One problem with the rationale you provided is simply that 7 healers is too much for Naxx. We've been badgering our guild leadership to let us run with 5 or 6 healers, because to be frank, we're bored stupid. Once we drop down a healer or two, I think that will balance out the numbers more effectively than the CoH nerf. There's just too many healers, not enough damage, so of course the instant-cast heal is going to win more often than not!

5 healers seems pretty much enough for Naxx once people get geared up a bit. I can see what you mean with bored stupid. For the occasional fun though, I really recommend more or less solo healing the AoE damage in Phase 1 Malygos for priests. Enjoy it while it lasts

http://i37.tinypic.com/29xsvv8.jpg

It's a 9.89% buff to the heal per second bonus from IHC.

Instead of increasing HPS by a factor of 1.3, it increases it by a factor of ~1.42857 (1 / 0.7). The relative increase is then (~1.42857 - 1.3) / 1.3, which is ~0.0989 or 9.89%. More generally, the relative increase can be computed with:



where IHC% is the percent increase in cast speed expressed as a decimal (i.e. 0.1, 0.2, 0.3).

We actually found the DPS burns to be easier with only 5. It's crazy healing, but doable even with the crazy lag on our server. As it was put very succinctly in our healer channel: If the DPS fail their check before the healers get to the hard part- then it doesn't matter how hard the healing would have been. We did a night with 6 healers and consistently failed to get the drakes down in time and slashed it to 5 the next night and got him down in 6 or 7 attempts.

I'd rather Blizzard nerfs CoH now and balances around the new spell than decide to do so after 2 more tiers of raids...

Const, I'm blatantly taking your words out of context here, but the above is not a reason to be changing anything. "Let's decrease the effect of defense rating! It will give healers something to do! CoH did need a change.. But I was really hoping to see something creative from Blizzard here on the spells and spell mechanics. I feel really let down about it....

I think it has a lot to do with blizzards goals of making raids easily accessible. Not just from a standpoint of difficulty (which needs to be notched up a bit pls -- srsly. 1 shotting most of the naxx25 bosses, and full clearing your first raid set is not good). I'm also concerned that while moving from 7 to 6 or 5 healers will make your healers more challenged, it will also up your dps quite a bit, possibly giving you those one or two raid buffs you might have been missing (boomkin crit aura etc). With higher DPS, and more raidbuffs, your healers will be doing better, and your dps will be killing the mobs faster.

But even more so blizzard making the raids more accessible from the standpoint of homogenizing the classes. Looking at Naxx, there is a significant downside to making the same content into casual raids. It seems like the real difference between 10 and 25 is more boss hp, more boss dmg, and more people possibly screwing up (Heigan/Grobbulus/Thaddius)..

I guess what I'm trying to say is that With 25 man only raids, you could make dmg shapes and abilities that only a certain class could effectively deal with...with 7 slots, it's very likely that you will have that particular class. The vortexes are a good example.. they seem designed with priests in mind... and though I didn't use CoH that much to deal with it, it was still a place in the game where priests were needed.. Where our unique combination of spells made the difference. Rather than change CoH and make the actual spell more interesting (again stacking debuff of increased mana cost is a much better solution), they just slapped a cooldown on it and said we'll adjust the content.

That's what scares me... with content that is both 10 man and 25 man, you're severely constrained.. a 10 man group will have 2-3 healers...With 2 slots, it's lowest common demoninator damage shapes and abilities. That sounds like more boring homogenized/"make sure any healing class can heal it" stuff down the road.

Now call me a pessimist, and tell me blizzard is new to all this, and they'll get better at making 25 man content down the road, but I'm not so sure...GhostCrawler says that people are constantly discussing everything over there, so I'm absolutely sure the above was brought up at least 6 months ago.. yet here we are.

We learned and killed it twice with 7 healers; dropped to 6 and found it very doable. I'd hate to do 5, though -- that would just be too risky, riding the bleeding edge of doability, and waiting for RNG. DPS should be able to handle it with 7 healers / 3 tanks; if you give them 1 more, that's your margin of error.

Anyway, the point is just that there are very few situations where spammed CoH is truly necessary, and they've promised to tone that down (Malygos vortex) to compensate. Which is good, because that phase pisses me off to no end. It's easy on 25-man, and stupid on 10-man, especially if you're undermanning it. It's very obvious they scaled the damage up quite high expecting CoH to outheal it, when the reality is, PoM does a lot more healing in 10-man than CoH does due to the range.

There is easily a delicate balance where a stacking mana increase would balance between "let shamans help" and "stack priests" Blizzard is just too lazy to find where that point is at. Also if it scaled improperly priests would just stack regen to stupid levels.
It needs a fix, and a CD is the quickest solution to the problem. I guess if it means Ulduar and beyond comes out faster so be it? Somewhere deep down blizzard knows this will require more attention in the near future.

Two issues here:

1. This is only a crucial question regarding 5-man instances or maybe specific raid scenarios in 10-mans where one out of two healers can become incapacitated while exactly the AoE scenario you describe takes place.

In every well coordinated raid, raid healing is a team effort. As long as each healer can provide competitive HPS within a reasonable time frame, there's no problem. It does not matter who exactly heals which target, as long as each healer is able to pull his share. Just focusing on a single raid healer does not help - it just detracts from reality.

2. You draw general conclusions, specifically ("That means without mitigating factors, (..) priests are the bottom of the pile at dealing with aoe damage.") from a very, very specific scenario (and unless specific WoTLK encounter names are given, a fictional scenario, too).

Without going into the exact details of the numbers, the following kinds of changes to your scenario immediately change the outcome:

- involve movement on the part of the healer
- change number of targets. for example, from 5 to 6
- if the targets are fully random, so you cannot use PoH, why do you assume positioning allows for using CH (or CoH at that)?
- PoH not usable
- timing and intervals of the AoE damage
- predictability

The mitigating factors you talk about are included in your scenario as well, however on the part of the other classes. Not having to move is a mitigating factor for shamans and paladins. Having all of the supposedly random targets in range for a CH jump is a mitigating factor for shamans. Convenient alignment to the casting times of a shaman is also a mitigating factor.

Your conclusion should read: "I can construct a scenario where priests are the bottom of the pile at dealing with the aoe damage of that scenario.".

This is, however, true for all classes.

Looking through the patch notes I dont see anything regarding PW:S and the mana return when casted on people who doesnt use mana. ie Warriors, rogues ect. Are we to assume that its working as intended or have they just not come around yet and fixed it?

An AB style debuff wouldn't have to be +mana cost, it could also be -healing done by CoH/WG. IMO that would work a lot better. Something like -25% healing done by CoH/WG stacks 3 times lasts 6 seconds (numbers totally ripped right out of my a** - it would obviously need some testing).