Devs Looking To Make Healing Less Boring

Ah healing… it feels great when everything is going well and feels like crap when it doesn’t. I remember when I first started healing on my holy paladin, I felt personally responsible for every death even when it wasn’t my fault (like dps pulling aggro and getting owned or the tank not doing his job). Over time, especially as I got better and better geared, I noticed a sort of strange trend. When everything was going well, healing was a pretty relaxing job. In fact sometimes it was so relaxing that it quickly crossed into the realm of boring. When things were not going well, that’s when things got interesting!

By the very nature of what you do as a healer, you always seem detached from the action as you stray off into your own world of watching health bars go up and down As a tank and dps, you’re always part of the action. It doesn’t help that healers usually use the same spell or the same 2-3 spells over and over. This is what I experienced as a holy pally spamming Flash of Light and using Holy Light when needed.

Ghostcrawler hints in one of his replies in a thread in the healing forum that they’re looking at some mechanics that will make healing more interesting. He says that rogues don’t just spam the same ability most of the time and that frost mages would like to get a freeze then use Ice lance in PvP. In short, Ghostcrawler seems to hint at healing becoming a lot more like DPS-ing at least in the sense of using cooldowns and making some spells trigger effects to use on other spells just like the example of freezing and ice lance.

I like this move to make healing more interesting but I sure hope they don’t make things too complicated. I just fear that things might come to a point where healers will be forced to follow spell/effect X with spell Y all the time just to get the effect they want just like following a freeze effect with ice lance all the time. Healers are different from dps because they don’t follow a rotation, they use a certain spell because it’s the best spell for that situation given the health levels of the raid, current mana, urgency of landing a heal and other factors. Having to follow spell/effect X with spell Y all the time will just disrupt this. I hope that made sense haha!