…And remove it from existing content.

Unless Blizzard is going to make another bunch of content unplayable as designed (at player and gear level) changing only new content and player abilities will make the game more speed leveling, and end game raiding only.

I am leveling a hunter and trying to run every instance at level, many of them I have never seen before. I am having a great time, and hope that Blizzard won’t make impractical.

***

I see claims that everything will work out fine: I am sure the number of times it hasn’t worked out fine can be recited by anyone who has been playing a long time. If blizzard is changing enough that we are basically back at square one in terms of balance etc. then either we will have a lot of subsequent changes as things are fixed, or we need to believe that Blizzard has newly acquired leet balancing skills. If you see things which you, in a broad overview, think aren’t going to work, or aren’t going to be fun, now is the time to make that known. Don’t however get bogged down with details of exact meshing of changes with how things currently work. You also might keep your eye out for things which make the inevitable balancing harder (or easier).

Thank You Kindly.

From a lore point of view, you can actually make a pretty good case that all 4 healing classes should be able to dispel everything, so lore based arguments don’t actually help much in this case. As it is, they seem to have made the decision that they wanted to keep Purge (shaman) and Dispel Magic/Mass Dispel (priest) and gone from there in assigning the cleansing capabilities. Given some of their other comments, I wouldn’t be surprised if Purge gets the Dispel Magic treatment and is allowed to target both friendly or enemy targets (dispelling debuffs and buffs respectively).

One fairly significant philosophy change they have mentioned (and GC has acknowledged as a change in design philosophy) for Cataclysm is that they’re moving away from healing niches (similar to the way they moved away from tanking niches in Wrath). So it is healers that can expect to see the most normalisation relative to Wrath.

As far as raid buffs go, they’re continuing the trend they started in Wrath, such that the aggregate effect of multiple raid buffs will still lead to significantly greater synergy in 25 man raids than occurs in 10-man raids or 5-man dungeons, but missing any single such buff (such as the major armour debuff provided by Sunder Armour and its equivalents) is less crippling than it is now. In Wrath, they could let the relative uniqueness of the Spirit buffs slide, because they simply didn’t make all that much difference. They were nice to have, but not crippling if missing. For the specific case of regen in Cataclysm, they’re going to have a tough enough time balancing regen such that mana is something healers have to care about without making it too punishing, that I can understand them not wanting to have to deal with wildly varying regen levels based on group composition.

And on the Fear front: what made Fear breaks far less essential was actually the change they made to the underlying interaction between Fear and aggro. These days, the boss continues to follow its aggro table, even if the current aggro target is feared and other raid members are not. Prior to Wrath, it didn’t work that way, to the extent that taking fear resist talents in PvE healer specs was a bad idea, since a resisted fear would lead to a dead healer.

Time will tell where the pieces settle, but you can be certain The Powers That Be are up to something.
.-= Tesh´s last blog ..Wading Into Live =-.

All I can think of right now!

On the decursing/dispelling, they want to reinforce healers making decisions on what spell they cast. Basically they are going to make the healers think “Whats better use of mana/time, removing the debuff or just healing through it”. I’d almost compare it to PvP fighting a lock with UA, is it worth having to heal through it (and the other dots) or do you take the silence/burst dmg which will allow your other healers to finish stripping the dots and heal you up? In these situations dispells are a proactive heal.

As other ppl mentioned they stated that most raid debuffs will be magic and all healers can remove magic, so I expect the analogy you used to Bezerk and Fear will be a really good one, Shammies who are freaking out over not being able to remove Poisons and Diseases are going to find that they probably will never need to anyway.