Actually, there's a relatively easy (from a design standpoint) to balance the healer/DPS discrepancy: spawning adds. If your average raid spends half or more of its DPS potential on spawning adds, removing a DPS for a healer is no longer such an obvious trade. Beyond extremely tightly tuned fights (which would then have very tight gear requirements) having some mechanic to reduce DPS on the boss by a fixed amount is likely necessary to prevent raids from trivializing the mana constraint.

I imagine that the mana regen mechanics will undergo a significant change in Cataclysm. Hymn and innervate becoming talents (again, in the case of Innervate) are quite possible solutions. The solution for passive healing from SP/healing stream is somewhat less obvious, but my guess is that this will go in the way of Replenishment: a unified buff provided by multiple classes/specs which do not stack (e.g. Healing Stream and Vampiric Embrace may provide Health Replenishment which works similarly, with health, with current Replenishment).

It currently takes about 2-3 critical holy lights to restore a tank to full from 0 and there's pretty much no significant bigger heals out there. If it takes 2-3 "super lights" (noncrit?) to restore a tank to full then the size of big heals compared to HP pools really hasn't changed all that much.

The change doesn't seem to be so much about the relation of direct heals to HP pools but the fact that damage comes slower (and mana is more scarce). I could imagine the heals also have somewhat higher cast time than presently which in turn can mean it takes more *time* to top up the tank but not more casts. At least that's how I'm gleaning it from the information Blizzard is giving out.

Under those circumstances hots will have to be toned down somehow, of course.

edit: Obviously it's different if it takes 2-3 casts just to top up tank from *one* hit/special and not from near-death.

However 3x uber Holy Lights will/should be a pretty significant dent on your mana pool compared to right now where 3x Holy Light is not noticeable.

Currently, healers are very rarely in a position where they dynamically move assignments around throughout the fight. Most things that would require a change would simply kill people before healers could coordinate any swaps. A bit of vent lag, a bit of people talking over each other in a pressure situation, and it simply wouldn't happen. Come Cata where often mana would be a bigger constraint than people falling over dead before you could coordinate anything, shifting healing assignments to maximize efficiency rather than throughput could be done. I say this because I played sitting in the same room with another healer a lot and it was amazing. Like, the things we could do through very tightly coordinating healing with each other would be difficult to imagine for anyone other than maybe 2 healers playing in a 5s team together constantly.

As an example, hots will nearly always be the most efficient heal possible assuming they're not overhealing. They trade a very low single target throughput potential for a high efficiency. If the tank is taking little enough damage that a full complement of efficient hots keeps them up, that's the best way to heal them, without a doubt. If they take an occasional big burst, a big single target heal from a non druid is probably the best way to top them off. Currently with a paladin and a druid nearly everyone would put the druid on raid healing and the paladin on tank healing. Come cata, having the druid keep a complement of hots on the tank, the paladin using his most efficient heal to heal anyone that's low, while the druid worries about topping people off with hots is a lot more viable than now. Whenever the tank takes a big burst, they get a swiftmend, or if swiftmend is down, an uber light from the paladin. When people don't fall over dead in 1/2 a second, healers have time to coordinate using their most efficient heals wherever they are needed, they don't have to do strict assignments so the healers can be ready to spam people asap.

Exactly.

My fondest memories are of Karazhan and with the release of the new raid format I am thrilled. Although (and I've said this over and over again) Kara is in my mind the most brilliantly conceived raid, I have learned from WotLK that I just don't particularly care for the 25 man raid set up. It's much easier to coordinate (and find) 9 other people to do stuff compared to 24 and to me it seems much less stressful. With rewards being equal (though fewer in number) I think I'm probably going to skip a lot of 25 man stuff.

I think of it like this... Zul'aman was more or less equivalent to Tier 5, even though it was released later. It was no walk in the park for people in Tier 5 gear, but if you were geared for SSC/TK then you could reasonably expect to be able to do ZA. It's the same way things will be in Cataclysm, except instead of SSC/TK = ZA, it'll be 25 man Uldum = 10 man Uldum (or whatever raid there will be). Same concept, just that one uses the same instance. It could be considered lazy of Blizzard, but on the other hand, I don't fault them for not wanting to force people into 25 man groups.

Also with the way I understand the new Hero and Valor points, it should be easier to keep up with gear for more then 1(2) specs, depending on luck and raid setup. My self love to respec once in a while away from either healer or dps, to do some tanking, but always felt it was a bit lack luster because I couldnt focus on it.
In cata it might not be the best tier set for tanking, but it should atleast be the 2nd best all the time.

Playing with this a little. Suppose that casting HT while Lb was up refreshed (stacked or rolled) the Lb (and when the stack bloomed, you still get the mana refund based on the stack size).

With LK numbers, it would clearly be useful anytime you were already going to stack Lb, and the HT wouldn't over-heal (of course Dreamwalker may be the only fight where you'd be sure to get no overheal). On Dreamwalker you use Lb and you use Nourish. HT (particularly talented, or over the haste cap) is faster than Nourish+Lb. HT costs less mana than Nourish+Lb. On average, HT heals for more than glyphed Nourish+4.

