I know there's other threads about TBC and Healing downranking info, but this didn't seem to fit those.
I also haven't had a chance to play the Beta so was hoping some people who had could answer a few questions.

I've been reading some forum posts about the new ivalue of sta being basically double, so I also went looking at thottbot and checking the new ranks of spells available at 70.

I came up with this table:
Currently our MTs run about 6.5HP unbuffed. I'm hearing numbers in TBC for MTs @ 70 of around 16k unbuffed (pure theory I know but not far off the mark given current knowledge).

So at the moment my max heals hit for ~28% of a tank's health, in TBC that'll be ~15%.
Also currently, assuming ideal conditions it takes about 9.4s to heal a tank from zero to full, in TBC that'll be 17.5s (nearly 100% increase)

Also in 40 mans you had 13-15 healers usually, in TBC with 25 man raids I'd assume 8-9 or so healers. This further gimps your ability to convert mana quickly into tank HPs.

So I'm wondering this.
What are raid fights going to look like in TBC?
I'd suspect a LOT less spike damage (where the tank's health can be one shot to less than 50% of total), given the reduced ability to heal through it. Or if a mob does have this sort of ability it'll be on >10s cooldown or something. This means no more patchwerk like fights.

Also I'd hope lots more fights that aren't pure tank and spank, so multiple tanks and mobile stuff (as much as I hate mobile stuff with totems). This means having 3-4 dedicated healers per tank is going to be out the window.

With HoTs now going to stack is direct healing a lots less useful? Potentially gimping healers without HoTs?

I know nobody has really seen the raid content yet, but perhaps someone with Alpha/Beta could maybe give us an idea based upon 5 man stuff.

Also I've only crunched the number for a Shaman, as this is my most played toon, but from what I see looking at thott's beta spells. For Priests, Druids and Pallys the HP healed % increase is about the same for all classes.

16k Unbuffed sounds extreme. Do you have any backup or info on the numbers?

Tanks will not have 16k unbuffed.

I think it'll be a lot more based on endurance, and still USING lower ranks without lower ranks being the only way to do it. A lot more fights similar to the twin emps where its going to last a while and you need to think ahead, rather than a fight where its pure healing power. Stacking HoTs along means that you could push an absurd amount of HPS on any one target, but whether thats the smartest use of everyones mana will remain to be seen. If a fight lasts 3 minutes and just is like a huge power healing situation (similar to patchwerk) then it will be trivial just because hots will have such a huge effect. However in a situation where you have to fight for a while without rest there will be a lot more focus on using mana smarter (and unfortunately maybe using a lot of pots) it wouldn't be super effective to stack up one player with HoTs because some of that healing will be inevitably wasted.

Taking a top geared tank right now and doubling the +stamina from items would put them at 12k unbuffed. Adding in prot talents and commanding shout would give them another 1k self buffed putting them at 13k.

Now guessing as to the hp gained going from L60>L70 (~1.5k) and the extra staminia on items going from ilvl ~90 ->~110 (~1.2k). This would put a warrior with tanking gear at around 15.7k health self buffed.

16k seems possible to me. The real question is whether they will allocate stamina on tanking gear as agressively as they have been in the past.

Had a quick hunt to try and find the thread I read about tanks with 16k HP, and can't find anything yet.
I also can't remember if it was on EJ's forums or official or somewhere else entirely.

Maybe that's another question then, how reliable a number is 16k (I remember a whole load of maths using beta mined gear to back it up).

Given ~30% increase in healing ability using lvl 70 rank spells, I'd say a 6.5k unbuffed tank @lvl60 should be running ~8.5k unbuffed @lvl70 to scale the same.
Is this consistent with what people are seeing in Beta?

Edit: OK given the above then it looks like Tank's HPs will far outscale the raw healing ability increases (whether it's 12k or 16k is another debate).

So it looks like more endurance fights, how does this fit with Blizzard saying they are going to have shorter dungeons only taking 1-2 hours to complete? Does this only apply to 5 mans? Does this mean 2-3 bosses per dungeon (or wing thereof), with little trash, and boss fights that can last upto 30 mins?

Just trying to get a feel for what sort of things I should be aiming for, stacking more regen gear, or focussing on more +heal? Or should I just ignore everything and worry about it when the time comes?

The boss fights won't actually last significantly longer I don't think. Healers can burn through their mana much faster. The duration is completely decided by blizzard and how much health and damage they want to give the bosses. Low health and high damage equals short fights, and high health with lower damage means longer fights.

If I were to guess, we're just less likely to see fights like twin emporors where it's 10+ minutes of healing against spike damage since we just won't have the mana for it

Hmm... if the changes to healing ranks and Decursive go through, then it might be nigh impossible to do some encounters after the TBC patch, regardless of whether you get the expansion immediately or not, at least at level 60. I wonder whether they'll take any steps at all to ensure that, say, Twin Emps or Chromaggus are doable at 60 come expansion day.

