Cataclysm healing (early)

[MasterHamster]

As soon as people stopped being insufferable idiots and learned how to avoid most fire effects, it was fine.
Culture shock from WotLK.

But the biggest mistake of 4.0 healing was the base mana regen which was terrible, then rapidly grew until we stopped caring about mana again in 4.3

[Cephilia]

I really don't miss being kicked from random HC groups right after zoning in for being a priest healer.

[Funky Kong]

I liked early Cata. I stood out as a good healer because I wasn't one of those priests who kept the Flash Heal spamming strategy from WotLK. It weeded out a lot of baddies, although if your raid was full of dumb DPS then you'd go OOM regardless of how good you are.

[cocoroaria]

I remember it very, very clearly.
I remember how well it went depended heavily on the tank. If the tank was a douche who thought she could steamroll through everything and pull half the dungeon in one go like she could at the end of Wrath, then it sucked.
If the tank was intelligent and went about it slowly and evenly, then it was awesome. (oh, dps had an effect too, of course)
When I had a half decent tank, I loved healing. I felt more... aware. Although I've generally liked Pandaria and have enjoyed it as a whole way more than Cataclysm, I -did- actually find Cataclysm healing to be funner, less spammy, and require alertness.
Right before I canceled my sub after Siege of Orgrimmar dropped (I don't stay subbed in the inbetween expac period), all I used was Lifebloom, Regrowth, a couple Rejuvenations every now and then, and Wild Mushroom for Efflorescence. I could even just keep Lifebloom up and a Mushroom and it'd be okay most of the time.
I just felt really useless compared to before and like I wasn't using even half of my potential.

[rebecca191]

Hated it on my healing priest for heroic raiding. It just felt very slow and weak. I don't mind managing mana, but I didn't feel very rewarded for doing so - even the expensive heals felt weak. And in a lot of the heroic progression fights, it didn't feel like using the cheaper spells was much of an option anyway. It was better to hope the DPS killed it before you went OOM....

[Xjev]

The fact that anyone dieing was blamed on healers sucked bad... They even one kicked me out of group in Stonecore not knowing the mechanics of bosses there. Generally Heroics were hard but problem was not healing

[Amerrol]

I was still maining a dps then, but I did have an alt Holy Priest I played at the time. It was certainly difficult pugging, but it wasn't impossible if the group was competent. Unfortunately, this was rarely the case with a solo queue, and I liked doing those for the goodie bags (and those were there pretty much all the time for healers and tanks back then). Mana was also a pretty huge issue for Holy (it still is, go figure...), so covering for baddies standing in shit was almost impossible. Emergency heals for dps were pretty much a death wish for the group since even Heal was mana negative at that point.

I don't mind hard heroics, but the flip-flopping Blizzard goes through every expansion is getting annoying. The biggest problem is that end of expansion heroics are a joke, no matter how hard they are at the start, so people get into an easy-mode mindset. They should just scale them like CM's and adjust the justice given throughout the expansion. For example, just increase the JP a 5 man drops by 25% every patch or something. That way the challenge is still there, but the grind doesn't take a long the further along you are into an expansion.

[nekobaka]

Mostly solo queued heroics as a resto druid and was fine and got easy with heroic dungeon blues. Raiding on the early end had some teamwork issues especially from players that had issues adapting to not spamming spells and keeping players up. This could lead to not only the spammer running out of mana, but issues with hot classes also wasting mana as it was designed for a higher percentage of their hots to heal compared to late WotLK.

Most of the complaints I hear when it came to heroic dungeons was down to people standing in shit and blaming the healer and then healers trying to deal with players standing in shit they are not supposed to. You cant heal stupid. Well a little, but you are not supposed to be able to continually heal a player through stupid. The mechanic is there for a reason and if you healed WotLK heroics at launch or done any other content in the relevant gear even in WotLK then it would have been no different.

The unfortunate side effect that comes with less knowledgeable or caring players is how constructive their feedback is vs a player who can explain with detail the specific areas they are having issues with and what could be done. Still not as bad as from players who just point fingers at others for their problems.

I did have fun healing heroics including solo queue. Sure there are times when you had self-centered dbags that blame others for their problems, but its LFD and random is random and I accepted that. You have the option to not random queue.

As soon as people stopped being insufferable idiots and learned how to avoid most fire effects, it was fine.
Culture shock from WotLK.

But the biggest mistake of 4.0 healing was the base mana regen which was terrible, then rapidly grew until we stopped caring about mana again in 4.3

I would say the last half of WotLK. One year of doing the same thing can make it hard to change habits especially from having to go from massively out gearing content to once again being the appropriate gear level. The amount of QQ from players having to replace epics with greens was just insane.

The funny thing with base mana regen issue at launch was Blizzards over hesitance in starting too high and leading to end of WotLK again. In the end they failed on both fronts perhaps also because of their failure at the start resulting in an attempt to swing too far again on the other side. Later gear wasnt supposed to have as much extra spirit on them, but that didnt happen. I think the same thing was supposed to happen with MoP, but nope.

The developers are saying that they learned from their mistakes and will make sure it doesnt happen, but than again the developers said the same thing about the DS nerf. Here is hope that the developers do strike the balance in WoD.

