Healing the Day After Tomorrow

World of Warcraft patch 3.3 is expected to hit the day after tomorrow (or tomorrow if you live on the other side of the Atlantic ocean), bringing with it the brand-spanking new Icecrown Citadel raid instance to entertain us for months and months to come. If you are raiding as a healer you will have noticed that healing is quite broken at the moment - even Blizzard has admitted that there are issues.
Some issues will be addressed in the patch, others will have to wait for cataclysm.

Healer Burnout

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while, yet other stuff always got in the way. Casual Raid Leader Starman wrote a post a while ago on why wrath is burning out healers and why healing in wrath isn't fun. His main reason: Fights are too hard for healers. Seriously.
Now, I just had a post on difficulty and I won't go back into discussing whether boss encounters in Wrath of the Lich King are harder or easier to heal than they were before. Instead, let's have a look on why healers really burn out and whether that happens more often in Wrath than before.

Friday Filler

My Friday posts (not even to speak of weekend posts) usually get read by a very small minority only - so you won't get a full post today. I have a question for all you healers though - and a blog for everyone to read if they do need more stuff to read on the weekend.

If you are or ever have been a healer you likely have been bored with that role at some point in time or another. Please post a quick comment on why that was. Well written comments have a good chance to land in a post next week.

And here's your weekend reading: Keen and Graev's Gaming Blog. I stumbled upon this yesterday and it seems like a good collections of musing on MMO game design. Enjoy and have a nice weekend. See you all on Monday.

Sniping and Overhealing

Sydera has an excellent post over at World of Matticus about healing meters and how to read them.
I very much agree with most of what's said there, except for her views on heal sniping. The comments also bring up the topic of overhealing which I'll address below.

Healing Vezax as Enhancement

UPDATE: there are reports that this strategy doesn't work very well any more. I have not tested this in 3.2, but be advised that it may not be a good idea these days. It was fun while it lasted.

UPDATE 2:
It is confirmed, enhancement healing is dead.

Enhancement shamans receive a healing debuff similar to the ones Retribution paladins have had since the encounter’s initial implementation

- Crygil

I mostly play as a restoration shaman in World of Warcraft. In that role I recently found an interesting alternative way of healing the General Vezax encounter in Ulduar on hard mode.