I think that spike damage as a design in encounters (in dealing with it) will be something that remains. Look at Bloodlord in ZG when doing with blues. People can still deal with it.

i find, as a healer, the biggest challanges come from fights where i have to watch the MT in addition to another class/person while trying to keep myself alive.

Do we really need another Patchwerk in 25 man raids ? I don't think so. Patchwerk is extremly simple encounter in design. What makes its interesting and somewhat unique, is that its first encounter that truly showed, what a raid pushed to extreme limits could do DPS and HPS wise. He is also a perfect counter argument for people still saying "OMG there is no gear progression on WoW".

Please, no more patchwerk. That's like the worst fight in Naxx I've seen. We haven't tested Loatheb much tho, and it looks just as terrible.

I believe they're going to give us a lot more mana regen to play around with in the expansion to support endurance fights so not every fight last 3 to 5 minutes. That and they're definetly going to reduce damage tanken from bosses depending on the fight. You can't combine patchwerk healing with mob zergs.

As a healer, I welcome 25 man raids. Not it is only 15 less health bars to stare at, it also makes for more strategic encounters. In 40 man raids too many times you're just being to forced spamming your most mana efficient spell for 15 minutes (hello Vek'nilash Heal rank 2) and biggest difference between hard and easy kill is your dps/healer ratio,and apart from positioning issues, your job could just might as well be reduced to a bot.

Whats wrong with patchwerk? If you can do it once, you can do it again. Its one of the most repeatable fights in the zone.

I believe that's the point.

Not that Patchwerk is a bad fight, but that it's not a fight we need to see repeated.

Right now the highest spike you can reasonably throw at a tank in a raid and have him survive is very close to his max HP. With fewer healers, that task becomes much harder, which is precisely why you'll continue to see spike damage encounters in 25 man raids: because with gear progression getting the way it is, at some point 9-10 healers can deal with that sort of thing. Patchwerk is a demonstration that with current gear you can spike multiple tanks and keep the encounter beatable.

Does anyone else think that the reason Blizz did this change is due to lag issues? They said they will uppgrade all server hardware before BC which I think means BC will need some top hardware and may be even than 40 people were causing too much lag? I haven't read all the posts about this issue and it might have been talked about else where.

While it may not have been the primary motivator, I have to believe it was at least considered. 25 people in an instance are simply going to generate less message traffic than 40. And if they want to do more spaminator type fights like Thadius or hell even more stuff like the suppression room, the smaller cap has to help with that load. Plus, smaller caps probably translates to more granularity when it comes to load balancing between multiple instance servers.

Getting back on track, whether it's intentional or not, I kind of appreciate the healer aspects of the smaller cap. I just hope it moves us further away from the need for heal chains and/or rotations rather than towards them.

I would guess a big part of the BC expansion is moving away from the model of having lots of people stay connected all the time. Most of the things they have said about BC point to wanting people to play fewer hours but giving them more things to do in those few hours. A lot less rep grind, more world PVP, non-timesink arenas, no honor grinding battlegrounds, and 25 man/winged instances all point to WoW undergoing a dramatic shift.

Currently they "keep" you in the game by providing timesinks so you stay online as much as you can. If instead they move to a model where you only need to stay online a few hours a day to "get it done", they benefit by reduced bandwidth/hardware costs while keeping peoples subscriptions. In many ways you can see its similar to Guild Wars with the arena systems and new instance layouts. I honestly wouldn't be suprised if they allow premades (similar to PTR) in the future as well, as thats proven immensely popular in GW and on the test realms.

Not to totally derail the thread; I guess this is a related tangent: raid wide healing.

Someone above mentioned its hard to focus on keeping an MT up and the raid. I'm aware that some guilds do this differently, but really the group I am in unless I am told "keep your group up" as a priority - is never where my eyes go first. Some guilds focus on keeping groups up first and while I suppose thats ok -- do I really need to watch a hunter or a lock? Most fights.....no. And if not do you all double stack healers in the same groups and wouldnt it be some what of a waste to have healers default watching healers?

What we do is throw healers in w/e groups -- the only ones that matter are shamans and if its a POH fight priests, and give out primary, secondary, tertiary(?) assignments. Thats why I think tunnel vision on groups is such a well, its bad habit forming really. Our healers have to be able to adapt to looking at 4 things at once sometimes in different orders. If I am assigned MT its usually not a problem for me to heal the MT and keep rejuvs down on 5-8 people. Heck at gluth thats exactly what I do. Heal MT, toss warriors hots, toss hunters small heals/hots, hurricane warstomp, keep an eye on any healers taking damage and tossing them a small heal. And thats just healing; forget the fact im putting FF and bug swarm up, although usually I can rely on the other druids to rotate on whos doing debuffs so one of us isnt constantly doing it. But all the other stuff -- thats what every druid does in my raids. Mass healing and MT healing and specialty instructions.

How does this relate to this thread? I think that the roles your healers will take on, with the exception of priests really, will be exactly what I described above. I think this tunnel vision on keeping groups up as default number one priority will really hurt people who cant switch up multitasking or who have gotten so used to looking at their group first and THEN the raid instead of the raid based on a set of global priorities will really hurt 25 man progression.

And thats not to say there arent successful guilds that focus on group healing by default priority. I think its just a very limited way sometimes of looking at healing and right now when you can bring 16 healers to a raid, really such healing is actually not a bad idea. I just think it has large potential to really throw healers off their game in the expansion. When you only have 9-10 healers, regardless of the ratio to the whole raid, and some of those healers are going to be 'forced' to multitask and do other things besides heal and cure in a fight -- out of group healing by default is going to become more and more important.

So I think that its not going to be a modification based on increased or same damage and less healers, expansion, esp. thru hybrids, I think will test a healers multitasking abilities.

Would be nice if they retuned PvP and in the process allowed for "rested-honor". So rather than have some guildmate/friend bot you all day while you're at work for an honor grind to rank 14 it's mor beneficial to have some downtime, like rested xp.

I pretty much agree with Etoille's point here... if the new encounters are more about raw hps and endurance than they are about challenging healers to triage appropriately, then something has gone horribly wrong (this pretty much ties into my "fear" of a greater need for crappy healing tactics like rotations and chains).

On a side note I hate the concepts of conservation and endurance healing on the raid scale. I really love healing when it's all about choosing the right targets and getting those heals off ASAP or even pre-emping the heal. Just something about sitting there starting/stopping heals all day or ranking down heals and spamming doesn't appeal to me at all. You go from being highly reactional trying to keep people alive to being what is essentially an intelligent renew.