Try playing with people that don't suck. Or better yet, play against people who don't suck. Killing healers first in organized PvP is suicide, since they're pretty much all packing stamina gear (Dragon's Blood Cape, Nef's head Neck, Archimtiros, BoN exalted tank ring - get it) and the hero badge. These days, it's usually more effective to CC healers and try to kill the Mages and Warlocks first (who should also be looking at above items).

Except for that with no gear, it takes well under one heal to cancel out a frostbolt. In fact, one heal can counteract four frostbolts. Add +600 damage and +1000 healing, and one heal doesn't even counteract three frostbolts.

A heal that healed for as much as Frostbolt with GH5's HP/s with gear added would heal for about 300 less than frostbolt.

Dont frostbolt and healing spells get the full spell coefficient (i.e. cast time/3.5seconds) ?
Pre Talents, Frostbolt and GHeal are both 3second casts.

Therefore untalented, if you have +300 spell damage, you only need +300healing to have your heal scale by the same amount as the frost bolt (unless I have made some horrible mistake somewhere, if I have please let me know :) ).

So I dont see how they scale any differently. The original issue was how you measure that scaling.
I would say that the dps of frostbolt went up by the same amount as the hps of heal, and therefore they scale equally; while Elerion was stating that the ration of hps to dps was going down and therefore it was not scaling as well. That to me is a misnomer, scaling shouldnt be measured in this context as a ration between hps and dps but in the absolute relation that if dps increases by x, hps has to also increase by x; because the base value of the heal spell is larger than that of the damage spell when you extrapolate to infinate +heal/damage you find that the ration drops.

As I put in my first post the only way the hps/dps ration could remain the same is if scaling were based off the base value of the spells, for the same reason that loweer rank spells scale alot better in terms of dpm/hpm unless given artificially low spell coefficients.

A heal with GH5's HP/s that healed for as much as a frostbolt would be a .625 second cast, and therefore only get 18% of +healing per spell, compared to frostbolt's 81%.

Hp/s and dps going up at the same rate is only equal scaling if they were the same to start with. If you go from one GH cancelling out four frostbolts to one GH cancelling out one frostbolt, then either healing is vastly more powerful than damage at low gear levels (Until mages started getting epics I had to try very, very hard to lose to a mage in a duel), or healing is completly worthless at high gear levels. If the value of two things change relative to eachother as gear changes, then they aren't scaling equally.

Yes but he cant cast 4 frostbolts in the time you cast 1 GHeal. He can cast 1 frostbolt.
As a number the increase in dps and hps is the same. He gains X dps, you gain X HPS.

The scaling as a ratio to each other has little to do with it, you are just chosing to look at the numbers in a way that supports your complaint. The problem doesnt even manifest itself as a hps problem but a hpm/dpm. You can still outheal a mages damage, but it becomes harder because his damage approaches your healing in mana efficiency. Basically it manifests itself in that you cant just run a mage OOM as quickly.

Judia the issue isnt about a single incoming damage source its about multiple incoming damage sources. If blizzard changes the tempo of the game to reduce two shotting but changes the HPS to DPS balance to reduce the force multiplier effect of a healer then we end up with a metagame where optimal numbers of healers will shift over the lifetime of an expansion.

At this point its impossible to know whether that means a team will always calc the other sides damage and attempt to bring enough healing to outheal spike/burst or attempt to cope with spike/burst and focus more on endurance healing outlasting the other side.

The concern though is as the ratio of healing:damage output decreases rather than bringing more healers people will choose to bring less healers instead as they are less effective.

Its not a hugely bad thing if healers can respec damage and be effective but if they cant it will create problematic class balancing issues for designers trying to keep all classes viable at all points in the cycle.

This presupposes healing:damage ratio is reset ~1 year from BC release in a new xpac with even harsher downranking penalties.

There are lies, damn lies and statistics.
350 +spell/heal increases your dps by 100, and increases your hps by 100.
They increase by the same absolute amount. Its that simple.

To Enshula:
It doesnt matter how damage and healing scale relative to each other in PvE, only in PvP.
I would say the problem isnt scaling, the problem is that 1 GHeal can out heal 4 frostbolts with no gear, should 1 priest really be able to outheal the focus fire of 4 mages at any level ?
IMO, no.

The fact that before scaling it was possible has given priests unrealistic expectations; they could easily destroy any mana using class simply by healing themselves until the opponent went OOM and wanding them to death. (Which is why many of the very best priests felt that holy/disc was better for pvp than shadow), and were completely unbalanced while now they are (IMO) much more balanced.

The maths dont support relative scaling, the game would break MUCH faster if healing and damage did scale at the same rate, or we would be back to a situation where DD spells barely scale at all. Scaling would have to be based on the base hps/dps of spells and would become horiffically complicated to actually code and impliment.

Then that should be changed. Fixing an imbalance through scaling isn't fixing it, as it still exists at low gear levels. Having things not scale proportionally guarantees that there will be problems at some gear level.

Well for one I dont believe spells have a hps/dps measure in their data files. So you would have to run a caculation step for every spell, infact probably 4:
1) Calculate the maximum damage
2) Calculate the minimum damage
3) Calculate the average
4) Calulate the hps/dps

It might only be 4 steps, but that is on every spell cast and that could potentially swap your UI in raids or pvp.

