I’m a druid and almost always a raid healer in 10/25 man content. I love it. While I can main tank heal 10-mans (never tried MT healing 25s), I love raid healing because I feel like I’m protecting everyone– even the stupids that stand in the fire.

This reminds me of a time when we had a paladin, shaman, and druid (me) healers for 10ToC. While the shaman and I could raid heal easily, we ended up having the paladin raid heal because he was pretty terrible and couldn’t keep his MT up on Gormok.

I think it is definitely more a matter of the person behind the heals than the kind of heals they are giving. As a druid (and my ticky-tock HoTs), I have had no problem MT healing VoA/Naxx/EoE/etc., OR raid healing.

My guild has alot of paladins, so I am ALWAYS raid healing. And keeping Rejuv up on the tanks. I think I like healing more for people I like, because I prefer boomkin in PuGs.

If they wanted to make healing more vairable they could continue along the PW:S/Earthshield line and make more buffs which prevent/reduce damage. I came from GuildWars before WoW and playing a protection monk in that game was awesome fun. Very fast (like shielding) with even more focus on damage minimisation.

Gobble gobble.

I healed for years, but now I’m a SP who occasionally goes heals. Unfortunately, the nature of dps meters is that only good dps, (and good tanks) are respected. But when I do heal, I still quite enjoy it. It still has more skill than a dps rotation.

I agree though that healing needs more work to make it more fun.

Raiding has become more about the individual.

Now for a character role designed to support groups that sucks away some of the fun.

Healing is still a fun job in and of itself and incredibly satisfying when done well but the advantages of being a team player are less now than they were in 2006.

My problem as the one giving out healing assignments in raids, is that its very hard to tell if a healer is good or not.
If I set healerX on tankY, I wont really know if tankY stayed alive cause healerX was really good – or cause tankY was good at managing her CDs. Perhaps it was a combo.

Even with the use of logs (such as WWS or World of Logs) its hard to tell if a healer is good or not. A high hps is ofcourse a key sign, so is spells used: but logs wont help you find out if the person actually healed the right people.
You can roll with 4-5k hps and still have it be mostly useless healing, or you can have 2k hps and every single point of healing is vital. But, it takes a while to see which is which.

When then trying to decide who goes where and who does what, it gets to be a tricky business. And ofc, if something goes wrong – the healers get some stick for it (x needs more heals), but the healers (as always) will deny that they had anything to do with it…
Seems healers have gotten so used to igoring random blame, that admitting to mistakes as a healer have become a taboo.

Still, healing is to me the most enjoyable and challenging part of the game.

At times I wonder why so many people DO like to heal still. Maybe that’s also something worth thinking about.

So I rolled a priest and should be to 80 by September in time for my raiding season to start again. Of course I’m leveling pure shadow (which is actually pretty fun and powerful IMO), there just aren’t enough alts around to PUG lowbie instances when I’m able to play, which is sporadic. Leveling seems to be going fast.

Hopefully healing raids will be more interesting like Gevlon thinks it is. DPS is crazy dull and LONELY in lots of fights. I want to feel more part of the “core group” that actually have to communicate and coordinate with each other.

There are always decisions like short heal on the tank, or wild growth/CoH on raid. Compared to that 1-2-1-2-3-1-2-1-2-3 aka DPS is very boring. BTW the “more healer needed for learning phase” is true, but you wrote it the wrong way. Not the healer should go DPS in the late phase, but the DPS to healer. So during the position learning phase there are 6 healers and 3 DPS in healer offspec. When we no longer die before enrage, the DPS go back to DPS and get the kill.

At least as far as priests go, I don’t consider the removal of downranking to be a game-killer. We almost never used max-Greater in TBC, because it was too big, and pallies had the tanks 90% covered anyway. Greater 1 healed a good amount while being less expensive mana-wise than most of our regen. In single-target healing situations, it was pretty much your only button.

Between glyphing and Surge of Light, flash has taken the place of it. Greater STILL usually heals for too much, so it’s a combination of CoH, and using flash to stack serendipity and let loose with a speedy PoH. So, I guess, the removal of downranking changed the typical priests arsenal by adding one more spell.

So I guess this is my wordy way of saying I consider the removal of downranking to be a non-issue.