Season 1. I stack crit already and having a passive +10 Crit is always welcome (even if just for damage). The bonus healing amount on crit IS impactful on all your other major CDs. It will contribute to overhealing, sure. But It doesn’t all go straight into overhealing.
Was it boring. Yeah sure. But I dislike season 2 for the reason stated above, and I dislike season 3 even more because I dislike PWave. Especially now that for some unknown reason they took away offensive PWave for Resto.
Season 1 you had to worry about not using it at 100% efficiency constantly. Not everyone needed a boosted crit heal. Lots of over healing.
Just weird (to me) to say season 2 is bad because you cant use it at 100% efficiency, but to be ok with another season you cant use at 100% efficiency.
The crit from S1 was more noticeable because we had so little stats. We probably have more crit now than we had in S1 with the crit buff.
Season 1 and 2 were absolute trash for PvP.
I didn’t even run 2 set S2.
Make set bonuses actually benefit both PvE and PvP.
I’m curious what you mean by “Worry about” in this context. I didn’t change my playstyle because my crit heals healed for more. Not even once. It affected all your healing evenly. If I crit a big chain heal or dropped a Healing Tide and it “got lucky” and healed people up faster than normal - great! I can go back to chain lightnings like Thrall intended. The only noticeable overhealing was that a CBT crit could possible mega-overheal the group, but CBT was going to top everyone off anyway.
The same way you “worry about” it with S2.
I cast healing rain non stop. I didnt change my playstyle. It was a bonus 8% healing over the course of the dungeon without me having to really do anything different.
It allowed me to go back to chain lightnings 
But a huge chunk of that 8% was overhealing. Would you prefer a set that was “increase your healing on full health targets by 1000%”? that would make the numbers in details so big.
And a chunk of your normal healing will also be over healing. Every time you crit, will most likely be over healing. The amount of heals where a person takes a full crit of zero over healing, is not going to be a large chunk of your casts.
My point is the same scenarios people are saying why S2 is bad applies to S1.
You can prefer S1. thats fine. I just think many reasons given are based on people not understanding how S2 worked or just being ok with similar drawbacks in their preferred tier.
Not when I crit with Chain lighting or a stormkeeper lighting. That’s never going to be overhealing.
Which is like, the only argument given so far I remember that is fair.
I would go out on a limb and say that if Season 1 only affected damage for resto, I’d still vote for it 
. Maybe I’m the sicko, but I want to bring back the days of BFA’s 3x Igneous Potential, or SL’s Chains of Devastation.
Season 2’s Increasing my overhealing by 8% doesn’t interest me
Season 3’s casting extra Rips on people at full health (or actively casting heal on FULL HEALTH targets to get 4p procs) doesn’t interest me.
I actually loved season 1 for that reason. Season 3 also is more adaptable to movement fights as well being based on our instant cast heal…
in the end i feel Season 1 is the simplest option for gameplay as you can play how you want
to cut down on overspending on mana vs quality of heal i like season 3… i have less overhealing there than i did in season 1
I voted for S1 not because I liked the gameplay or bonus but as a commentary about how BAD S2 and S3 are compared to other classes. S2 was even worse before they ‘fixed’ it.
S1 was the least bad of all the sets.
Why not? You don’t get additional rewards for overhealing less.
I’m looking at some logs from some +20 vault-spam keys last night. (So admittedly not push keys, but still). Riptide had 30% overhealing, and Tidal Reservoir was almost 45% overhealing.
I found a +20 UR I did in season 2, and Tidewater was only 4% of my healing and 40% Overhealing.
I’m sorry wut? You’re saying you’d like a set bonus that did actually nothing meaningful to keep people alive – but makes your details numbers bigger by inflating overhealing only? Is this the timeline we live in?
No no the timeline we live in is playing the game to collect rewards. Overhealing numbers don’t give additional rewards. It’s not hard to understand so no need to worry about it
I don’t wanna pull a rating card, but what precisely makes you think that your own logs are the benchmark for how the spec is supposed to be played on a given season?
What if you were playing sub-optimally? Would you be judging the tier by your own performance?
Do people actually look at healing rankings rather than their damage?
It’s a fair point, and I’m fine to be “proven wrong” by bigger fish with more comprehensive logs.
But also, I think I fall pretty squarely in the middle-of-the-pack for endgame players. So I kinda feel like whatever mistakes I’m making are also being made by the rest of the civilians out there. If Blizzard only wanted high-end players to weigh in, then they would have made this poll only for the pro-guilds (and they do have a direct line to those guilds via discord).
My goal is to fight the “But the numbers in season 2 were bigger” argument. I think most healers look at the healing logs, and the healing parses and just see bigger HPS numbers and assume that’s ‘better’. Those numbers include overhealing, so in a sense, you can sit there blowing CDs on full health targets and push those HPS parse numbers up. When I look at healing logs for our guild, one of the first places I look right after hps numbers are overhealing numbers.
Would you want this set bonus if it was nerfed by 40%? Well people should consider that they should be discounting those numbers by the overhealing %. For me, that’s floating around 40%.
Blizzard has opted for the approach with the least thought possible regarding S4: “Just make a poll and give them what they want.” It’s a terrible idea tbh, for multiple reasons ranging from you can grief other specs polls to a huge part of the playerbase doesn’t actually understand how each tier bonus worked.
Anyway, I’m kinda at a loss with that 2nd paragraph. Parses in wlogs don’t factor in overhealing. In the top right you have an “Overheal” toggle to switch the last column from HPS to Raw HPS, and you’ll see the values are clearly different. Unless I’m totally misunderstanding what you’re saying.