Secondly I think you underestimate what Real scaling would do. For one it would mean that the higher level spells not only scale faster in dps but faster in dpm. The game would, infact break down quite horribly, allow me to throw some numbers at you. Currently 350+damage gives an increase of 100dps (before talents or spell crit), on every spell level, so whta amoutn of scaling would that be equivalent to ?
Well on rank 8 frostbolt +350 damage is a 98% increase in spell dps and dpm (dps and dpm scale at the same rate). The tables look like this:

Rank Min Max Mana Average dps dpm
1 318 320 25 319 106.33 12.76
2 331 335 35 333 111.00 9.51
3 351 357 50 354 118.00 7.08
4 374 382 65 378 126.00 5.82
5 426 438 100 432 144.00 4.32
6 474 490 130 482 160.67 3.71
7 527 547 160 537 179.00 3.36
8 592 616 195 604 201.33 3.10
9 653 683 225 668 222.67 2.97
10 729 763 260 746 248.67 2.87
11 815 855 290 835 278.33 2.88
12 822 862 300 842 280.67 2.81
13 897 943 330 920 306.67 2.79

Now lets apply "true scaling", where 350+damage represents a 98% increase in dps. To do this we put in a magic number of 1/300 to calculate the dps coefficient.
I.e. %age Dps increase = (cast time/3.5 * spell power/300)*100

Rank Min Max Mana Average dps dpm
1 36 40 25 38 12.67 1.52
2 62 70 35 66 22.00 1.89
3 102 114 50 108 36.00 2.16
4 148 164 65 156 52.00 2.40
5 252 276 100 264 88.00 2.64
6 348 380 130 364 121.33 2.80
7 454 494 160 474 158.00 2.96
8 584 632 195 608 202.67 3.12
9 706 766 225 736 245.33 3.27
10 858 926 260 892 297.33 3.43
11 1030 1110 290 1070 356.67 3.69
12 1044 1124 300 1084 361.33 3.61
13 1194 1286 330 1240 413.33 3.76

Scaling becomes much more extreme, and low level spells are utterly redundant the moment you can replace them, they are worse in both dps and dpm, and they scale more slowly. Essentially the slope of your graph is much steeper causing things to scale out of control alot faster.

Edit: I can't work out the right syntax to make tables show nicely, Any tips ?

This is particularly true. Please stop using frostbolt vs Gheal, use scorch vs FHeal if you must. This is PvP only, PvE is completely irrelevant for this discution as mobs and bosses are designed and tuned by hand.

The only thing vastly increased HP values scream to me is the need of increased healer mana pools. Fights lasting longer will mean you either become useless after 1-2 minutes because you ran OOM, or you have to sacrifice a lot of mitigation stats (sta, resilience, armor) to get the mana pool you need to do your job.

For the purposes of scaling it doesnt matter what spell you use, the effects of scaling of the type asked for are true whatever spell you chose to look at. What is in question is how spells (in general) scale. The general results from the numbers I posted (i.e that with %age scaling your completely break lower level spells and everything scales waaay to fast) apply to scortch and flash heal just as much as frostbolt and GHeal.

Judia

Just looking at the itemization coming out so far, the solution blizzard currently seems to be using is avoiding large amounts of +dmg, favoring the newly padded stamina and scalable hit/crit. Which is great for healers, I suppose, as it keeps the dmg:heal ratio in check, but also makes you wonder about the balance between melee and casters. They've got to up the damage sometime; maybe their plan is simply to reduce the overall rate of +dmg growth until the next expansion when they can set new base values again.

As a paladin it's certainly worrisome as speccing/playing "offensively" is generally less than stellar(not to say it's not effective, but it's certainly not a strength of the class).

The same reason you dont get +% health, +%heal, +%ap +%int, +%mp5s.
Because the game ends up breaking too fast, far to fast.

Hell they are REMOVING +% crit, +% block, +% parry etc etc
What makes you think they would suddenly add in +% damage.

Blizzard have learnt that this sort of scaling simply starts hitting limits and breaking the game, and are quite rightly moving away from such scaling. Asking them to apply it to spell damage (or healing to refer to the OP), is a thoughtless idea.

I think you miss-interperted my post. I'm not suggesting they suddenly add in +% damage. I said if they had gone with that from the start, it would have saved them a lot of trouble.

As for your arguements against a +% system, you can't compare it to crit, block or parry etc. The difference is that these attributes have a cap that one day would have been reached, or made other mechanics completely trivial (see hit tables regarding glancing blows and crit caps)

But you sure as hell can have an additive multiplicative scaled system for all sources of damage and healing, hitpints, mana pool etc. Your reasons for stating otherwise are flawed and are largely based on data that is totally irrelevant (eg: spell damage values that were devised for a different environment)

If you tweak the original numbers, all of a sudden your "breaking the game" model is working in perfect fluency and balance, with no need for mechanic changes later down the track such as the incoming low-rank nerf.

If level 60 chars had 2,500 hitpoints and did 500 damage per attack, and an entire T1 set gave +50% (hp, mana, spell damage, etc whatever was relevant to that class) then what exactly would be the problem? T2 gives +70% T3 gives +90%.

Tell me, at what point would the game break down?
at the scale I have proposed, T5 gear (released in content in 2008 :D) would give +130% to base stats.

The system would work perfectly fine, so long as the original balance of hp/mana/damage etc was accurate.

I have never said this should be implemented in wow's current state. All I said was that it would work better had they done it from the start and was the most logical way to go about scaling.

They aren't removing +crit%/etc., they're just making the effect of it scale with level. At level 60, there's no difference between +14 crit rating and +1% crit. The problem with +1% crit isn't power, it's that once every attack crits there's no more it can do.

There's no reason +x% damage or healing on items has to break the game any faster than +x AP, or that it has to break the game at all. +150% damage done breaks nothing as long as gear also gives +150% hp. There's no point where it stops having a benefit. +150% hit breaks things if there isn't something else that lowers your hit chance.

I disagree.
It would have just made the gear gap even bigger and cause even bigger dissent from casuals.
The system would have broken alot sooner, or scaled so slowly gear was irrelevent.