Having done algalon recently, I must say, this does fill me with a sense of dread. It won’t be easy…

“Limited learning mistakes” – For hardcore guilds, it’s simply not unreasonable to expect people to get things right their first try. We tell all of our new recruits in the interview: “We don’t care that you’ve never seen heroic Halion before. We still expect you to not get hit by cutters.” Some players simply aren’t cut out for hardcore raiding in that they need to make a mistake in order to see what they could have done better.

“You’re expected to raid hard when it counts” – One of my officers calls it ‘rapid fire mode’ where you’re getting only a minute or two to run back and rebuff before going. When we were learning heroic Lich King, I would start the encounter about ~20 seconds after I got there. Heroic Halion’s runback was shorter, so we could even get moving faster. Some people feel like you’re just “throwing bodies at the boss,” but we mark every performance error, even when we’re pulling fast and hard.
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That being said, having two instant casts for emergencies in addition to LHW falling into this niche makes me feel like we have the tools to respond reactively, but I don’t really feel any tools are all that different. These are in addition to NS for a total of 3 ways to emergency heal – while at the same time, moving to a slower paced more strategic healing approach to encounters. Are we going to have too many tools to fill a niche that’s not going to exist?

This makes me feel like when I was playing my level 15 mage – where I could scast fireball, frost bolt, or arcane missle. At that level, each fundamentally does the same thing with marginal differences.

Not to be resistant to change, but I was very comfortable with the resto shaman healing toolset (save adding a defensive CD). As healing in beta stands now, at least until I am more comfortable with all these extra buttons to hit, I feel like I’ll macro bind my riptide and UL together so that when riptide is on CD and I need an instant cast heal, i’ll cast UL. I seem to want to RT more often than it is off CD. Next, I’ll replace my LHW with HW and try to find a useful place for LHW (maybe even a third option in the same macro if both RT and UL are on CD).

The main differences are that in the non-raid damage periods I’m doing little or no healing at all. Usually letting my mana regen so I don’t need an innervate. I will hit the tank with a spot heal now and again usually keeping RT on the tanks, but for the most part, during transition for instance, I’m just standing there getting mana and throwing chain once or twice for infest. Our healing make up is usually 2 Shammies, 1 Pally, 1 Disc and 1 Drood.

Typically my healing for LK consists of CH when needed and HW for Soulreaper and Harvest Soul (Obviously the occasional RT on ranged).