Letter from the Producer LXII

[Eloah]

Actually no. Whether heals are direct, shields, or HoTs it really doesn't matter how they come so long as the player doesn't get KO'd. All healers can heal, so they are balanced when looking at just that. If the dev team continues to look at healing balance in this regard, the problem is going to continue well into 5.0. The reason why healers are unbalanced is because two of the three are saturated with utility, and the last has none at all except lesser single target versions that don't help the raid much, if at all.

Not exactly. spf1200 is right though, it boils down to HoTs and Shields. If you were to remove those two forms of healing from each healer, and look at what they have left, you'd see that that is basically all WHM had going for it. AST still offers a tone of other things, and while they'd be hit hard SCH still has utility. The main issue is WHM is supposed to be like the healer version of BLM. But where big damage numbers are good, big heals are not, relatively speaking. You are right about the utility, but it's because of the HoTs and Shields that it's more noticeable.

Not to mention that Yoshi-P mentioned in an interview they were only looking at the healers as HoTs and Shields, and they need to stop that. The indication is that they will probably try and focus more on their feel and playstyle more than their kits. Since when you get down to it how many different ways can you dress up a heal, or damage, or a shield...?