Ghostcrawler made a couple posts yesterday restating what he has said before, that health pools are going to be much larger in Cataclysm than they are today compared to damage coming in.  What this means is that healing is going to be very different in Cataclysm than it is today.  There will be much more focus on mana efficiency and healer coordination than there is now.  I’m looking forward to these changes.  It will give more depth to the healing game and I think it is also the way WoW was originally intended and the way it should be.  Classic WoW and early BC really was a more slower paced game and it means we can make more meaningful decisions as a healer instead of just spamming buttons as quickly as possible.  I think things just got out of hand in Wrath and even at the end of BC with the level of damage going out compared to our health.  Ghostcrawler explains it very well, so I’ll just quote what he said below.

“Health pools will be much larger in Cataclysm and healing will be lower. That should help address some of the overly binary feel of PvP and PvE encounters.

You’ll still be able to kill people as well as be able to heal them. The pace will just be a little slower and both healing and killing should require more than 1-2 buttons.”

“Imagine a boss that takes say 3-4 hits to kill a tank, but it also takes a healer 3-4 heals to top her back off. Now efficiency of a healing spell can be as much of a consideration as direct throughput, since the tank is unlikely to die in your next GCD. Now coordination among healers can be a bigger deal since efficiency will matter. Now maximum health on the tank classes will matter less because the question of how long you can survive without a heal landing is largely academic. Now avoidance on a tank can matter a little more because saving healer mana becomes as important as being table to take the next hit.

As an aside, healers will actually need enough healing tools and enough distinction among them so that they are really choosing the big, expensive heal vs. the small, cheap heal vs. the fast, expensive heal, to name just a few examples.”