I don’t disagree in the slightest. WWS is a fantastic tool and it has a lot to offer both healers evaluating their own performance and healer leads organizing groups and making assignments. Where it becomes a problem is people spamming “healing meters” after a fight, or thinking that because they topped the meters, they must be a better healer.

Which is, in fact, horseshit, if you’ll pardon my saying so (:

I don’t think 3.0.8 will change the flexibiltiy of shamans – if anything, I think it will change the dependence on priests (raids WERE prieststacking for the CoH spam). Chain heal has a cast time, CoH has a cooldown now, same with WG – it puts raid healing back on the same footing. I don’t think that shamans as raid healers is bad – nor do I think shamans as tank healers is bad. What’s bad is when any one healing class gets pidgeonholed into that role. (which Paladins currently are, but hey – I’ll fight one battle at a time, right?).

I enjoy raiding as a shaman much more. That’s because of tidal waves that makes me use LHW/HW and Riptide which is a lovely spell that just always fits in due to many movement heavy encounters. And glyphed LHW makes me feel like a little pally, I hope it won’t be hit too hard by soon to be nerfed improved watershield.

I sincerely hope 3.0.8 won’t push me back into the CH/raidhealing niche or even encourage shaman stacking (again).

Healing meters are a topic on itself. Healing meters are numbers and when it comes too numbers most of the time I guess I could prove someone did a good job or the exact contrary based on the same combatlog. On the other hand there are valid questions your friendly recount/wws can answer:

-do healers stick to their assignment (especially tank healing)?
-do healers with same class and spec and same assignment perform roughly at the same level?
-do your shamans decurse curses?
-does a healer use a variety of spells or is it just the lazerbeams?

drugs last blog post..Malygos down

I definitely think healing is still fun – I wouldn’t have three (and one on the way) healers if I didn’t! I think the problem right now is that instead of encouraging healing teamwork, raids seem to be moving in such a way that encourages healer competition – especially as tanking and DPS become more “meterized” (meterized, meterized. it’s a word now).

Yes – we have a lot more variety in 5 man healing – regardless of class. but large group raids are more specific now, and tailored to specific designs – the min/max idea. Rather than a lot of flexibility, things (especially in BC) became extremely rigid – you have to have 8 healers and 3 of them HAVE to be CoH priests, or whathaveyou. I’ve not raided enough in LK – and haven’t raided at all with my shaman yet – to really tell how much that has changed, but hopefully it will be better, especially with the changes to CoH and Wild Growth.

As for raid credit – unfortunately we have the most “behind the scenes” job in the game. If everyone is doing everything right, nobody really notices we’re there. It’s when the proverbial shit hits the fan and the healers dig deep, find some extra mana down in their toenails and grit it out and win that we take the cake. And ideally, those situations never happen. And really, that’s ok for a lot of us – but it does make it hard to find healers, or to “mold” healers out of other raid types – especially if they’re used to having some shiny spotlight time (:

I agree very much with Veneretio. Raiding, especially 25 man raiding needs you to be a part of a working, cooperating raiding team. In 5 mans I can just go crazy, wind shock, drop different totems for different situation, dps a little. In 25 man raiding it often comes down to casting your best heal, chainheal, over and over. I’d love to see more fun and variety in 25 man raiding for healers but that would be a very hard thing to achieve.

And after all its us healers that keep the raid alive, even if we don’t get much credit for it, I think thats nice.

drugs last blog post..Malygos down