CoH/WG FAQ, take 2- read before you post!

Okay, so people are repeatedly failing to read the CoH/WG nerf FAQ, probably because they have to copypasta all of those links and it's too much work for them. So I present to you, CoH/WG FAQ take 2, where I summarize the points that have been made 80 billion times by GC, and also throw in my own opinions/conjectures to expound on some points which will generally be noted as such.

So what's going on here, anyway?

Basically, CoH and WG are overpowered, so they're going to be nerfed. The likely method will be the addition of a cooldown to the spell, the value thrown around is typically 6 seconds, but none of that is set in stone.

Why the nerf?

Because in a 25-man raid a priest or druid can at the moment do nothing but run around in a circle through the raid, spam CoH/WG whenever more than one non-tank player is not at full health, and put out the same effective healing as a shaman intelligently using chain heal, unless it's a particularly AE-heavy fight, in which case they'll blow said shaman away. This might not even be an exaggeration, I'll have to try this in Naxx tomorrow night to be sure.

To put it in more simple terms, CoH/WG are currently making holy priests and druids better than shaman at AE healing by a fairly large margin. This is not how it should be, as shaman need to be better at AE healing than priests/druids to counter the fact that they're worse at tank healing than those classes.

The margin is so big that Blizzard is forced to either make fights with AE damage that's healable by shaman and an absolute joke for priests and druids to deal with or make fights with intense enough AE damage to actually challenge CoH/WG but extremely difficult if not borderline impossible to do with only Chain Heal(Malygos vortex being the prime example here.)

The other side of the issue is that it's turning druids and priests into one-button classes, and that's not what they're supposed to be.

If it's just heavy AE like Malygos that's making these spells such a big deal, why not just nerf vortex and all similar massive AE damage?

See the previous question- put simply, Malygos is a symptom of this issue, not a cause. Really, though, nerfing AE damage just makes it worse for shaman, because AE healing is supposed to be their niche.

Why not just buff chain heal?

I wish I could find the post where GC explains it in full, but basically they'd have to then buff every raid AE to Malygos-level, buff single-target heals to keep them attractive vs. multi-target ones, etc etc- they'd basically have to up the numbers of everything related to healing. The analogy used was shortening one chair leg vs. lengthening the other three, only in this case the chair has more like twenty legs and one of them is 10 times longer than the other 19, and I think I've murdered that analogy pretty well so let's move on to the next question.

Won't this make shaman the only healers to bring for AE healing?

If they slap cooldowns on the spells and don't change anything else, maybe. Priests are still supposed to be second-best at AE healing by a decently small margin to shaman, so they most likely won't just slap a cooldown on it unless they nerf AE damage to the point where a 6-second CD CoH is all a priest needs anyway. The likely solution in my mind is to change prayer of healing into a targetable spell, essentially into a CoH with a cast time (perhaps lowering the mana cost/radius/effective healing a bit along the way) to give us something to throw out between CoH casts. But that's just my idea.

Druids, I'm not sure about, but I'm thinking after the changes are done they'll be third-best at AE healing but good enough to cover for a lack of holy priests/resto shaman, especially in 10-mans.

Still though, the most important point here is, DON'T ASSUME THEY'RE GOING TO SLAP A COOLDOWN ON THESE SPELLS AND CALL IT A DAY. Too many peoples' whining are based on that assumption. And it makes me RAGE.

So why is it bad for priests/druids to spam CoH/WG but okay for paladins/shaman to spam FoL/CH?

Because shaman and paladins are designed around their 'signature spells' of FoL/CH while druids/priests are designed around using a wider variety of spells. This is also why they nerfed Lifebloom, because it was similarly overused.

More than that, though- and here we decend into the realm of personal conjecture- the nature of the spells makes effective CH spam require more brainpower than effective CoH/WG spam, since if a shaman targets someone at full health they waste half the spell's healing while if a druid or priest does the same thing they waste none of it.

STAY TUNED FOR PART 2, KIDS