The Binary Healer

GhostCrawler: "Health pools will be much larger in Cataclysm and healing will be lower. That should help address some of the overly binary feel of PvP and PvE encounters."

There is a huge issue with healing in WotLK as it stands now... and first impressions of Ice Crown Citadel don't change that much. The problem is "binary healing." What this means is that durring a successful encounter (I.E. we win), a tank's health bar is either 100% full, or slightly over 0% full. There is rarely any inbetween. The tank is either alive, or almost dead.

So, how is that a bad thing? As it stands now, this is how a raid encounter unfolds for the tank and its healer:

Start encounter -- Health: 100%
Boss hits tank -- Health: 10%
Spam largest heal -- Health: 100%
Boss hits tank -- Health: 10%
Spam largest heal -- Health: 100%
Boss hits tank -- Health: 10%
Spam largest heal -- Health: 100%
Boss hits tank -- Health: 10%
... ... ...

Fun, right? You can quickly get the idea of what is meant by binary healing. If the healer doesn't get the big heal off quick enough, the tank is dead, and we start all over again. Additionally, as a tank healer, there's little purpose to having anything on your action bar, much less other spells, than your one large tank heal.

Coming down the road, the things we should start seeing are:

1) Larger health pools for tanks
2) Bosses landing hits on tanks more often
3) Boss hits landing on the tank do less damage
4) Smaller heals being used
5) Faster heals being used


Currently, a resto shaman dedicated to tank healing is (or should be) stacking Spell Power, Crit, and Intellect. Meanwhile, a raid healer is (or should be) stacking Haste, Spell Power, and Intellect. This discontinuity in stats for the same class and spec is something that few others have to deal with. Gearing for tank healing will hurt your raid healing, while gearing for raid healing will hurt your tank healing. The changes mentioned above are going to help bring the two closer together. Shamans on tank duty should be able to move away from the slow, large heals, to a better mixture of the heals we've got at our disposal.