Wow.. that is very odd.

Umm do you have any mods that do things other than chat commands? Spell casting is any ability use, so to remove that from the mod community is a rather significant change. Hell you can't even do a Rez and announce macro under those rules.

Thats not true.. I spent all of 5 minutes in the UI forum and got the full story.

I never used any of those mods with my priest or paladin. I guess I just am too used to doing it all by hand after years of mmo's. Sure, a mod-user might be a bit more efficient than me, but I really dig being able to say to myself after a rough encounter that I really did a great job (assuming I didn't screw up!).

Tracking all the diseased/poisoned/whatever people in a raid will be mighty tough though, no doubt about it.

I want you on my team after the expansion is released.

Seriously, the people who have not been relying on mods to do the work for them will soon be worth their weight in WoW-gold...and those that have been following the easier path will need to relearn their skills.

As a sign of how much I (we) will need your "manual dexterity", I won't even poke fun at you

Farscry, there is a really big difference between trying to cleanse 5 people, or even 10 people and 40 people.

Trying to figure out if one of your main tanks or main healers in BWL is polymorphed, while your teammates are dropping dead left, right and center, is a bit more difficult to do than cleansing ghoul poison/disease in UD Strat. And also a helluva lot more deadly.

one positive: this ought to put a pretty serious crimp in gold-farming bots.

Having played a (non-raiding, yes, I've already noted that) priest up to the mid-40's in level in WoW and having never used a mod to assist or automate any priestly duties, I have no idea how in the heck that analogy is even remotely accurate.

Say what?

I'm surprised that it's such a big deal that it's an instant unsubscription for you, but I have my own sticking points that other people might think are silly.

It gets quite a bit harder when you jump from 5 player to 20 or 40 player content. Though the ideal would be each group having their own healer, my own experience healing in 20s and being healed in 40s is that most of the healers are playing wack a mole with all the raid members' health bars visible at once, clicking on the broken people.

I played modless on healing up to 60, except for Decursive. Handling 5 people really isn't that hard. You have enough time to look around and see things, even. I used healing runs as relaxation times... just run around and don't think much. (I had a druid, so I had many options on how to play.)

When you're healing 40 people, it changes a lot.... it becomes total focus. And the bars take up a huge amount of your screen... I arrange mine on the left, and I'd guess they take up nearly half of my widescreen interface. And with the absolute focus on the 40 health bars, constantly scanning for people in trouble, it becomes very difficult to ever take your eyes off for even a second.

That's just tedious after awhile. Yes, it takes skill, but you constantly have to look for people in trouble. Mods will still be able to change color, but they won't be able to move things around, so they can't do things like give you a sorted list, or make any kind of decision for you whatsoever. It makes healing into watching cells in a spreadsheet. You're no longer playing the GAME, you're playing the UI. Instead of being immersed in a rich world with dangerous monsters, where things that need doing are presented to you when they need doing, you're watching little white bars. Yay.

Healers already burn out at tremendous speed; there are very few that continue to do it for any length of time. I strongly suspect that this will get enough worse that it's going to be very hard to find healers in many raid groups.

This is also very bad for a lot of people with RSI injuries. This mod 'fix' means that many people who have automated healing onto their keyboards, reducing motion to the minimum possible, will suddenly not be able to play anymore. You could make the argument that people with RSI shouldn't be in WoW at all, but regardless, there's apparently a fairly good population. They'll probably have to find another game, because healing, to my knowledge, was the only function that could be mostly mouseless. For that matter, almost all the mods that reduce clicking and button pressing will have to be redone, so the RSI-prone are going to be at higher risk no matter what class they play. It's just particularly bad with healers.

It's an extraordinarily stupid change. And I am not alone in that opinion.

not really.. I'm not sure you understand how decursive or the various healing mods work. Decursive doesnt change the way the various dispel spells work.. it aids in targetting and intelligently selecting decursing targets.

And honestly... I'm not sure your understanding how raid (20 and 40 man) groups work.. it simply isnt possible for melee to "learn to stay in range of their priest".

Here's how I have been explaining to non-raid healers how removal of Decursive adds tedium to raid healing. Most of the challenge and fun of playing a priest in a raid is making decisions on what size and speed of healing spell you can use, without using too much mana. Dispelling and curing disease, on the other hand, are simply a binary choice. If the person is debuffed, you cast the dispel or cure. Yawn. No real thought about it, no mana management choice in there, just a chore that needs to be done ASAP. Decursive automates that brainless decision & lets you concentrate on the "fun" job of selecting & targeting appropriate heals. Now with Decursive gone, Blizzard will be mandating we spend more of our time on the dull "yes/no" decision of dispelling. I always joke that healing a raid is like playing whack-a-mole in Excel. We don't need any more changes that increase our time in Excel while decreasing our time in Azeroth.

Blizzard took another crack at Decursive a while back, changing Dispel Magic from a flat mana cost (100, I think it was) to a percentage of base mana. It is real easy to blow through your mana pool just dispelling on the bosses with mass debuffs. Until you have better gear, even dispelling all the Soul Burns on a simple Firelord fight will take all the mana a couple priests can muster.

Speaking of cutting down the number of healers, there's another change that will create more pressure on raiding priests to spec Holy, too. In case you don't know, Holy priests hit like a sick kitten, and nobody has ever healed a mob to death, so speccing Holy pretty much means you can't grind gold for raid expenses anymore or kill anyone in PvP. Priests basically learn to hate it, end up rolling a damage-dealing alt, and then switching to the alt. In Burning Crusade, healing talents will now affect gear. Right now, because talents don't affect gear, on the high end (around +1000 healing gear) the difference in healing between a Holy and a Shadow priest is negligible. Throw 13 points into Discipline to get Inner Focus and Meditation, and a Shadow priest is fully capable of healing. With the change to talents/gear, instead of gear equalizing healers regardless of spec, it will create an ever-increasing gap between healing and non-healing specs. This will cause more pressure for priests to spec healbot, which will increase burnout.

I haven't canceled my account, but I have basically switched to my warlock as my main & first toon I will level to 70. After that will be my either my hunter or my shadow priest, and then maybe my healbot priest. My guild's last two AQ20 and ZG attempts have failed to start for lack of willing healers. The priest shortage is bad, and about to get worse.

Nope. That's why games do it for you.

Well, I do understand how they work. Maybe I was over simplifying the whole thing, but I do understand how they work.

I think it's pretty simple, mods like Decursive don't do the work for you but they make the work a whole lot easier to do. There is no doubt that the healng and decursing classes will have to work a whole lot harder. The re-emergence of the 5-10 person "raid" will definitely help but in my opionion if a mod set's priority for you then it's bordering on a cheat, if not a cheat definitely a crutch. The game was meant to be played by people, people who would hopefully make intelligent decisions. While I think that some mods have gone a long way towards making things better, others are bordering on autoplay.

As for the comment about melee and range? I'm not sure how you run your raids but as a MT/OT I ALWAYS know where my healers are and who or what is hitting them. IMO, the most valuable asset a MT has is situational awareness, outdistancing your healers is a cardinal sin. Sure there are times when you get bounced/punted out of range but I don't put all the responsibility on the healers. I've gotten into the habit of turning everything I tank whenever and wherever possible. Certianly this doesn't work for Ony or Rag's and some others but for the tauntables it's a habit. This allows you to almost see the entire raid and in the event of an aggro yanking crit you're already headed in the right direction.