Ghostcrawler on Healing

A few days ago on the Official WOW blog, Ghostcrawler posted a kind of “State-of-the-Union” style post detailing how Blizzard is feeling about where things are so far and things that could potentially be addressed in the first patch.  There is a lot of great information in this post, and it shows a snapshot of how Blizzard views the game balance thus far.

With regards to healing, there is one paragraph in particular that is caught my attention:

Healing in PvE is working out pretty much as intended. There are some Heroic dungeon bosses that are probably tougher than the required item level average permits. In general, you might have a tough time upon zoning into a Heroic dungeon with a bunch of strangers as soon as Dungeon Finder permits, especially if your group isn’t willing to communicate and work together. We want Heroics to be challenging -- if you want to zerg the content, stick to normal dungeons.

I only read this today but, interestingly enough, it was posted on the 27th, the same day I wrote my First Lessons from Heroics post about communication; meaning that Ghostcrawler is obviously reading my blog. Hi Greg, welcome to Dwarven Battle Medic.

The basic point here is that heroics are not going to get any easier, at least not when you’re working with a random group of total strangers… and that is how Blizzard wants it. 

As frustrating as my experiences with Heroics has been (there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth, lemme tell you), I’m glad they are not going to be nerfing heroics.  Heroic Dungeons are supposed to be hard and good teamwork and communication should be needed to successfully complete one.  During Wrath I found heroics quite dull; not because of the content or the mechanics or the fact that I had done them several dozen times each, but simply because everybody ran them with a deadly silent efficiency.  No communication meant that you might as well have been running the dungeon with four NPCs.

I would have liked to have seen this post mention a buff to Holy Light that makes it heal for a kajillion HP, but you take what you can get.  It’s actually interesting that there is nothing in here about Holy Paladins at all.  It seems that they are working as intended.

Priests look like their in for a nice little buff, however:

For Holy priests, we’re increasing Chakra’s duration and changing Surge of Light so it can now benefit from Flash Heal and Greater Heal and can crit.

A little link love needs to go out to Tarinae over at A Healadin's Tear for writing about this in a far more timely manner than I managed to.