I'm happy to hear it's still possible to get good groups to heal with at least. Once I get my priest up I just might dip my toe in the random dungeon queue and test the waters.

 

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Healing randoms is nothing. Healing raids right now is ridiculous and not fun.

Sorry I let my arrogance show a little there.





My guild hasn't started raiding yet so I can't comment there.

 

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Having my cc broken is extremely annoying and frustrating. Even more so when it leads to repeated wipes.

i've been pugging since level 20, 47 now and i have only seen 1 rogue SAP twice. Blizzard forcing people to CC again isn't happening, I still see tanks pull everything and wonders why we have to wait on the healers, or me since i'm a shammy, while pugging.

Last night I was in Dire Maul and the healer had one hella of time healing the tank, I had more health then him. The last 2 bosses the healer dropped, I switched to heal him and it was hard. He was good at his job but poorly geared and the fact he was 5 levels lower then me. I told him to get better gear and he'll be fine.

There are a lot of tanks out there that can't even tank, had several that couldn't taunt or pull mobs off the healer.

I'm going to continue going as DPS.

 

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Blizzard's stance on "need to CC" is in relation to level 85 heroics and raids. It may be necessary in level 80+ regular dungeons, but isn't as much of a requirement depending on group composition.

Anything below level 80, save some BC heroics, do NOT require CC, nor was it intended to after the latest expansion from my understanding.

As it stands there are some pretty glaring inequities amongst the different healing classes. If someone tells you healing is just fine and doesn't need to be fixed they're likely playing a holy paladin, or not playing a level 85 healer at all and have no idea wtf they're talking about.

Healers are really frustrating to play right now for a number of reasons.

1. Healers scaled backwards from 80-85.
Unlike every other role in this game healers actually got WEAKER every time they got a level from 80-85. Heals don't really scale at all however mana costs grow at an alarming rate. There really isn't anything fun about getting levels and better gear only to feel like you're worse off than you were before. Not only are we less powerful than before, health pools scaled like they never have before. Tanks in blue gear have 150K+ health going into heroics. Meanwhile we heal for nearly the same as we did in Wrath. As a % of the tank's health that our heals restore we've never been weaker.

2. Blizzard left it up to healers to educate the rest of the WoW community that the paradigm has changed.
Healers have effectively become "Cataclysm dungeoning instructors." We have to inform the tanks and dps that they can't just pull everything and aoe it down anymore. More often that not polite requests for CC or mana breaks is met with arrogance, anger, or even vote kicks.

3. The only feedback mechanism for poor play is death or ooming which is blamed on healers
Tanks and dps need to be learning from their mistakes in order to adapt to the new model but they're not. At this point they're lashing out at healers for not compensating for poor play. Obviously this shouldn't be happening but it is happening, a lot. Healers are getting abused in randoms even though they're playing their class as well as it can be played in the new paradigm.

4. Healing didn't get more "interesting" it got LESS interesting
Supposedly this change was about making healing more "interesting" by making it about choosing the right spell at the right time. Turns out that the right spell is almost always slow efficient spell, heal, holy light, etc. GC has said that he didn't want healers to spam one spell, then he goes and designs a system that encourages healers to spam one heal, the whole thing's mind boggling. The mana conservation game seems to boil down to using anything other than your slow efficient heal as infrequently as possible, how interesting.


TLDR: GC forgot that he's in charge of a GAME that is supposed to be FUN. The new healing system isn't fun, at best it's boring, and needs to be reworked.

This is how to make your healer happy.

Skull - Target
Square - Trap
Moon/Star/Whatever - Hex/Repentance/Fear with glyph/sheep/root

GET LOOT IN THE END.

Seriously how hard is this?????

This just in, Holy Pallies have been nerfed. Tower of Radiance no longer generates holy power when holy light is cast on the beacon target and the healing done by Light of Dawn has been reduced.

From the healing forums:

Nethaera on 12/14/10 9:38 PM (UTC)

These hotfixes were intentional and we wanted to share more information about the "why" for you all here:

Mana is supposed to matter for healers, and in the case of Holy paladins, that just wasn’t happening. We were seeing raid groups attempting to learn new bosses where the other healers were out of mana while the paladins were still at 90% of mana. We also thought the experience of paladins healing harder heroic dungeons was inconsistent with that of other healers, or our design intent. We thought it was only a matter of time before groups started going out of their way to stack paladins for raids or recruit them for dungeon runs, which of course is not our intent. For this reason, we thought it was important to address this point now rather than sitting on it until a future patch.

The main culprit for the increased paladin efficiency this was Holy Power from Tower of Radiance. We were seeing a strategy develop where paladins would cast Holy Light on a Beaconed tank, and then cast Light of Dawn on the raid (and use very few other spells). This strategy was remarkably successful considering how simple it is. The Holy Power-based heals are supposed to be an important component of the paladin kit, but because Holy Light is designed to be super efficient, the overall strategy was too efficient. The intent of Tower of Radiance was to make directly healing a Beacon of Light target less punitive, but instead it was becoming the only smart way to play. You can still generate Holy Power by using Flash of Light or Divine Light on a Beaconed target, or through a variety of other ways. Remember, overall it isn’t balanced if paladins are just as mana efficient as other healers and have several mana-free spells.

Light of Dawn was adjusted because it was completely eclipsing Word of Glory. We lowered the healing of Word of Glory late in development, but also redesigned Light of Dawn. They had fallen out of sync, and Light of Dawn was just too good.

The BC dungeons may not "require" it, but they could certainly benefit from it, even non-heroics. I haven't done any dungeon runs or raids in Northrend yet so I cannot comment on that, but I've seen several group wipes that would not have happened pre-4.0.1. And don't forget about the across-the-board damage nerf on warlocks and warriors. I think most classes got hit with some sort of nerf iirc. Making it more difficult to hold agro and more difficult to do damage cannot help healers at all, on any level.

I am (personally) glad to see the changes. I just think it's stupid that Blizzard waited this long to make them. It's as though a new CEO with a completely different vision took over the game. Wait, did that happen??

 

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