Although priests have two healing trees, most raids will bring one who is specced dicipline/holy. That priest will heal discipline for most of the fights (the priest niche) and go holy for the occaisional fight where the discipline spec is not optimal. The holy priest is left out, unless there is not a druid or shaman available to fill that last AOE heal slot. The nature of discipline healing, makes it counterproductive to bring 2 priests of that spec.

You go to the healing forum and see folks saying: only idiots use meters when selecting players for healing slots. Well, I don’t think most raid leads really understand that. They see the holy priest consistantly lagging on the healing meters and decide to bring a druid or a shaman, unless the holy priest is close to god-like in skill. The class with two healing specs, the class that was originally most attractive for people wanting to heal in raids is finding itself limited to one healing slot on raids, while paladins are pretty much guaranteed 2.

I hope Cataclysm will bring some changes to bring holy specced priests back into line with other healers so that, all things being even a holy specced priest has a much chance of being slotted into raids as any of the other healing specs.

The dungeons in Wrath were definitely a challenge to heal (at first!) for a holy paladin b/c of having gotten so comfortable with ‘niche tank healing’ in BC. It made me sit up and go ‘oh I have to actually work now” because in BC it was almost boring to heal on a paladin. I personally enjoy how healing has changed for paladins b/c I don’t feel like I’m stuck doing nothing but tank healing.

I agree with you on the play style. But that’s not the only point is it? Every class should (and does) have its strengths and weaknesses. Some directly affect their dps/hps, other affect the rest of the people in their group, and yet other affect the way they perform in their given role, be it a tank, healer or damage dealer.

Homogenization – ultimately it would lead to every class being pretty much the same. Imagine having spells that do exactly the same, and i really mean the same – numbers, cooldowns, ticks in case of HoTs, but are only named differently – that’s the ultimate homogenization. As far as healers are concerned, how much difference can you really milk out of mere play style before reverting one or the other class back to being primarily a raid or a single target healer? Not that much i would say, and that’s why i don’t think homogenization is a good thing in the long run. Eventually it will kill off the need to have different classes.

(sidenote: Blizz has already walked that path with deathknights – there’s a class that can be a good tank and a good dps, and we were flooded with them for a while, to the point you couldn’t find a warrior tank or a paladin tank if you life depended on it, untill nerfbat started swinging left and right.)

Now, having said that, what i do like is people being able to master every possible role for their class, regardless of class-specific weaknesses – and that’s the real mastery and beauty of the game. Leave the roles as they are and let the players find the best way to fill in – don’t make us jacks of all trades by default, let us work our way there…

The point of having different classes is play style. Take mages and warlocks – both cast spells to DPS, so why not make them one class? Druids and priests heal very differently. I’m not the most experienced healer (or general WoW player for that matter) in the raiding world, but there is a clear difference in the ways classes heal. Should this affect what they heal? No. Some players like tank healing. Some players like raid healing.

Talent trees should be more open and free, allowing every class that heals have the choice whether they specialise in single target healing or AoE/raid. Hopefully Cataclysm will bring that.

Please refrain from making sweeping, wrong generalizations like this.

Druids are excellent at healing spike damage. Stack on full hots and nourish spam. Nourish heals get bigger the more hots there are on the tank, AND it heals big and fast with Nature’s Grace. I’ve chain procced NG nonstop while healing a tank. Any druid worth their salt has 800 haste or more now, so that means faster heals, too.

But I’ll also sometimes out of boredom er I mean to be helpful really, I mean to be helpful I’ll play tick-tac-toe with my grid interface and the the weakened sole debuff, covering clothies or other high dps / crucial members of our DPS team in melee who I think might get a lil aggro happy.

At the end of the day if everyone (or almost everyone) lives, the boss dies. I’m pretty happy. We have awesome shaman/druid raids heals. And Our tank heals is often a mix of Disc priests and Pallys. As disc I’ve had to be on raid heals.

And to be honest I haven’t enjoyed it. Not because I wasn’t decent at it. But because I didn’t feel -optimized- for the role, and knew my healing output was no match for the other group healers.

I think that’s the big part of why people want niches. They want to feel useful. They want to feel like their unique talents and abilities are important. I think you can celebrate diversity all you want.. but no-one wants to be that healer that the raid healer goes .. So what do we do with you? Or hey .. do you mind switching to DPS tonight I think we’re good on heals.

THe more defined your role .. the more your given the ability to shine in that role. Just my opinion.