HH and Blizz's theory, Someone Clarify?

#0 - April 19, 2010, 2:39 a.m.

Q u o t e:

We might be okay with the tendency for groups to still assign paladins to tank healing because they are particularly good at it. What we want to avoid are those cases where a group feels like they can't possibly keep tanks alive because they lack a paladin or they can't possibly keep groups alive because they have too many paladins.

What I'm gathering here is that in Cataclysm, there will eventually be raids/instances/situations where a Holy Paladin would be ideal, won't be ideal because there will be buffs to other classes that'll allow tank healing just fine.

Just because a HPaladin is particularly good at that, it doesn't mean that you're saying "Yeah you'll need one."

What I keep getting confused and worried about is that the quote above sounds like we'll be easy to replace, but, even our raid heals won't suffice. Or it doesn't sound like that thus far.

Perhaps it was the example that was given to us (Works like healing stream), or maybe it's the preset notion that Paladins will never be good raid healers -- but I just don't see how at the end of the day what it sounds like is that they are allowing other classes to viably tank heal, but shortening the stick with Paladins by giving us a (from their own words) heal that works like.... Healing stream.

I just discussed this with my friend who has every other healer BUT a paladin and he brought up a good point; Lets say that we have a paladin healing the raid:

You have HH to heal the group that you are standing next to/in.
You have Beacon of Light, with FoL to support tank healing/spot healing the raid.
You have the Summon picking up the person with the lowest HP in raid.

In theory this sounds good, but is this Blizzards desire/design for future raid healing for Paladins? Am I being tremendously paranoid by being worried that FoL/HH won't be enough for the Shamans (Irony I know), and Druids that'll be sniping heals?

If someone could please educate me on this, It'd be greatly appreciated.

TL;DR: What the hell is going on with Paladin healing. Really.

#15 - April 19, 2010, 8:56 p.m.

Q u o t e:
The goal is, indeed, to make you viable raid healers. That can be accomplished without neutering your single-target healing (and without making you the gods of all raid healing).

Yep. Healing Hands is one of the ways we want to let paladins raid heal and it might even be the dominant way. We want to give them a group heal that isn't Circle of Healing or Chain Heal, because we've already done those spells and we want to do something new here.

What we want to avoid: "Well, we don't have our paladin tonight to heal the tank, so let's call the raid."

What we also want to avoid: "Well, we have too many paladins and they can't raid heal, so let's replace one with an undergeared alt."

There are extremes of course. All things being equal, we'd rather you not stack too many of any one spec. We just don't want to make it impossible to heal a raid if your group of friends just happens to have a lot of Holy paladins.