Something like Chromm is doable without Decursive. More specific group setup's and positioning, and it really shouldn't be a problem

I think something like the Twin Emps would also be doable, with Healer rotations.
If you are using higher ranks of Spells, less people can be used to heal, meaning the other healers can wait and regen to spirit. (

I think this is how it was hoped these encounters were completed, and with the hard crackdown on these two features (downranking and decursive) i think we can look forward to more encounters stylised like the above.

I guess this is where my curiosity comes in.

They can't make the spike damage coming in to much, due to the numbers making it impossible to heal through, and so if it's going to be the sort of fight I have to back to back 2k direct heals (950 HP/s), then stacking HoTs are going to make this sort of thing trivial. This also means in a min/max world you're going to want to bring healers with HoTs rather than Shamans and Pallies (Don't think pallies have a HoT).

I guess I just can't conceptualize how they're going to come up with challenging encounters giving the healing mechanics they're talking about in TBC. Unless somehow they make fights that make HoTs irrelevnat somehow.

On paper, it looks like one of two ways, healers are either going to have a bloody hard time, or healers will be next to irrelvant given tanks and melee classes high HP. Also with consumables like the outland bandages healing 6500 over 8 seconds, that's about the best HP/s in the game.

You're always going to take healers, but is it going to be a case of 3-4 healers doing patch healing just to top everyone up, or are you going to require half a raid of healers to dump mana into keeping your tanks up?

Or are you going to have a lot more flexibility?
Being able to take a raid heavy on dps and burn bosses down before they do significant amounts of damage to kill your raid, or take a healer heavy raid to the same boss and wear him down over a longer period?

Just thoughts.

Uh Twin Emps will definately be doable... its a joke of a fight for a raid in Tier 3
and Chromaggus is easily doable...

The only fight I would be worried about after the expansion is Sapphiron since I use rank 4 HT that entire fight and its the most crucial fight in the world that eveyrone is decursed in under 2 seconds.

There's a blue leg piece on the thottbot beta site that has ~64 stamina and defense rating IIRC. The highest piece of Dreadnaught, the helmet, has 45 stamina. Granted they are two different item slots, and thus the item budget is different, but you can already get an idea of the amount of stamina we'll be seeing on items.

Actually head and legs are both the same item budget, so they're a valid direct comparison.

I've seen a screenshot of a warrior on beta taking a 9.xk Frostbolt crit (with the bugged crit talent from arcane) and living, and thats with a level cap of 67 and pre endgame gear. 16k definately seems viable.

I notice you only talk about the new tank gear. But what about +healing and +int gear @ 70? It might not be as drastically increased as +sta, but shouldn't it be considered for these kinds of comparisons?

Not halved. New stamina cost is 2/3 the old value. That's 50% more stamina. Halved stamina cost would mean 100% more stamina.

The reason I mentioned double stamina from gear is the combination of that +50% stamina along with normal increase in the item budgets for going from level 60 gear to level 70 raid gear. I think with those two, a +100% aggregate increase to current stam totals is completely reasonable.

Notice 1) that he's gaining life from Second Wind before the guy casts the first bolt. That means he's already been frostbolted once. 2) second wind restores 10% health over 10 seconds, at a rate of 1 tic per 2 seconds. That means each tick is restoring 2% of his total life. 151 * 50 = 7550.

In other words, something's fishy about that screenshot.

I'm assuming there was just a frost nova before those frostbolts, so we can assume roughly 10k (I'm guessing he could have been finished with a fireblast but was too far away).

At the moment it looks like this is going to affect all mana users quite heavily. After watching the mage and priest arena video and seeing them go OOM quite a few times vs level 60-62 opponents, int better start scaling up as well or there's going to be a lot of problems.

Unless Blizzard want the focus to go from 'Can I kill this guy before he kills me?' to 'Can I kill this guy before I run completely dry?'

EDIT: ok i've just realise he doesnt die in that part of the combat log, this is confusing now :(

For the record... "We have reduced the cost of stamina in our item budget by 50%"

does NOT mean.... "We will be putting twice as much stamina on items in BC"

Conceivably they can, but it many cases you are likely to see increased stamina, and also some increases to other stats with the leftover points freed up.

Except they havn't reduced the cost by 50%. "Of the Monkey" and other similar suffixes give 50% more stamina than the other stat on TBC items, whereas in live they give a 50/50 split. The "other" stat follows expected values for the type of item it is, so there hasn't been any gains there.

There might be a slight clue in that Druids have an effect added to the Subtlety talent that decreases the chance for dispelling of HoT. It would be easy to have a boss that dispels HoT on a number of targets.

HoT stacking also opens up interesting possibilities in Maexxna-style mechanics, or where any amount of your raid may be out of healing range for a period of time etc.

The simplest reason is the following:

This screenshot was taken after a duel; you do not die at the end of a duel.

Sure it could be someone with well over 12k health, or it could just be he didn't die because he was duelling. The second requires far less of an assumption, not to mention you can, as Zurai did above, calculate his health from the amount of healing he gains from Second Wind.