Quote:Lifebloom takes seven seconds for the payload to hit. Possibly you were thinking of Regrowth, which has a fairly abominable mana efficiency ratio. Or maybe Nourish, which seems aimed at being most efficient when you already have HoTs ticking on the target.
Flash of Light has a very small healing payload. Holy Light is mana-inefficient for paladins. Holy Shock is likely to become the new midrange heal for paladins, but will be on a 6-second cooldown. (reduced from 15 seconds in live)
My biggest concern is how to handle the '10-minute-long tank dies in 1.5 seconds' fights though. I consider myself reasonably good at cancel-healing but if I miss a beat, the tank dies. I consider that unacceptable stress. No one else wipes the raid (except in specific fights) if they don't have sub-second response time.
I play a resto druid, I know the difference between lifebloom and regrowth. (The abominable efficency of regrowth is no longer an issue, it was fixed several patches ago to be the 2nd most efficent heal, after lifebloom.) What I was saying was that if you need a small heal, there are small heals available to every class, but at some kind of cost. If you need a small heal, but in an emergency, then yes, you lose by not being able to also save on mana efficiency. You either have to accept the wasteage of dropping the big heal, the risk of waiting for a little more damage to come in, or the downside of the smaller heal spell.
Introducing such issues into healing seems to make it a harder, more interesting game. Your examples about the paladin healing seem to be to be examples about why it's interesting to have different heals, rather than different ranks of the same heal. Otherwise, your toolbox is too big to require interesting choices. If the answer to almost every healing question is just a different rank of the same spell, then you have too much flexibility, IMO.
-Jester