I'm reposting this from the official forums to see what the mmo champ community has to comment on.
After reading a large chuck of the posts on these forums, it's pretty clear, that healing is not fun. Nor is it hard. Most posts are either QQers, who try heroics, get in a bad group, are in bad gear themselves, and fail horribly. The rest are posts of people claiming how AMAZING the new healing system is, how HARD, yet so fun, and complex it is. DECISION MAKING they say. All you need to do, according to them is ADAPT.
So I ask you oh so amazing players. What spells are you using? As for a shaman, we have 5 general spells we *can* use during the course of an instance.
1) Healing wave
2)Healing Surge
3)Greater Healing wave
4) Riptide
5) Healing Rain
(I'm not even gonna mention chain heal, its useless, as it costs more than healing wave, and heals for less if you don't get all 4 jumps)
Out of those, which ones are you having to *decide* to use? It can't be healing surge, its near useless, costs nearly 3x as much as healing wave, for less than a 50% more of a heal. Greater healing wave then maybe? Sure, it can be used, but not much before you completely oom yourself.
So we're left with 1,4, and 5. Healing rain is situational at best, and requires all 5 party members to be inside it to be worth the mana cost. So now we're left with healing wave and riptide.
Riptide has a cool down, and at best you can have it on 3 targets at once. From my exp in instance this is actually pretty good, IF YOU HAVE A GOOD GROUP. The unavoidable dmg is easily healed by riptide (when i say healed, i mean they're hp doesn't move, not up or down.)
So we're left with healing wave, a 2.5 second cast 8k heal that we have to SPAM to actually heal the tank through dmg. In alot of posts, I read, "Wotlk was so boring, all we did was spam one heal and go afk".
So, what exactly are we doing now? OHHHH thats right, we're using TWO spells, an instant with a cooldown, and spamming SLOW cast spell that gives us no satisfaction that we actually did anything.
Which brings me to my next point. To all the people posting about how fun and exciting it is, and how people just need to l2p. You are not good at healing, your GROUP was good at CC/avoiding things.
As it is right now, healer skill plays a backseat to everyone elses. I know most of you want to flex your epeen about how amazing you are at the new healing system, and everyone else is just bad, but sorry, you're not good. Well, I'll put it another way, you may be a good healer, but it doesn't matter. Your skill, as long as its average or even slightly below average, doesn't matter in the slightest.
I've healed a pretty good number of heroics, more than most fail, but the ones that do finally clear the instance, I never once felt like it was because I was a good healer and we cleared it BECAUSE I was the healer, not some other healer that's just average.
So hears my question i really want answered.
What exactly makes healing hard for you? If you're in a good group, its a cakewalk. I've been in group where i never dropped below 75%,was able kept everyone TOPPED off, which according to most people in the "this is so hard and fun" camp, should be a big no no. And when you're in a bad group, you aren't clearing it, you're either replacing everyone or leaving. So how is this hard? How is this fun ?