Blizzard's Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street recently chimed in on an ongoing discussion about health and healing in World of Warcraft in order to shed some light on the changes Blizzard plans for those two aspects of the game come Cataclysm:

"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. You'll still be able to kill people as well as be able to heal them. The pace will just be a little slower and both healing and killing should require more than 1-2 buttons."

Responding a player later on in the discussion who raised concern that these changes could cause tanks to get "2 shot" by bosses, Ghostcrawler said:

You missed the part where I said health pools will be higher. Imagine a boss that takes say 3-4 hits to kill a tank, but it also takes a healer 3-4 heals to top her back off. Now efficiency of a healing spell can be as much of a consideration as direct throughput, since the tank is unlikely to die in your next GCD. Now coordination among healers can be a bigger deal since efficiency will matter. Now maximum health on the tank classes will matter less because the question of how long you can survive without a heal landing is largely academic. Now avoidance on a tank can matter a little more because saving healer mana becomes as important as being table to take the next hit.

As an aside, healers will actually need enough healing tools and enough distinction among them so that they are really choosing the big, expensive heal vs. the small, cheap heal vs. the fast, expensive heal, to name just a few examples.

For more information on the Cataclysm expansion, check out the expansion site here.

What do you think about the changes coming to health and healing in Cataclysm? Let us know in the comments below!