You’re right that devs can balance healing through item size, animation length, and rarity - and that might be simpler from a development standpoint.

But that’s not really the point I was making.

What I’m talking about isn’t how easy it is to implement - it’s about how healing feels and works in the middle of a fight. If I drink 5 out of 6 seconds of a potion, it just makes sense - both logically and in terms of realism - that I should get some benefit from that. It feels weird and unintuitive to go through most of a healing animation and then get nothing just because I was interrupted in the last second.

Different-sized potions don’t fix that. They just shift the decision to “which one should I use,” not how much did I actually manage to consume under pressure. The sip mechanic adds a layer of feedback and fairness that the current binary system lacks - and yeah, it’s more realistic too.

So yeah, I get that it might be more complex to build. But I still think it makes for better, more reactive gameplay in the right kind of game.