[WoW] The Redonkulous Healing Environment at Level 90

I just ran a (new) Heroic Siege of Orgrimmar raid with my guild this evening (11 of us), and I have to say, the healing environment still feels a lot like 5.4 did. Actually, Hamlet of ye olde Elitist Jerks put it better than I: right now healing is more 5.4ish than even 5.4 was. Infinite mana, spamming AoE heals, nothing stopping you as a healer but your raw throughput. 

So, notwithstanding everything that's been said about 6.0 healing--right at this moment, healing is even more 5.0-y than it was in 5.0.
— Jay (@HamletEJ) October 16, 2014

 
My Holy Paladin has no Spirit outside a couple gems and an enchant, and yet only on a single fight (Malkorok) did I ever actually run OOM. And that was because I was spamming Holy Shock-Holy Radiance-Holy Radiance-Light of Dawn (Eternal Flame-spec'd no less) effectively non-stop the entire combat.

But I still couldn't keep up with our Disc priest, who was nearly only casting Holy Nova and Power Word: Shield pretty well over and over and over again. And absorbs are as powerful as ever, making up more than 70% of our Disc priest's healing and 40% of my (Holy paladin) healing done.

Iron Juggernaut Discipline Priest Spell Usage

But as someone who's run a fair number of dungeons on the Beta, right now is not indicative whatsoever of what you'll see at level 100. Seriously, not even close.

Actually, if you wanted to see something far closer to what Beta was like, you would have had to have run the leveling dungeons between 85 - 90. I've been duo-ing them with my boyfriend (him as Holy Paladin, myself as Bear Tank), and holy crap they were amazing! But you pretty much needed to be at Challenge Mode levels of competence to not be a complete pancake, which is, frankly, silly for leveling dungeons. At least, they were as of October 14th. the issue was worse at below level 40, when most tanks don't even have Active Mitigation yet. 

.@Aelobin @WatcherDev Leveling being harder was not intended; we're working on a fix right now, hope to have the issue resolved soon.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) October 15, 2014

Sadly/Happily, they've been fixed. Not quite the cakewalk it used to be, but definitely not Challenge Mode hard anymore. Still, the leveling dungeons provide a preview that cleaves closer to the 100 experience than content at 90 does now.

So, anyways, healing right now is about as hard/easy as it was before the patch in a raid environment, and totally not indicative of what we'll see come level 100, for better or worse.
#WoW, #Healing