I have found addons like recount and skada to be amongst the most useful in WoW, because they just yielded about one metric fuckton of information. I doubt that this could be properly done in WC3 to that extent. A great benefit, from a DPS perspective, was the comparison between myself and another player of the same class, and the comparison of the DPS distribution of our skills. This would not fit into the map at all, there are no 40 or 25 man raids here.
About not wanting math in the game:
Finally, I hate when these games turns into pure math "we need 604.6 dps to do X boss we need 697,49 dps to do Y boss." Rather, its up to the judging of player skill, items, spec, level, and equipped spells and this seems more natural to me.
Any boss with an enrage timer and an HP bar has an easily calculated minimum dps required, you can't change that. Any boss with no enrage timer has an estimate of minimum dps required because healers have limited mana.
To me, a great portion of player skill has always been their ability to be somewhat familiar with the math behind their character class to allow them to understand their items, spec and equipped spells. "Ima stack crit cuz i like crit" is OK if it gets you through the content, and I am usually not opposed to fun builds, even if they are not the optimal build. I understand that many people want to play with fun builds and actually have fun in a game, but to me, this fun is not derived from critting a lot or having ridicuous haste values.
What I enjoy most about RPGs is the fact that I can optimize my character, and to do this I would need said math. Not to flame people for not reaching a certain DPS threshold, but to better understand what mistakes I make and how I can improve.
I think you can't base a game on math and then ignore it completely.
I never really understood the purpose of a "heal meter" in WoW. Isn't the purpose of a healer in groups to not let the group die? If you manage to keep your group alive until the end of the fight, didn't you succeed? I know why there's the need for a damage meter, simply because it helps optimizing rotations. But healing is situational. You can't "overperform" as a healer. Either your group stays alive or your group dies. There's hardly a middle ground.
Overheal lets you get some information on your performance, so does the comparison to other healers, and if the next boss is harder than the one you were able to kill, you should evaluate your healing performance, even if everybody lived. Being able to heal everyone through a fight doesn't mean that your performance was beyond any criticism, maybe the tank was just overgeared or the dps was irregularly high. You're not the king of the world if your 40 man raid managed to kill hogger, and you're not the best player you can be if you managed to kill onyxia with three lvl 60 guys (even though it is pretty impressive, I am pretty sure one of them made a mistake somewhere, they were at it for over 5 hours I think). It would be good to know which skills outperformed others, and if other healers have the same result. But, to come back to the topic of an encounter recap, this would be best discussed in a class/role specific thread, not with a demo version of recount. In general, recount is pointless without comparing it to other people, but, given the difference in complexity of the games, the comparison in gaias can be done without recount.
