World of Warcraft is, despite appearances, not a game about swords and magic. It’s a game about mind-reading. It’s about being able to predict what your opponent will do next and act to counter it before it even happens, if possible. It’s about knowing that you’re about to eat a Blind because your trinket is down and your partner’s hots are about to expire – given what you know, right now, what do you do next?
A tip that I wish to offer pvp healers: turn off friendly nameplates. The way they float on top of the action encourages you to focus on them instead of the enemy. Get Grid instead. I cannot praise Grid loudly enough – friendly targets that are out of range are dimmed, so you have an at-a-glance overview of everybody in range of your heals, and you can tuck it somewhere out of the way so it doesn’t unnecessarily distract you. It is indescribably important that you watch the enemy for clues to their intent and begin acting before they have all their debuffs in place and can start dishing out insane damage.
I’d also like to say a few words on game balance. World of Warcraft is, for the most part, pretty well-balanced. I have one or two major reservations on that theme, though.
For instance, at the present time, Destruction Warlocks are out of their skulls with power. See, this system of mind-reading only works if the skills involved are weighted properly – a certain attack (or set of attacks) with too much weight break the system. Chaos Bolt’s cooldown doesn’t justify the extreme amount of damage it can do, especially when combined with Conflagrate, which hits absurdly hard for an instant.
See, Warlocks are very squishy at the moment, and tend to die rather quickly. To fix this, the balance team tweaked and twisted and made one rather large mistake: rather than increase the Warlock’s survivability by giving them more passive defense, they shot their outgoing damage through the roof. This breaks the delicate mind-reading game: Warlocks do so much damage, and take so much damage, that the best tactic in the majority of cases is to focus-fire the Warlock. This takes away a lot from the opposing team, because their opening gambit is no longer a variable; they are going to shut down our Warlock, and that gives us an edge because we can now predict the match.
In general, I approve of WotLK’s higher burst damage – killing a high-resilience healer in TBC was a nigh-impossible task. But as usual, the balance team tweaked too far – there are times I’ve been insanely nuked by a destro lock, through hots, before I was even given the opportunity to cast a real heal.