Blue Post: Healing and Cataclysm

Healers are not going to be punished. Keep in mind that what we want is more proactive healing that involves more than spamming a couple of main heals or keys. Also, health pools are being increased in Cataclysm. The idea being that while there will be burst type damage, you’ll be able to adjust and heal accordingly rather than spamming heals to catch the burst as it happens.

That said, as always, we’ll be keeping an eye out for actual test data to see how it all plays out.

Ghostcrawler expanded upon this a bit more over the Warcraft forum

Also, here are the proposed dispel capabilities to all healing classes for the next expansion (or patch?!):

• Druids will be able to dispel defensive magic, curses, and poison.
• Paladins will be able to dispel defensive magic, diseases, and poison.
• Priests will be able to dispel defensive magic, offensive magic, and disease.
• Shaman will be able to dispel defensive magic, offensive magic, and curses.

AND TO TOP THAT so-called trade-offs will be introduced to make dispel less trivial for healers.

• Protection and Retribution paladins will lose their current ability to dispel magic.
• All shaman will lose dispel disease and dispel poison in exchange for Restoration gaining dispel magic.
• Restoration shaman, Restoration druids, and Holy paladins will need to talent into their defensive magic dispels.
• Shadow priests won’t be able to remove disease in Shadowform.
• Mage, hunter, and warlock will retain their current dispel mechanics.
• Body and Soul remains the same, and basically any dispel mechanic not mentioned above is currently planned to remain as it is.
• When possible, we’d like to combine dispels into a single action. For example, the druid ability to dispel curses and poisons might be a single spell with a Restoration talent that also allows it to dispel magic. This part of the design isn’t finalized, however.

All these additional changes will make things interesting indeed. According to the Blue Post:

Each healing class will be getting three out of the five types of dispels, with one of these always being a defensive dispel magic. (The design will ensure) that finding a healer with the ability to remove magic isn’t restrictive in building teams for Arenas or rated Battlegrounds. It also allows the encounter designers to assume, when designing dungeon or raid fights, that every group can dispel magic.