What a HORRIBLE philosophy!

I have found this philosophy to be a tough one to communicate. Painted broadly, we have some players who chose healing because they like to be challenged and we have some players who chose healing because they like to be the hero. In LK, raid healing can definitely be stressful at times, but we're not actually convinced the challenge is there. After a tough fight, whether it was succesful or not, ask yourself what you should have done differently. Did you use the wrong heal in the wrong situation? I'd suspect not since most healers have pretty stringent rotations these days where you use your strongest heals on cooldown and fill in the time left with your next strongest heals and so on. Did you heal the wrong person at the wrong time? Probably not because anyone you failed to heal was probably about to die. You probably overhealed a lot because there is little consequence for overhealing.

Go back and look at a few videos of BC raid encounters. A couple of points may be strking. One, several characters may be at various stages of injury -- the healers could not keep them all topped off. Second, the healers may be at various stages of mana -- in other words, it's not just a matter of having more GCDs before everyone is fine again. It's a matter of triage.

Triage is one of the things missing from today's healing game (even though you likely learned First Aid through a triage quest). Loosely defined, triage is deciding who needs immediate attention (vs. who is stable vs. who is a lost cause). We want healers to be able to make decisions like "The tank is wounded, but she is unlikely to die in the next few hits, and hots are ticking on her, so she's probably okay for a moment and I can heal this Ret paladin over here," vs. "The rogue is wounded, but my big heal would overheal for a ton and I need the mana, so I can use a small heal." We want the dps to likewise be thinking about ways to minimize damage on themselves, not because they'll die in a global (i.e. before they could respond anyway) but because the healers are going to risk running out of mana.

Today, in LK, healing risks feeling even more like whack-a-mole. Injury? Heal. Injury? Heal. You're testing your reflexes more than your decision-making ability. Whack-a-mole can be challenging, but it doesn't have much depth. It's easy to add depth though. Let's start with the notion that there are two hammers. The little hammer can dispatch most of those moles, but sometimes you can use your big hammer too. The big hammer has limited charges or whatever. Now let's have some of the moles pop out a little slower so that you have time to consider which hammer to use. See where I'm going with this?

Running out of mana doesn't have to be, and won't be, the only reason you fail an encounter. But it is a point of failure that we don't have today. Adding it back in will make the encounters feel more distinct from each other and will actually, we believe, make healing more interesting and ultimately more fun. I agree it's going to be a tough sell though. In one of our playtests recently, the healer came back frazzled. "I couldn't keep everyone topped off," she said. "It took me half the dungeon to realize that I didn't have to." Once that clicked, she said she started having fun. Hopefully it will click with other players quickly too.

Q u o t e:
Punishment should be doled out primarily because I didn't diagnose or treat the patient properly, not because I ran out of bandages.

I see what you're saying, but that's part of triage too. You can't order surgery for every patient, which is kind of the equivalent of using your largest or fastest heal for every patient, regardless of injury.

The other part of that is if you use your efficient Heal for every single problem, then you'll have tons of mana, but you'll lose people. (In other words, sometimes expensive surgery is exactly the right thing to do.) Mana isn't the entire healing game. It's just one consideration.

Q u o t e:
So where does the word FUN fit in here. I see you thinking Stress and Fun are the same thing.

Fun is getting the job done well, fun is not getting more stress as you get more fun.

Stress is when you fail often and might not even be your fault. Failing is not fun, Stress is not fun.

I do not see GC saying fun is even in the equation, nor do I see you saying this means fun.

If you end up will less healers on all servers, that is pretty much proof you sucked the fun out of healing.

A FACT is when something is fun you get more people doing it. No fun less people want to do it.

We will see who is right about this.

For most players, games need a certain amount of challenge to be fun. If you've ever run through a game with cheat modes on, it can feel pretty liberating for about 15 minutes. Then you start to get bored because you're just not having to work at all for your victories. In fact, it can even sour you ever wanting to play on normal mode again.

That's what I meant about the two types of players thing though. I do believe we have some healers that like to heal because of the accolades. Socially, they just like the idea of saving lives even if it's relatively easy. It's hard to make healing easy enough for them without making it too boring for the players looking for more of a challenge.

I do agree there's such a thing as too much stress. We try and structure the difficulty of PvE such that you can aim for content you're interested in though. It's hard to make say heroic Lich King challenging without adding a certain amount of stress for healers (and tanks, and dps for that matter). For me, one of the things that works against stress is pacing. You can have a few encounters that are easy followed by a real nail-biter, or you can have a boss encounter that has really scary moments interspersed with phases where it's unlikely people are going to die quickly. Occasional stress is more fun than non-stop stress. That just ends up feeling too much like work. :)