Originally Posted by Dhargo
A few things that people are forgetting -
1, The new TBC encounters are being designed with this in mind. Slouken flat out said that, one of the motivators for this change was so that the encounter designers didn't have to take decursive like mods into account when designing encounters.
2. You won't have 40 players to look at - you'll have 25
3. Downranking is taking a hit - spells below level 40 will see far less benefit from +heal gear.
4. Player HP is scaling faster than any other factor in the game - this should give some breathing room for spot-healers.
5. While a clickable emergency monitor is not doable anymore, you can always have an emergency monitor (sortable) that has bright glowing pointers to the unit-frame of the affect person (meaning no hunt and peck). I'm already working on the animation code for something like that.
6. Slouken is looking into implementing a combo keys approach to keybindings (using the menubuttons) based on a lot of our feedback. Take a druid healing a single group for instance (this scales, btw) using just the keys 1-5. Pressing a key opens the UnitFrame's menu button and remaps the keybinds to those newly opened buttons (which are your heals), pressing another key casts the spell, collapses the menu (optional) and resets the binds.
1,1 = rejuvenation on you
1,2 = regrowth on you
1,3 = healing touch on you
2,1 = rejuve on party 1
and so on. Many of us have requested the functionality, and slouken wants to put it in. Slouken's been pretty good in the past about getting us things like this.
Now, some of this may take some time -- but the 2.0 client will be on the PTR (slouken has said so), even though we won't get to test the new content, we can test the new UI and write new addons to make healing better.
Before the "oh, you play a DPS class, you don't know squat" stuff comes up - My first main was a paladin (for the year between release and 1.9). All my first mods centered around staying aware of my party's (and then raid's) condition and simplifying executing the proper actions on them.
Along with smaller raids, and the fact that 44% of the classes are now healers, a different approach to assigning spot-heal responsibilities would reduce the amount of staring at health bars (and overhealing IMO) -- but that's not a programming discussion, that's a process analysis discussion.
I think the idea that so many healers should be watching an entire raid is misplaced - it contributes to healer stress and to overhealing. There are ways to reduce the number of people a healer is paying attention to that leave massive redundancy in coverage, and flexibility for when a healer dies.
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1. I'm really not holding my breath that they won't have encounters post TBC that won't need the furious clicking of dispel/cure disease. Mass dispel will alleviate some of this with prior organization of when to clump within 15 yards and when to spread out. I have no idea what druids and mages will do. I suppose you can use shaman totems for some, but then in a raid of 25, you'd need 5 shamans (which will affect raid balance quite a bit).
What will happen is probably some poor sots will become the primary dispeller/decurser/depoisoner and just do that the whole raid, and they get to stare unblinkingly at 25 raid bars.
2. Thank goodness for this.
3. I can adjust to this, I'll just use level 40+ ranks of spells.
4. Haven't heard of this one except from you. This will help if true, I agree.
5. The emergency monitor you describe will be more of an encumbrance to me than help, and more likely, I just won't look at it. Just use the main raid frames then, why have 2 things you have to stare at and 1 additional frame to clutter the screen?
I think what will happen is what Maia is planning on doing (Grid), or the whole raid frame will become the monitor (meh) where people who don't need heals fade and you'll have a visual aid on who's the lowest on hitpoints (like a giant static EM). I'll probably end up using Grid, which, ironically, looks like a whack-a-mole setup. Someone's already suggested, that Maia should animate moles popping out of them as the person loses hp.
6. I'll have to try this to see if I like it, if implemented. Hitting 2 or 3 button presses to cast one spell seems like a lot of steps to do one thing.
One thing I won't use are the menus (drop down/radial) they are planning. I hated it in SWG. I just hope it won't be required for me to use them to be competitive.