Because there's a ret pally in the raid somewhere, perhaps?

I would assume anyone attempting this trick would be in a corner, spec'ed prot but clad in the ornate arena set for maximum stamina and +heal, healing themselves madly, rather than attempting to dps.

I would figure just like the hold days of a Holy Paladin heal-tanking the imps on Illhoof.

The Holy Paladin has a lot of stamina, but plays regular healer, while druids and priests keep every dot known to man up on the paladin (Spiritual attunement is key).

Oh, that makes total sense now. I was like "Wtf is he talking about, tanks using SoB and getting DG?"

Hello,

i've just one question about Jow.
What's the % of mana return now?

Thank's

Valid concerns although of his propositions only the third (store overhealing and have a way to transfer it to raid via a pulse) is even mildy possible to be considered for as serious. make Glyph of HL and Beacon work on overheal and you solve most of the issue without causing massive imbalances.

I know I'm going to be a short side of this debate. However, having run several raids with Beacon, I think it's best to leave it how it is. If you change BoL back to working on all healing, include Overhealing, BoL never becomes a choice anymore. There is no thought behind it. We just BoL the Tank, and when he takes damage, we can throw heals on absolutely anyone we please (provided they are within 40 yards of the tank). To a lesser extent, making HL Glyph work on overhealing provides the same issue - just hit someone.. anyone.. in the melee group with HL, and they all get some healing. There's no actual 'skill' in picking your targets, it's almost blind healing at that point.

However, forcing them to be on effective healing means we have to choose our targets wisely. BoL the tank only when someone else is actually going to take damage. Only hit the melee with an HL when you can get a full HL heal on one person in melee, otherwise, go with a FoL chain.

BoL and HL-Glyph plus overheals, I don't see as our problem. However, I do agree with the post that *something* needs to be done to help us with Overheals. We don't need something like Serendipity to help us, as we're already built for longevity. However, it does show that the technology is in place to detect overhealing, and thus having some way to actually use that over-healing is what I think we need the most. Some solution that allows us to make use of our over-healing without encouraging us to over-heal is something I can see helping us out quite a lot. In fact, if it could be tied into Holy Wrath through a deep Holy talent, I think that would be fantastic.

Of course, if Holy Wrath became more like an AE Holy Shock, that would be fantastic, building "charges" from our overhealing, with the ability to release it as healing and AE damage (not just vs undead/demon damage). That would also help in PvP.

I don't want a freely-available AE heal. I like our distinction as a class that relies on lots of direct healing, but I think an AE heal that is conditional on playing to our strengths... that's something we can truely use, and would be fun using.

Edit (it's a slow day at work): Here is actually another idea, to go along with this...
Take a certain percentage of our "Effective Overhealing*" and turn it into "charges" that allow Consecration to also heal. This requires some positioning, and requires us to actually think about when to really use this AE heal.


"Effective Overhealing" is something that is pseudo defined in the linked poster's idea. A quick example: A tank takes 5k damage, we start a 7k heal. Someone comes in and snipes off a 3k heal, leaving the tank with a 2k deficit. Our initial heal would have had an Effective heal of 5k, but now has one for 2k, thus giving us an "Effective Overhealing" of 3k.

I fail to see how this is any different from spamming CoH/WG/CH.

He's right about one thing, smart healing mechanics are killing the healing game. From my limited experience as a priest and watching priests in my guild heal raids, there simply aren't faced with that many decisions anymore. CoH (or WG, CH) is simply too good at keeping people up. Smart target selection takes the skill out of healing in 90% of encounters. Yes we have "tank healing" locked down, but our overhealing has been going up and up and up throughout T6 and all we've got to look forward to in WOTLK is more HPS... which, because as a class we can expect to average 50-50% overhealing, only really helps us heal at best 50% more, at worst not at all (and I'm inclined to believe it'll be closer to not at all). The devs are correct in stating we can pump out high raw healing numbers. The changes to SP and FoL/HL coefficients only helped there. While I don't mind high overhealing if my target stayed alive and I didn't run out of mana, it does indicate that extra HPS is not what we were in need of.

BoL is great and I don't think it should be changed. It's very useful in some fights, effectively doubling your throughput on 2 heavy damage targets, and not so effective on others. I like the fact that it's not a raid healing solution. However my post-3.0 experience in Sunwell has been that's its very difficult for me to even get heals out in time to beat CoH/WG/CH spam. It's also left me spamming FoL on a tank like I did through TBC, which everyone's admitted is not very fun.

It's not that different, but I don't think anyone would argue that those mechanics are actually fun. I completely agree that "smart" healing mechanics are ruining the healing game, not only do they make single target (paladin) healing redundant - I go /afk on trash now - but it's sucking almost all the skill and fun out for those other 3 classes too.

My only hope is that at 80 the increased size of the health pools will be such that all the aoe heals flying around will not be sufficient by themselves to keep up the entire raid.

Me too, and of course I'm in complete agreement that smart healing is eroding the healing game.

It's hard to draw conclusions from the level 70 game with the new mechanics, but one thing I've noticed in our raids since 3.0 is that even though we've drastically ramped up the size and chaotic-ness of our trash pulls, deaths on trash have seemingly become 10 times less common. I think that's attributable at least partially to the greater number of smart heals flying around nearly constantly; anytime someone gets low enough on health to be in danger, the heatseeking healing missiles home in on them and heal them right up before anything else can happen to them. Maybe that's not entirely a bad thing, especially if it makes trash faster and more fun, but it's kind of worrying.

Hopefully the profusion of smart heals is something the devs will take a look at when they do their "big look at healing".

[e:]

In other news, I'm no longer going to be editing the OP. Since most of the changes have gone live, it's largely served it's purpose. The additional changes made on the beta servers since 3.0.2 can be found in patch notes. I'm leaving everything up for reference, of course.

Feel free to keep discussing things here, of course (although I imagine at some point Kaubel et. al. will be locking this thread and letting it go into retirement.)

I think saying 'smart healing is killing healing' is the height flawed logic. Its almost like the cliche statement 'back when I was young...'

Rather then nerf a very useful tool for all healers, I think encounters should be designed in a way that CoH or CH spamming in and of itself isn't sufficient to keep the raid alive. Having more then just the tank taking high single target damage, for instance, for a protracted time or requiring the raid to spread out to negate the effect of AE heals would do quite a bit towards making healing fun.

If you are going to make a new one, for the love of god please don't called it a "Healadin" thread. We really don't need any more silly "-adin" names. Let's try some conventional spec-named threads for one expansion.