One of the changes in The Burning Crusade that will affect me the most is probably the change they have done to the scaling of +heal. Over the past year or so, I have accumulated quite a bit of +heal gear, and my spec is also centered around getting maximum heal in order to be able to downrank the spells I use.
The gear I normally wear has around +1000 healing and 90 mp5, and this makes me one of the priests that can heal indefinitely using low ranks. http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=38173821, this is bad.
So, this is to change. The bonus for +heal will be reduced significantly when downranking, to the extent where the spells that I commonly use to conserve mana and minimise overheal, heal rank 1/2, are so to speak useless. In general, +heal is not even close to as good as mana regen is. Yet most of the healing gear is stacked up on +heal.
The biggest problem I have though, is that I kind of fail to see the problem. Obviously it is true that well-geared paladins, priests and druids can keep up their healing for ages. However, this is in a perfect environment, where the tanks never take any burst damage. If you play at a high level, instances are just not like that.
According to the reasoning behind changing the way +heal works, I should obviously never have to use consumables such as mana pots, mageblood pots or mana oil. I can heal indefinitely, can't I?
Hahahahahahaha.
My guild has been farming Naxxramas for many weeks now, and we still use consumables for several of the fights. I don't even want to think about how much more I would have to use if I couldn't rank down to conserve mana. And it is not like I just healbot and click one button indefinitely. On my bars, I have every rank of every heal spell, and I choose which one to cast in any given situation.
When instancing in TBC, I noticed how the lower rank spells hardly healed at all. With the overall increased stamina and the high damage output of the mobs, in particular in the level 70 instances, using high ranks is often the only option. Boy does that run you out of mana fast. Inner Focus, mana potions and downranking at least to greater heal rank 1 helped, but I have to admit that I wonder how lesser geared healers would fare in those instances.
I wonder how the raid instances in TBC will be, and I am looking forward to trying them out. Though I hope that Blizzard made the encounters match their nerf of +heal. If not, I fear that at least some healers will get tired of spending fortunes in consumables, and reroll or quit.
The irony of it all is of course that with all the greater heals I am casting, I have found myself switching out Faith for 8-piece Transcendence. So much for working hard to get tier 3...