What was that about making tank damage less spiky?

[Neviglas]

I think todays "spiky" damage is fun and there is very significant difference between WOTLK spikes and Cata. The core thing in Cata healing is that you have powerful tools instead of slaky spamming rotation. I have been playing Priest since vanilla and I never had such diversity in spells. If I'm in mana saving rotation I can perform about 4k HPS on single and feel endless like WOTLK paladin)But if I need to, I can use 2 flash+ grater and burn about 9k on single. So returning to spikiness, in WOTLK you’ve got to heal before think, because you don’t have tools to correct the situation, and spiked load from boss can kill the tank. It Cata you need to think before heal, cause your mistake in chousing spells can cost you a party. Spikes in Cata is not a big deal, cause you can thrown HWchastise, flash, and boosted grater and it would be over 45k per 5 sec. So mechanic of the fight force you to THINK and if mob becoming red and big, you should start to cast graters, and if you see, warrs blast wave animation, you probably should cast mana efficient spells, cause if you don’t – you dead.
That’s why I want to state: Spikes are fun!

All figures taken from 85 lvl priest, during heroic dungs.

[heissler]

Have to agree with the previous poster.
Healing heroics atm is a LOT of fun for my paladin right now.
Holy has never been this much fun.
The scaling of HP to damage flying out is on the spot right now, at least for the DPS. Tank damage CAN be quite spiky atm (thinking of the ogre bodyguards in DM if you don't kite them, or some trash like the one in grimbatol or VP without any kind of CC. Some bosses like Erudax, Ptah or Rajh can put out some hard pressure on the healer too, especially if someone fucks up a mechanic.), but that's why we have some VERY cool abilitys/cooldowns now.
I'm somewhat looking forwards to the Cataclysm raids now.

[Deleted]

WotLK: 2-shot is spiky
Cata: 20% HP per hit is spiky

That's the difference. Expect some more tuning in the weeks ahead, moreso as they get into raid testing.

Aside from some bugs, Druid and Death Knight tanking looks less spiky compared to todays ICC raids. Warriors and Paladins do have a few issues that are being addressed as we speak.

The problem here though is that it doesn't make a difference for the healers. While a Tank might loose 20% of his health per hit in Cata, they'll need at least once heal to heal that. In ICC it may take the tank down 40% per hit, but that hit only requires one heal to fix. So it doesn't really help the healers that much.

And also, tank avoidance is very low in general in Cataclysm so tanks get hit a lot more...that may add to the sense of spikyness. We really need to look at comparable situations. And don't forget, Cataclysm is intended to be a lot harder than WotLK in some areas.

[Tharkkun]

Yeah but from a healer perspective it turns us back into spamming out heals. How different is that now?

Right now if you aren't casting every single global cooldown your tank is probably going to die. Tanks can't survive 3 hits or in some cases 2 hits in a row so you are forced to just spam relentlessly not caring about mana.

Now if you spam before your tank takes damage you're going to run out of mana. You may also have a free second or two before having to heal again so wasting heals will be a big deal. There will always be oh shit moments where you need to spam to get people back up in health but that's not going to change. I think tanks and healers will need to blow their cooldowns more often than previously. I can't think of the last time (as my druid) that I had to actually pop barkskin/enrage or SI except for halls of reflection.

[Neviglas]

First of all, you always can and shall overheal tank with mana efficient spells. And I’m sure, that blizzards aren’t going to give you free time, so you still have to spam heals. But the main goal of Cata is to give you different spells to cast, with different consequences after. 80% fights in normal and 30% in heroics I just spamming 2/3 spells constantly – my basic mana save rotation in which a never went OOM, so it’s pretty same with wotlk. But when the damage comes, I switch my rotation on more expansive heals to replenish tanks HP, after that I’m returning to mana preserving sequence. The key factor now it’s balancing between the spells.
The problem lines in the situations, when some trash mobs overwhelming the boss damage. Like, as other poster sad, to guardian Ogres is DM. So what’s the big deal, give them a bit of respect and burn you mana harder. I often use Fiend on trash or Light well, yellowing on my party to use it. It is grate that now we have choice in spells.