In a new developer blog post at the World of Warcraft community site, 'Ghostcrawler' talks about the ostensible 'nerfing' of healers that some expect to be coming down the road when Cataclysm debuts on December 7th. Ghostcrawler goes through the reason behind the more limited amount of mana regeneration that healers will encounter in Cataclysm and talks a good game about how 'resource management' makes players better at their crafts.
To be clear, we don’t want healers to constantly run out of mana. We want them to run out of mana when they don’t play well. And we don’t want them to always fail. But we do want them to feel good when they are challenged, and overcome those challenges to succeed. When someone is wounded, we want healers to consider whether to use a slow, efficient heal (because they aren’t in immediate threat of dying) or a fast, expensive heal (because they are). That’s called triage, and it was notably missing from the Lich King healing environment. We think triage will make healing more fun. We’re making this change not to make healers sad by nerfing them, but to make healers happy by making the game more fun for them.
Read more here.
