Healing related jazz

My mind is unlikely to change on this. It was discussed for a long time among staff before the changes were put in place. But for the sake of your understanding I'll try to summarize.

The new healing guide was designed to be equivalent to item creation in terms of power. That is to say, worth the two masteries you need to cap to receive the full benefit. It isn't just that it allows healing of yourself and others, but the addition of healing items on top of that put us in an interesting place balance-wise when it came to the two races with powerful racial healing abilities. It was obvious that these healing powers could not be allowed to stack onto a single character, they would simply be able to recover from any conceivable injury with 4 different healing cooldowns (healing mastery, healing release, healing items, and racial healing). There are still some concerns about this even now, as no one has really tested the full power and limits of healing on a personal or support based level.

With that decision made, the idea of allowing simply the heal other option to be available to other races came up, but it was decided to have too many issues in of itself. To start with: healing, like item creation, essentially requires specialization to get any real value out of the mastery, and we decided cutting out more than half the mastery made it no longer worth the two mastery cap, especially with other characters getting the full mastery value. There were also a number of concerns from an IC perspective: How do we explain IC that this character can heal others but not themselves? How do their items work on others, including others of their own race, but not themselves? For arrancar specifically there was also a lot concern with hierro being unbalanced with a spec healing character. So in the end this is what we decided to do with it.

Fair enough I guess. Kinda shuts them down from using poisons.