[Deleted]

Early Cataclysm as a healer was THE BEST for me.
Triage healing was near perfect, I really enjoyed this playstyle. Maybe VERY EARLY Cata was a bit over the top (like the firsts 5-man heroic dungeons just after you ding lvl85), but overall it was a very enjoyable experience to me. It was engaging and the whole group/raid was involved in the mana management by not staying in fire needlessly.
Of course I'm talking about PvE with decent mates (raiding guild)... I can understand how the experience was frustrating for those who had to PUG everything indeed.

Blizzard says they will hit a middle ground this time so don't worry: it will be quite easy this time around.

[Ethas]

It was hard but felt very rewarding.

Yeah. Pretty much this.
I remember my first heroics with pugs as the holy priest were horrible and really stressing. However I learned much from that healing model and adapted so well that I was rocking at the end game raids where people couldnt sustain their mana because of their old mindset. So the last percents of progress bosses were practically solohealed by me and that was really a joy, especially when I got wol rankings due to that.

[Ponchu]

Yeah. Pretty much this.
I remember my first heroics with pugs as the holy priest were horrible and really stressing. However I learned much from that healing model and adapted so well that I was rocking at the end game raids where people couldnt sustain their mana because of their old mindset. So the last percents of progress bosses were practically solohealed by me and that was really a joy, especially when I got wol rankings due to that.

It was the one expansion (or part of expansion - outside of BC) where I felt that my skill as a healer was valued and noticed, actively, by the raid/5man I was in. Good healing was rarer, and essential to the groups success. Where as now I doubt most 5mans would notice if the healer was even in the dungeon.

edit: not to say I thought the model wasnt flawed but I personally quite enjoyed it

[Wildmoon]

It was people that were embarrassingly bad. The difficulty was good.

[Fheng]

I used a Resto shaman in Cata as my healer and honestly healing alt runs and pug groups of BWD BoT weren't that harsh on my mana unless i was spam healing the idiot who though fire gave him a haste buff or whatever, it felt more engaging and like the rotation of cool downs on Wyrmbreaker and actually having to click the lightwell to avoid death felt really fun to me and just switching from Hymn to stacking for healing rain, i thought cata healing was fun and challenging instead of it now how its just spam your abilities in decent gear and never run out of mana.

[draykorinee]

It was people that were embarrassingly bad. The difficulty was good.

Or it was people conditioned by facerolling content and the changes made were to much in one go.

[Celista]

Or it was people conditioned by facerolling content and the changes made were to much in one go.

I don't know. I had thought that most people in Wrath at least knew that fire = bad, but then I pugged Deadmines and saw how wrong I really was....

[Wildmoon]

Or it was people conditioned by facerolling content and the changes made were to much in one go.

Doesn't change the fact that they were bad.

[draykorinee]

I don't know. I had thought that most people in Wrath at least knew that fire = bad

No, unfortunately this was not the case Although bear in mind I played on a server that could only pug the first 6 bosses comfortably the entire expansion.

- - - Updated - - -

Doesn't change the fact that they were bad.

No, thats true, but the difficulty therefore was not good, it was bad too, from a design stand point anyway.

[PrairieChicken]

It was fantastic.

During Cata healers were rare compared to today the time of mass produced healers.

In the healing point of view it was much more fun to pick target and heal instead of "spam AoE and win"

[draykorinee]

It was fantastic.

During Cata healers were rare compared to today the time of mass produced healers.

In the healing point of view it was much more fun to pick target and heal instead of "spam AoE and win"

Yup, my Shaman is so full of smart healing, I just need to drop Healing stream, healing rain and cast chain heal. I'll chuck in the odd targeted heal but otherwise thats it.

[Ragashii]

Yeah right people get real you didn't have to think about the spells you were using in cataclysm. You're really just talking out of your asses now at this point. The only thing you had to "think" about in early cata was how shitty your mana efficient heal was and how you would go oom if you did anything else for even 10 seconds. Druids still hit wildgrowth on cooldown, holy priests still hit circle of healing on cd etc. Why did nothing change? Because single target heals sucked horribly. As a paladin nothing changed from wrath except I still had to spam heal the tanks with divine lights instead of holy light and hit holy radiance on CD. Yeah that was amazing gameplay and blizzard did a great job of making paladins raid healers. I mean I just loved having to stand behind everyone and making sure they were just in the right place so my light of dawn would hit them. Yeah that was great and it wasn't something I just mindlessly did whenever I got 3HP. Nope that was a smart decision that I made. Yup. Oh and I had to find time to use judgment on CD or I went oom. FUUUUUUUN.

Or how about disc priests in early cata? Yeah that was fun how power word shield would be gone if a critter sneezed 2 zones away from you were. Yeah that was so amazing, my co-healer loved that so much. He felt so smart going oom all the time just because he was smart enough to roll a priest, talk about smart and rewarding game play there guys.

Or what about shaman oh yeah they had it the best in early cata, they were just amazing. They were so amazing that nobody brought them because they believed in fair play and shaman just trivialized all the content. I'm sure shaman remember those times fondly, I hear they were given the best available seats on the bench and that was amazing.

Or what about those resto druids? Everytime I talked to a resto druid in wrath you know what they always talked about wanting to do more if blizzard would only let them? Hard cast everything. Blizzard finally answered and let resto druids hard cast as much as they wanted to and every single resto druid was so happy about that, just ask them it was the best.

Yeah if only we could go back to those amazing and rewarding times.