I've thought long and hard about this. Why don't I like the new mana changes and how can I express myself to the developers in a way that makes sense and provides constructive feedback? I think I've finally come to a way to explain my feelings on this.

When I play any video game I want to be engaged. I want to participate and feel like my actions are affecting the outcome. I don't want to play a game situation where I sit back and wait, pausing for 2-5 seconds at a time before i take an action. This is the crux of the problem I have with the new mana system. It encourages laid back behaviour. I think for me this will cause a disengagement from the game itself. If I cast and then have to wait for a certain amount of time before I make the decision to cast again it causes me to not feel engaged with the combat. I find this form of gameplay very boring and usually I avoid games like that.

I can appreciate the concern that Blizz has in terms of ecounter design. But to shift the focus like this to healing design presents its own major flaws. Do I like to lose someone in the span of a GCD, no. However I feel very engaged with the current design, I'm always doing something and feel like I'm part of the team and my actions matter. In the new design I worry that the focus may shift too much away from that.

So basically what I'm saying here is Blizzard please watch that you don't create a situation where your healers are feeling disengaged from the combat situations. Don't let my concerns become reality.

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Q u o t e:
I don't want to play a game situation where I sit back and wait, pausing for 2-5 seconds at a time before i take an action.

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We don't want that either, and in the absence of a five second rule, it won't help you that much anyway. Instead, we want you to choose whether you use your GCD on a moderate heal, a huge heal or a fast heal. Today almost every GCD is spent on the fast heal because someone will die if you don't do that and your mana regeneration supports that play style.

Now, we might slow combat down a little to the point at which you have enough time to make a decision about which heal to cast, but that can probably be on the order of 0.5 to 1.0 sec and not 2-5 sec.

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Q u o t e:
Right, so we don't spend that 2-5 seconds waiting to start to cast, we spend it watching a slow efficient cast bar waiting to decide to cancel the cast if it's not needed. Fantastic!

Waiting is waiting, whether it's between casts or for the cast. At least when we wait between casts we can be mobile.

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So you're arguing that anything with a reasonably long cast bar is either not fun or useless?

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Q u o t e:
Cataclysm is basically just adding downranking back in. Moderate heal, Huge heal, Fast heal. Exactly the same model that many used when downranking was available. Quite funny, really. They removed downranking for whatever reason, and now it's just being added back in but with different spell names for the different ranks.

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That's exactly what we're doing. If you've read many of my posts though, you'd know that whatever reason =

1) Downranking is the kind of thing you'd only learn from reading forums or having someone teach you. It's very non-intuitive.

2) Downranking allowed players to game the coefficients on lower ranked spells. Not only were they saving mana for smaller heals, but the heals actually weren't much smaller because the coefficient mattered more with a certain level of +healing than the flat points.