The Heal Rune nerf made healing very spamming process, as it heals so little. The other options Heal Aura is too slow to be used in combat, and may be usable for coop, and Pulse of Health is not a good way to heal as it’s more a health buff.
I would propose to add a Greater Heal Rune that costs and heals more ~2x normal Heal, with a ~1.5x casting time.
I think they just don’t want ONE source of healing to be the most OP thing in the game. Because that is easy to abuse.
Instead you can simply MIX healing sources to provide effective healing. Like life steal, plus healing rune, together with some healing % increase affixes.
I have lifesteal coupled with using frost stream and it pretty much refills me HP as I use it. Only really needed to use the Healing Rune early game. From mid-game onward it was much easier to recover HP via other means.
And we have a lot of different means to recover HP. Use the combination most suitable for how your setup is done.
And most of these are further enhanceable with Healing %.
It was added as a way to reduce food consumption/as an alternative when you run out of food. In my opinion it was too strong but now is over nerfed.
In my opinion, at this point it would be better if this new rune consumed all the Focus needed to heal your entire health.
It could have a 1.5x casting time like you said.
It would completely remove the problem of having to do the same animation over and over again.
The trade off is that it when you use it it could consume a lot of focus, and has a longer animation, and therefore the old rune would still be a viable alternative.
Exactly, there are multiple sources of even better healing, but they made the Heal Rune specifically bad. Earning power (focus) to cast abilities is a common Metroidvania mechanic, and in titles like Hollow Knight you have a choice between healing or dealing damage, which is the same here, but you have more options to heal. So the developer instead of letting the player to choose how they want to heal, given that there are so many options, they nerfed the metroidvania healing to the ground. And it’s not even nerfed, it’s the same, but you have to spam it now, which sucks as a game design.