I know what you mean. I was healing in HoR the other day and on one of the bosses, he gives a debuff that cuts hp by 50%, so my 40k tank dropped to 20 and then took a 10k hit following that. I could start spam heals fast enough it freaked me so much. A 30k loss in a simple 5man heroic? Geez

HoR seems like one of the worst for Healers. Healing through the Lich King chasing you is not too bad, but the mid two bosses with healers, casters, and long range DPS makes every moment of the spirits fight an "Oh $hit" moment for me.

I recall when Blizz removed downranking everyone was wondering what was going to happen to healing to compensate. Downranking was one of the major components in a healer's arsenal, and effective use of downranked spells could make a good healer an incredible healer. First mana regen went too high, then had been iteratively cranked lower while tank avoidance got higher and higher... until we came to where we are now, mana is not quite as infinite at lower levels, but once you get past intro raids it is, and tanks aren't quite invulnerable at lower levels, but once they get past intro raids their avoidance becomes silly. In general it seems Blizz has been having a lot of trouble scaling given this new paradigm. The only thing that seems to make sense is to stretch out the space. Keep the boss DPS the same, but increase tank health and decrease avoidance while also increasing raid damage and cranking down regen a bit more. Granted Blizz did shake things up a lot all at once though; downranking removal, the Pally redesign, then the addition of DKs really muddied the healing/tanking waters.

I do agree this will likely make healing more interesting, although one thing that Blizz always seem very, very reluctant to do is to change old things. The Pally redesign was unprecedented, and the Cataclysm remake of Kalimdor is also quite surprising. Many healing specs have spells that, frankly, are terrible. I hope that in these bits of willingness to go back and re-engineer older content and class features will extend to a review of healing over the multiple healing specs (yes, not healing classes, healing specs), and will result in some rebalancing of skills and spells to fit the new healing paradigm they're putting together for Cataclysm. If the older mostly useless spells were re-engineered to be downranked versions of full-power ones (like Heal could be a downranked Greater Heal), it would be a way of bringing back what many specs lost when downranking was removed; choice of speed vs mana vs healing amount and type, which seems to be one of Blizz's stated goals for the reworking of healing.