GC, "bring the player not the class" != heal?

We didn't want players to feel like they had to exclude other players that they wanted to bring based on the need to min/max certain buffs per group.

Example: In the Sunwell era, in order to bring all of the +dps buffs you needed for a group of rogues, you ran out of space to bring say the Ret pally and possibly even the rogues.

If you need 5 healers for LK content, you are better off bringing a diversity of healers because you gain different kinds of buffs and utility spells and their abilities mesh together well. But if you can't do that and want to bring 3 druids and 2 paladins or 5 priests, you can still manage the content with just a couple of exceptions (like Razuvious).

The tanks tank in different ways, and as you have probably noticed, they feel pretty different to heal. Tanks are necessarily more homogenized than healers though because you might only have 2-3 of them in your group. Even so, there are encounters where a druid has a tanking advantage over a Protection paladin, just like there are situations where a Holy paladin has an advantage over a shaman. But they can all still get the job done at the end of the day.

In Sunwell, you had one possible answer to "Who should bring the Curse of Elements debuff?" or "Which class should we bring for mana regen?" That is what we want to get away from.

Q u o t e:
In Lich King we have only 1 possible class that brings a 10% crit debuff. How does this fit with that philosophy, especially given that this is a pure class which arguably does the best dps in the game right now?

It doesn’t. Forward-looking players might expect us to change that. :)

Even if it is shared more, 10% crit is a very powerful raid debuff -- probably too powerful. There is a melee debuff that is equally game-changing, which is something else we would like to fix.

Q u o t e:
Actually, GC promised to look at IDS and fix it, and i always blindly trust the blue posts. Woohoo! :D

We overhauled the buff system pretty dramatically and there are going to be some rough edges. We are currently in the process of evaluating when the same buff is not truly equal, because one class gets it passively for example, or one class doesn’t have to talent for it. Saying that a buff isn’t useful because every raid *always* has some other spec is not persuasive in our minds because we are explicitly designing around the assumption that you may not have one of every spec. (Minus a few gimmick encounters like Raz that we are carefully evaluating.) Divine Spirit is a good example of something that looked like it would be competitive with other versions of the same buff, but feels like it falls short in practice. Therefore we plan on changing it.

Q u o t e:
Please name a fight where heroism is 100% necessary.

We don’t think Heroism / Bloodlust is 100% necessary. It’s a very nice buff to be sure but it is nothing like it was in BC. Because any shaman can bring it, it’s also going to be more common than say a buff that shows up as someone’s 31 point talent.

Q u o t e:
We know. The OP is asking you to do the same for healers. You did a great job on this point for tanks and DPS, but not for healers. Some healers are really falling behind others noticeably.

We haven’t seen much evidence that some healers are falling behind others noticeably. If you have some evidence that suggests differently, please share it. Understand though that “On my server it seems like there aren’t many priests” is a pretty small sample size.

Furthermore, our design is not to give a class or spec so much utility that they are considered mandatory for a raid. That is explicitly what we are trying to get away from. Faced with the choice of an equally geared and skilled Resto shaman and Holy priest, you should feel like you can choose whoever you want. If you have a lot of one class already, that may encourage you, but not require you, to pick the other guy.

We don’t predict a lot of raid stacking of a particular class or spec in Ulduar. If we’re wrong though, we’ll fix it.

Q u o t e:
But thats the issue entirely. I believe based on the stats shaman is the least played class (even if that's wrong, I'm quite sure it's on the very low end of it) so while all spec have it, it doesn't mean you will have the actual class available. What I like about things like replenishment, is that since three different classes in one of their respective trees, for a 10 man someone can respec to get that talent, to benefit the raid. However you aren't able to have two other classes respec to provide bloodlust; only shaman can give that buff.

While it may not be a 100% necessary buff as said, neither is replenishment. Yet replenishment is given to three classes. The same goes for the CoE effect, not a 100% necessary buff but 3 classes can provide it.

From our POV, we assume you have Rel@%#%@hment just like we assume you have a tank. You can get by without it, but it will be challenging (assuming you're on content that actually challenges you). Bloodlust is below that. It's very nice to have, but not mandatory most of the time. If you are learning brand new content or hard modes then I would definitely recommend bringing a shaman.

Keep in mind that Bloodlust's benefit is currently overweighted because the fights are so short. On a 2 min Patchwerk fight, you can have Bloodlust up 33% of the time. If that was a 5 minute fight, it goes down to 13% of the time (and the cooldown prevents you from keeping it up more).