There’s two different point of views that usually take place on this sort of issue, and both are correct.
When I heal a +6-7, I’m not dealing with ‘best case scenario’ players, and I definitely have to compensate for mistakes that could not have been made. (Or in your case 8’s and 10’s, you also get a mixed bag of nuts. Sometimes you luck into a good tank crest/vault farming, sometimes you get someone like me boomering their way through content)
When someone heals a +12, people are using their CDs relatively effectively or they wouldn’t be in a +12.
So when someone like Argorwal says they never have to heal tanks, they’re probably not wrong (we all know it’s a bit of an exaggeration), but they’re playing with better tanks at 2700 IO than I’m healing in a +6, etc.
I’ve noticed the biggest issue in discussing M+ tuning is the same problem with PVP discussion. You have players like Sosari and Fauxstrasza who are mechanically much better than I am, and play with better players, who have a view-point of ‘get better,’ and then you have middle of the pack players like me who does an alright job of running content, but has a lot of room to improve. We have conflicting opinions because our experiences (and effort) are different and the best all of us could hope for is Blizzard takes input from all of us and lands somewhere in the middle of what we all want to come as close to making everyone happy as possible, if we’re all willing to be fair and honest with each other.
I acknowledge that my experience is not representative of the larger population, but in regards to isolating unavoidable damage it isn’t in a bad spot in comparison to most of DF. All we need to do is think back to Ruby Life Pools.
The difference in experience that you are referring to largely comes from avoidable damage that people mistake as unavoidable. What I’ve noticed is that it’s easier to blame something as unavoidable because that removes a lot of the onus.
Of course as you stated personal CD usage also plays a part. There’s a big and noticeable difference in players who use defensives proactively for big mechanics compared to reactively. People who use them reactively don’t realize that they already soaked the big hit and that their CD uptime isn’t doing much besides mitigating maybe smaller dot tics.
No, I always liked them. I don’t care what the tank meta is considered, a good BM always made my dungeon runs smooth as hell so whatever the season I keep tabs on good Brewmasters.
I would agree that players should ‘always be casting’, assuming they actually want to win that is. Why wouldn’t you do everything you can to improve your chances of winning? Personally, I would prefer the playstyle of weaving in damage abilities between heals rather than frantically casting heals the entire time.
Its just the meta evolving. We started out with simple tank and spank with unavoidable AoE.
That evolved into dance dance revolution to add “skill” to the game. At the end of the day, once players actually put enough effort into the game to learn to avoid swirlies it made it hard to tune fights through just these mechanics. Especially since really these are all simple jump mechanics.
Now we are to the point of needing both unavoidable damage and dance dance revolution.
There really only is one solution and thats overhauling the combat system. But that probably wont happen until WoW dies and has to be remade or Blizzard decides to do a new Cataclysm like patch. Issue is it will alienate diehards even if a new system is grear. Now that Blizz has embraced classic servers, maybe this doesnt matter… just let diehards migrate to classic servers. Really imo there needs to be some complexity added to the way we look at combat mechanics. Early games had health bars and weapons doing static damage. If you look at non-MMOs, these mechanisms evolved into shields, regenerative health, bandaging, parry / dodge / grapple mechanics. WoW is still tied to the old mechanics. Without skill and reaction time based dodge/parry/counterspell/block mechanics the mechanisms Blizzard can use to inject skill barriers into the game are very limited.
Plus there is a bit of a counter incentive to overhaul systems to make things too skill based because Blizz makes revenue from the constant grind. Unavoidable damage relying solely on item level, reinforces the grind and their fundamental revenue system.