one surgelessly (and surgeless healing in 4e is always gold). It's base healing is bland. Baseline. It's the least interesting thing about the class. Everything else a warlord can do is much, much, much more interesting than healing, and much more relevant to the theme of the class. Which isn't answering my question or countering my point. It's deflecting. They may just be "what ifs" but they're valid deductions based on looking at the class material we have. 1st level characters do not do much. They have a couple small options. Fighters have two manoeuvres and cleric can cast two spells and channel divinity once. Should a warlord should have more options that other 1st level characters? No, that'd be silly. They also should follow the pattern of other martial characters and focus on manoeuvres, spending their MDD for bonuses. Which means they can either have at-will powers that rely on their MDD to reduce damage keeping with the design of the power source, or they can have a daily heal that seems tacked-on from a design perspective and also comes at the cost of other more warlordy options. ...I...Words fail.Do I really need to explain this? Why is it problematic? Well, first it's not unreasonable to want hitpoints to represent one thing any more than it is for the other side to insist it represents the opposite. That's not the issue. The point is that the game itself cannot take sides and has to cater to both parties. It can do this with abstract rules and optional rules (which currently exist in the playtest package) that give more abstracted hp and the meat damage model. Giving a class an ability tied to one interpretation of hitpoints changes this dynamic. One side "wins". And you can see for yourself what has happened to the balance of power by letting one side "win" for an edition.</blockquote>

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