The Daily Blues

The Spirit Beasts were added as a way to capture that old feeling of having to hunt (which really means be very patient and very lucky) to get rare spawn pets so that you'd feel awesome and be able to show them off. Making those creatures actually more powerful than other pets goes completely counter to that design. If the frustratingly rare spawn is needed for highest possible dps, there would be a lot of exasperated hunters out there, and I think they'd be totally justified.

Spirit Beasts are the hunter equivalent of the Time Lost Protodrake. They are there for bragging rights, not max dps.

We're not sure yet what we're going to do for hunter pets in the future. I fear that even if the dps gain was marginal that hunters would still go for the highest dps pets, so really there only exists an illusion of choice. We could literally make all of the pet families do the exact dps and have rather watered down special abilities (because otherwise one of them might grant a 1 or 2% dps benefit and that would end up being the pet again).

In other words, I can see a design where pet choice is purely cosmetic and pet stats are identical or I can see a design where pet choice matters, in which case you don't really have that many to choose from on content that matters.

Ideas that would make healing more fun are good things to discuss in this forum, particularly with an eye towards Cataclysm.

The idea to let healers dps a little is a controversial one though. Some healers just have no interest in it, so while it might make healing a lot more fun for you, it risks making healing a lot less fun for them. I would not approach that idea as an obviously intuitive one that all healers will rally around, because I suspect that's just not the case. :(

I like healing in general, but if I had 5-10 talent points to spend that would convert damage to healing that would be an interesting choice in my tree. I can see where a healer doing dps could lend to a lot of issues concerning gearing etc, but that is for another discussion.

I could see that if the tree was structured in such a way that you had to give up a little bit of healing for that dps (and to be fair, talents like Searing Light already exist), such that it was the kind of thing you might do while soloing or running easy content (like Dungeon Finder when overgeared). In other words, I wouldn't want us to do it in such a way that healers were then balanced around doing damage — like we calculated healer damage when we come up with boss berserk timers. Then it goes from a playstyle choice to being the only way to play.

There is literally nothing Blizzard can do to address this issue in any significant way. That isn't to say that they can't improve things for those of us who do enjoy healing mind you, only that no revamp to the game's healing system will bring in additional healers.

We don't need to bring a lot more players to healing. Dungeons, raids and Arena teams generally seem to find what they need, and I'd argue some players are attracted to healing specifically because they know it makes them a treasured commodity. What we do need is to make healing fun for players who like healing. We don't want to lose the healers we have.

Yes, there appears to be a bug with the dps warrior 4 piece bonus. It should be easy to fix.

We're keeping a close eye on the discussions, feedback and in-game information for this. We don't have any current plans to make changes, and it seems a bit soon to start considering them, but we are paying attention to constructive discussion and feedback on this change.

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