Few things to note: 1.) One of the major benefits of being a Healer-type comes from not needing a healer, always being needed in everything, and not having to do anything but staring at Lifebars. People that play these games can do the same thing for and endless number hours, hitting the same hotkey for there heals at the thought of getting one piece of gear.

2.) When you use mods, it becomes to the point where you don’t even have to click your spell, just click the HP Bar, in which you wish to heal. Lets take your class for example when you said you were a Druid-healer (only class in the game that can Nuke, heal, and then tank). You had to cast maybe a trillion regens of all kinds with little to no effort if you properly moded your UI. Otherwise, a few guided hotkeys will fix that right up for you. And if you say that it not true, I know a minimum of 3 players that without playing a druid healer, can top a end game healing meter with equivilent gear and 30 minutes of practice before the raid.

3.) Your saying they need a higher role to play, maybe somthing more enticing? Thats the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard. Heres why, FrostMage, hotkey your frostbolt to your number 2 button. Then go on a instance run, find a boss or hard mob and shoot that button and only that button and you could possibly be the top of the meter and one of the best mages they have ever seen! Same easily goes for FireMages just mix in a few scorches. Onto another class, I have a warlock that I ‘/macro’ entire list of DoT’s to a monster I planned on killing, one button fought my entire battles in a Raid. I still laugh about that until this day. In fact, the entire game is built around that concept. And here it is, you get the most efficient spell you have, and cast that over and over again. Need more examples? Paladin’s 100 Mana Flash heal anyone? Actually, it even works for rogues and warriors, they have a limited amount of things they can do due to rage and energy buildup, so what if they have a hundred moves they could do, gotta use the one that is most efficient. The game tries to trick you up thinking you have more options than that, few cooldowns you have to burn here and there. Chain heal from shamans could easily heal waves and waves of players without even targeting them.

To sum it all up, your wrong, no way is healing too hard, almost nothing in WoW is hard, and I’ve found it so easy to do I literally quit it and found FFXI a lot more fun because there is many things to master like skill chaining, tradeskilling is not a walk in the park, there are things to figure out, the hardest thing in WoW’s tradeskills are finding the next recipe vendor, the quests are NOT collect 20 of this item by killing 80 of said mob. In fact, leveling up is almost the last thing you try to do in FFXI, they based the game around it being more than a grind to 75.

I say you need to give Final Fantasy another review because you got way too annoyed with seeing too many crabs and bunnies, if they changed a few graphics you wouldn’t even have a legit complaint about the game. Lastly, your nothing in wow if your not 70, your literally not even recognized as a player until you GRIND to 70 because its so easy. Hell, FFXI has a storyline that you don’t have to go to Wowiki to read, Beat that with your fancy words.

The only MMO on the horizon that I have any interest in right now is Jumpgate Evolution, specifically because it has a strong twitch element associated with it. If Jump to Lightspeed for Star Wars Galaxies weren’t watered down for the masses and attached to the monstrosity that is Galaxies, I’d likely be playing that. Mostly because my fondness for the old XvT series is only matched by my prowess at the game genre. I used to take people down while flying the TIE Bomber. Fear it.

What I would like to see is a loot system where what drops is the “essence” of an item, as opposed to an actual item. Like for instance, you kill Nightbane. Nightbane drops an “armor” essence and a “weapon” essence. Those can be rolled on by anyone present, and can be converted into anything off of Nightbane’s loot table. Perhaps, those items could require multiple essences to create – a lot more like Badges of Honor, come to think of it. Or Tier Tokens. But the turn-in would have to be linked to the particular boss.

But taking the concept a little further, lets say you’ve killed Nightbane and gotten the three essences you need to make his chestpiece armor. If you manage to get another “X” number of essences, you should be able to enhance that armor by selecting one stat to increase by a small amount. That would allow people who wind up running the same places over and over mild progression, so long as the amount you can improve an item is capped.

Of course, Blizzard will never do this because they believe that their content being linked to the senseless grinding of said content is what provides gaming longevity. But what I hate about is is the random-ness. One guild could clear Kara for two months and get every item they want, where as another guild could spend six months there and get nothing but Void Crystals for their troubles. That is the part that bothers me – the desynchronization of effort to result based on a randomly generated gaming result.

Blizzard tried to address that with Zul Aman by making it 10 man but shot the whole concept in the foot by making it required a level of gear acquired either through long stints of Arena combat or by running the aforementioned 25-headed monsters that are post Kara raids.

More 5 man content with the Sunwell will be appreciated but I can at least hope it might be balanced around at the most Kara level gear or even just-starting-kara level gear.

As far as loot…dear lords would it kill Blizzard to implement a looting system that actually tuned an instance or raid’s loot table to actual drop pieces usable by the people on the run?! Just a simple check when folks are saved to the raid instance, dynamically changing the loot table of that first boss killed and thus setting the tables of the others from there. Hell, technically their loot tables could be empty up to the moment a raid member actually loots it, there’s no reason it couldn’t be dynamically altered.

And it’s not like we won’t be running the same places over and over again, which is the only (and feeble) argument I could see against using such a system. There’s always reps to grind, guildies/friends/alts to gear up, quests to do…there’s enough chores to do in game without running something 26 times to make a set of shoulders drop. I know with you Aden I’m preaching to the choir here.