I try to refrain from commenting too much on patchnotes and upcoming changes when it comes to WoW. I'm not exceptionally interested or good at math, theorycrafting interests me only so-so and I sincerely doubt I'll offer new insights to new and old issues. It simply feels a little too much "Captain Obvious to the rescue" for my taste.
However, I'll make an exception right now: this post is mostly concerning Chill of the Throne. Now, I'll assume you've read the patchnotes, Ghostcrawler's posts, and so on. If you're still wondering what I'm on about, head over to mmo-champ and get updated.
My answer to this is quite simple: healing is boring. It's a mostly thankless job with too few challenges to keep it entertaining over time. That is, unless you're working on new content; then it's my favorite thing in the world. This is, naturally, gear-related. If I were to spec my bear resto, I'm quite sure I'd have a blast, until I was decked in epics. I don't do a lot of instances anymore, unless it's on my alt, which most of my friends know. I have to un-equip most of my gear to even stay awake, and if we're not on ventrillo and I have a book in my hand at the same time, chances are I'll log off after we've finished the first dungeon. The bluepost commenting on how dps, at least, can push themselves on the dpsmeters, had a very good point. Oh, by all means, that probably gets boring too after a while, and you could ask if it's really supposed to be fun doing content you're outgeared for, but when even normal ToTC and Ulduar-raids are so boring you'd rather walk naked through WSG...then I think something is very, very wrong.
"But Ayms, you could push yourself on healingmeters!" someone said. Uhm, yeah, just...no. I'm a discpriest. We ABSORB. The only absorb-meter out there isn't quite reliable, and there's only so much damage to go around. Especially if your tank is well enough geared. In addition, healing-meters depends too much on your healing-assignments, and as we all know, good healers don't break assignments unless really, really necessary. You want to trust your fellow healers, and you don't want to teach them, or yourself, bad habits. The day will come when that restoshammy is going to have to do his job alone, and it'd be a shame if he failed because you've taught him that he doesn't have to go all out. Of course, there's not really that much healingassignments going on in a 10-man, especially these days, but my point still stands: healing-meters are unreliable things and it's very hard to use them to motivate yourself. Especially if you're the resident disc.
"Well then, how about being as manaeffective as possible?" This is a possiblitiy. I've tried it. It was halfway interesting until I realized that I can't go oom in heroics, unless I stand in a corner spamming Holy Nova every time I have a GCD to spare. And even then it took absurdly short time before I'd regained most of that. Blizzard already nerfed our manaregen a bit, and in my opinion, it's still too high. The only times we've had oom-problems in SRE is when our holypriest was still in blues. Gimme some raid-buffs, and oom-problems are seldom seen except on progression-raids. And those are the ones we have no problems staying awake on.
So, to wrap this up as my arm is still stupid and I'm now pretty tired of writing one-handed: I think Chill of the Throne will be fun. Yes, I'm aware it wont affect earlier heroics or raids, those will still be the same old grind for any healer having to stand around counting dust-particles while waiting for someone to actually take damage, but it will be new. Hopefully, it will be different enough to provide some serious entertainment. I think it's too early to say that it'll reduce one specific class or other in terms of Being Good At Their Job: this is why we have the PTR-servers after all. I'm quite sure that Blizzard, who's focusing more than ever on the "Bring the player, not the class/spec", will avoid that trap.
If nothing else, it's a good sign that they're aware how healing can become, well...really, people. We just STAND there. We have NOTHING to do. This isn't good, they're trying to deal with it, and I, for once, can't wait to see what'll happen in the future.
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