Smart heals FAIL why can't Blizz see this?

I'm not sure why we need to keep starting threads on the same issue, but since you seem to have trouble finding our thoughts on the issue of smart healing, I will offer them again.

The old model of targeting a group out of a raid to heal it goes against one of the changes we tried to make for Lich King, which is that the raid structure matters, but the party structure within the raid doesn't. Almost all buff are raid-wide now, so we didn't want raiders to have to structure their groups just around things like Circle of Healing. "Um, can you put the MT and OT in the same group please, so CoH can get them both?" That sort of thing.

One of the things we wanted to do was give players more flexibility in how they set up their raids. This extends to your UI -- if you like to put the tanks in a separate part of your UI, or organize things by class or functional role instead of group, you can do that without having to worry (so much) about who is in what group.

We couldn't get rid of the group concept for every spell - Mana Tide is one example. But we have gotten rid of a lot of them.

We did ask all of the class designers and almost everyone on the WoW team who plays a raiding priest, and to a person they all thought the cooldown was a better solution than removing the smart component of the heal.

I will say again, if one spell (talented at that) is what makes the difference between you A) having fun, B) being able to heal competitively, or C) being brought to a raid at all, that is a much bigger problem than anything CoH itself does.

We do care and we do listen. But I think sometimes players don't listen to each other. There are plenty of players who say they understand CoH was overpowered (even if they disagree with our solution) and there are plenty of players who say they like healing on their priests and that their priests are the backbone of their raid. If you don't feel that way, that's cool, but you can't realistically expect us to only listen to you while ignoring them.

You can tell us what you don't like about the class and what your concerns are, and many of you have. We appreciate that feedback. But that doesn't mean we are going to make a whole lot of changes if we don't feel they are warranted. We're not asking you to design a class for us to go implement.

Saying a class is broken doesn't make it broken. You can say it's underpowered in specific areas if you feel that way, or even that you think the mechanics are clunky and don't play well together. That can be useful feedback. But you're not going to be able to convince us that any of the classes in the game are horribly broken. They just aren't. With the exception of the DK (which doesn't seem to be hurting at all) these classes have been around a long time and through a lot of encounters. They are pretty battle-tested by now.

We think Holy is a very strong healing tree, and we know there are cutting-edge guilds who agree with us. If you aren't in a very min-maxed guild like that, then the differences between classes should matter even less because you have so much power to improve your class' contribution just by learning all the nuances of the spells, the best gear to maximize them and how to coordinate with other healers.

Now there are some things we would like to do to all 3 priest trees. But I increasingly feel like it is necessary for me to add every time I say this that just because we have future plans for your class does not mean we think your class is currently broken and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.