Spooncraft

Making healing more like Rogue/DPS Class playstyle ?
Yes, that’s the kind of thing we’re thinking about. Rogues can’t just spam one ability (most of the time) because their system is set up to where they want to use one kind of ability then switch to another kind. Or to use a different example, Frost mages want to get freezes and then Ice Lance (in PvP anyway).

We’ve done a little bit of that with healing. There are clearcasts or spells you can use on cooldown to make your next heal fast or free or big or whatever. But we think we can do a lot more with it.

Obviously we can’t just ask you to start looking for a 3 stack of a buff on every target before healing them. The UI doesn’t really support that and combat is just too frenetic to be able to parse it. That’s why we think those changes would have to be implemented with a more holistic look at combat and healing in general. (src)

Changes to healing and influence on raid
I said we would chill the raid damage overall. Some of the fights have enhanced raid damage specifically because the designers know that anything less is just trivial to heal through with current tools.

When you do take raid damage, we absolutely want CoH / WG to be the tools to handle that (for your classes).

If we need to buff the healing of either spell, or nerf Chain Heal, or if a cooldown of 3 or 4 sec makes more sense than 6 sec, we can do all of those things. (src)

In addition to the aforementioned posts, there’s a lot of talk about Druids and Priests having their AOE heals tonned down or given a cooldown of some kind to bring them in line. Personally I think they should just grant Paladins their own unique for of AOE heal other than Beacon of Light to compensate for the fire and forget styled Circle of Healing/ Wild Growth.

Circle of Healing / Wild Growth changes
We always prefer to buff things to nerf them, just because it does feel better for the player. But we have to evaluate the magnitude of the changes involved.

To make CoH / WG work in their current form, we would have to increase raid damage on the group, and increase the healing on your other spells to compete, and increase the magnitude of other types of damage so you want to use those other spells. Increasing single target damage means we might have to adjust tank health (which generally means gear) so that you feel like you have a chance to heal them before the e.g. 30,000 point Hateful Strikes land. It is easier in this case to nerf CoH / WG and lower raid AE damage.

This is the classic metaphor of balancing a chair — you can try and extend three legs or just cut one down to size.

We don’t always take the easier way out, but sometimes that is the more responsible thing to do. We’d rather spend a little bit of time tweaking current encounters and more time working on future encounters than the reverse. We’d rather fix other problems with healing than spend our time rebalancing a whole lot of healing spells.

Plus, since this change will happen after the game is already Live, we do owe it to the customer to attempt to minimze bugs when possible, and in this case that means changing as little as possible. (You can take this argument too far of course and argue we should never change anything. It’s a balance, as with most aspects of game design.)

Remember, our ultimate goal is to make the game more fun, not slap you around. I get so many kudos and warm fuzzies when I announce a big buff to a class that I would always prefer to be greeted with that than all the bad feelings that surround a nerf. Nerfing is never fun. (src)