The "healer" problem

Pretty much - when I play healer, I really don't get to look at anything else or savor the epic battle taking place in front of me when mashing frantically on the heal buttons.

The UI is not friendly to healers (though to Blizz's credit, it's very user-friendly the rest of the time), hell, the gameplay isn't friendly to healers either.

1. Killing and damage get rewarded in battlegrounds, not healing - yes there's that bullshit about being in a particular group and getting to 'share', but when not in BGs and doing normal ad-hoc pvp, I don't get jack shit for healing others running around randomly.
2. Healers usually have to stay in back - meaning that if they do happen to help in a BG or pickup group, they won't get access to the drops (the rogues/warriors/anyone else in front) loot the corpses before a healer can even get close.
3. There's not a lot of variety in gameplay - whee, mash button, mash button. If I move around, I can't heal as effectively. A melee or ranged type dancing around, using different attacks, etc. = more interactive and immersive than healing gameplay.

So yeah, folks will go, "That's the class you picked, deal with it." Oh, I have, but it'd be more fun if I could actually look at the world and see what's going on more readily, and it'd be more fun if I could move around and had more variety in my healing-type gameplay. Especially a company like Blizzard - they made the clicky-clicky of Diablo fun, why not healing?

Seems like your guild priest doesn't use the dead useful CT_raid_assist emergency monitor. It's a great tool for healing but it would take pretty much all of the remaining screen real estate.

For healers, WoW was actually a step backwards. True, we never did signifcantly more than staring a health bars but the healing and combat mechanics in WoW, which require you to constantly keep track and mash the flash heal button, make the job even more exhausting and tedious than ever before.

Besides, WoW's UI is horrible and pathetic. It's designed to make it easy for MMORPG newbies but even those will soon outgrow the limitations of WoW's unmodified UI. When I first started playing WoW I was pissed off by the fact that I couldn't even place my hotkey bar where I wanted. Some great UI... without Mods, the game would be a PITA.

(sorry Abalieno, lost my login info)

First thing we do, we kill all the priests. (and clerics and doctors and the entire Main Healer class)

I know this is blasphemy, but get rid of the Main Healer ideal. Every class has potions or healing widgets or trinkets of healability, and tune the encounters to that. Problem solved.

Of course there are going to be crazy user interface modifactions for Priests in World of Warcraft, just look at all the micromanagement that the player of the Priest must endure to be effective.

As I look rather quickly over the WoW's Priest's spells I find a total of two heals that affect an area, both of which seem to be much less effiecient than the single target heals. How much micromanagement any role has to play with is a matter of design. Blame Blizzard!

In Warcraft III, some spells had an autocast toggle. If the player turned a spell on autocast it would automatically buff entities which did not already have that buff or debuff. Last time I played WoW no Preistly spells I obtained could be set to autocast.

Examples...
Spell 1 (God's Whatever)
Target a circular area with a diameter of some feet. Healing available over some period of time is fixed. Friendly entity with greatest relative life deficiency recieves the bulk of the healing available. Spell continues to drain mana and heal as long as healer does not do some other action. Spell could have a minimum healing time to prevent healer breaking too soon.

Spell 2 (Hot Potatoe Devine Shield)
Targeted buff cast on friendly, absorbs some amount of damage, then automatically jumps to a nearby injured friendly. Gotta go foozleodials!

I had an idea that would turn the healing mechanics somewhat more fun (I play a 60 priest much like the picture shows).

Anyone who played Ragnarok Online in the past agrees that priest and wizard were the most fun and hard classes to play. But ragnarok was 2d so it's kind of hard to copy the system.

But my idea is, a new 31 points holy talent. This talent would take lots of mana to cast (to avoid the abuse from pvp) and make you unable to use any ofensive spells (smite included). I'd be a 30 minutes or 1 hour buff to the player that whould make all heals instant but only healing two thirds of what casting heals would. These heals would all be affected by the cooldown instead of a cast time (maybe even making the global cooldown in flasheal a bit higher than the cast time, same with gheal (making it some kind of last resort heal)).

With this change something new would be introduced into the interface. Health bars that actually work (over the head of the players) instead of the crappy version you get when you press "v" that only shows npcs health. Also the hp lost would be shown over the player's head so you'd knew who was getting hit.

Like this you'd be selecting the player and casting the heal. Because it is harder to select a group of pixels jumping around the screen I proposed the instant heal thing, to make it easyer to deliver a much needed heal.

In the end you could still heal with the HP bars on screen, you could play without the buff and still be good, but there would be a much more fun alternative :/

Requiring healing in MMO's, in general, is one of the stupidest and most handicapping things in the genre. It's a role that essentially has more work than other classes, for less fun, yet gets little to nothing in the way of rewards. And people wonder why nobody plays healers?

And naturally, when healing's present, that means it's eventually required, which means that the healer-hybrid classes (Druid, Paladin, Shaman in WoW, for instance) are invariably pigeonholed into doing nothing but, as anybody with any lick of sense avoided taking a healing caster. It's probably also why Blizzard seems so dead-set against Paladins having any sort of capability to tank or DPS; it's the 'shut up and heal me' mindset, taken to the developer level.

Holy Gods!

This picture is almost enough to make me quit WoW...and glad I never intend to join the raiding game (it helps that so many players in WoW are unfriendly, often unreliable loot-obsessed numpties, which convinced me while my main was still in its forties never to get involved in raids or other situations where I have to interact with, or depend on, them. Bleh. Hail to the 5-man, max 10-man group of dependable and likeable friends!).

By the way, have you tried Call of Cthulhu: The Dark Corners of the Earth? It is a console RPG that has, by and large, done away with the UI. There are character and inventory screens, for sure, but 99% of the gameplay is UI-less, with NOTHING on-screen but the world.
More interesting, it works! It really is an excellent game.

No, I don't think removing it would be the solution, some actually enjoy (even if it is on from a lore point of view) the cleric role.

And for end game content the point is every class is needed, not only healers or warriors. What should be changed is the necessity for other classes, not nerfed the role of healers...

Always a set ahead.