So a well-timed HT would be better than Lb+Nourish. How good would it be in comparison to our other spells?

Our most mana efficient "combo" (other than things that don't use mana, like bandages or OoC) is to slow-stack glyphed lifebloom to 3 and allow it to bloom. That is a little more efficient than WG on six targets, or Tranquility on five, and much more efficient than Rj.

Our highest HPET spell for a single target depends on your exact gear level, but Rj, Glyphed Rg, and NS+HT are all at about the same value.

If my numbers are correct, slow stacking Lb+HT+HT would be our highest HPM combo. For single-target HPET it would still be a bit below those top contenders, but above unglyphed Regrowth.

Keeping tanks at low enough health that even a crit HT doesn't over heal may be a bit much, even for Cata. I'm just surprised how much difference such a change could make in the right environment.

If HT did refresh LB it would open them up to really upping the HPS of the spell over what it is now. They could offset it becoming the go to spell by significantly upping the mana cost making it too inefficient to use by itself. That way you could cast it on a tank who you had a reasonable expectation of HTing every 9 seconds and it could actually tick hard enough to be a real HP buffer/heal, but never run the risk of becoming the go to heal in all situations.

Two new posts by Ghostcrawler came about yesterday: Hots in Cata & Healing Touch with a couple of snippets below.

"I also agree that hots risk being overpowered in an environment where they aren't overhealing constantly. In a world where players spend more time being wounded, hot ticks will be enormously important. That's okay to a point. We want you to push them. But we don't want such a large percentage of your healing to come from one spell. We don't want Rejuv to win the decision every time you're thinking about whether to cast say Nourish or Regrowth instead."

The easiest way to really achieve this is to equalize the cost/output of RJ/WG a lot better than we have now compared to our other spells (NR/RG) which won't really be a problem although I'm sure some people won't be ready for the shock of a raised cost.


"If you're a druid healing a tank, you'll probably use Lifebloom, then Nourish, swapping to Healing Touch at times when the tank's health starts to dip dangerously low. You probably won't cast Healing Touch often on non-tanks, unless they're just super low for some reason (and in those situations, you may need a fast heal like Regrowth or Swiftmend to get them stable anyway)."

From this one we can glean that Healing Touch will be equal to other classes largest heal (Greater Heal / Greater Healing Wave) and that for the most part the tank healing rotation should remain very similar to what we have now. The question here comes down to how do they balance it so that Lifebloom is actually important on its own right in regards to tank healing without hitting all those awkward PvP issues.


I'm uncertain of how they intend to deal with Nourish because personally I feel that as it stands now it hasn't worked that great as a raid healing tool for more reasons than just how good RJ is. There's a lot of scope for how to move forward though and hopefully they spend some more time on it during beta so that we don't have to go through the endless unnecessary buffing that it got throughout this expansion.

I don't think literal equalization will work (but it probably wasn't what you meant). Nourish has a huge advantage over Rejuv (it gives all its healing at once). Rejuv has a situational advantage over Nourish (you can cast it while moving). If you equalize the healing per mana costs of these spells, people will only choose Rejuvs over Nourishes when moving, which is I think is too situational.

Over time effects, both healing and damage, had an "effect per cast time" advantage over immediate spells for a long time now. This is generally true for damage spells now, and dps don't have to worry about overhealing.

The issue with Rejuv is that it is currently balanced to be efficient enough where it is a smart strategy to blanket a fully healed raid with it, in anticipation of future damage. In the world of Cata, where most of the raid hangs out below 100%, hots cannot be that efficient. However, hots still need efficiency advantages over direct spells, since they don't give their healing all at once. This is similar to how a "fast" direct heal should be less efficient than a "medium" direct heal. In fact, I claim that a hot needs to be more efficient than our most efficient direct heal. How much more efficient is an issue of iterative testing and polish.

Aura damage is "trivial." I mean, yes, it's important to have a guy who is capable of countering auras, but:

(a) it is silly to build an entire healing spec around that being the specialty, it's far too situational, and
(b) non-hot healers (shaman, disc, holy) can counter aura damage just fine, and can ALSO handle really dangerous raid damage, which is either:

(i) a lot of burst that comes and goes
(ii) ramp up like infest

Hots are bad at (i) and (ii). This is why druids mostly sit on LK, they just don't have a good niche vs dangerous damage patterns. Blizzard gave us a lot of advantages to try to compensate (no mana problems, ignores interruptions, excellent mobility), but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. We don't have a good counter to dangerous damage.

If you remove mana efficiency as an advantage hots will just go away -- they really aren't a very good way to heal when it comes right down to it. If you don't agree, try this exercise: think of a really dangerous type of damage that is best healed by hots but NOT by chain heal/disc bubbles/holy priest toolkit.