My comparison wasn't comparing the type of bonus, it was comparing how the bonus is gained and used. Do you gain it naturally through game play and treat the buff as a "this is nice when it happens" kind of buff, or do you actively plan to always have the buff up in order to keep your HPS consistent? Currently having a serendipity stack can happen without trying, or by actively trying to get the buff stacked.

My biggest concern is that Blizzard might want us to have the Chakra buff active in order to compete with other healers. If that happens then we will be forced to actively try to keep the chakra buff up, just as a healer now, who wants to utilize Serendipity as much as possible, has to take time to cast Flash Heal, even if an Empowered Renew or Circle of Healing was right for the job. Say I want to be an amazing AoE Healer, but to do that I have to cast Prayer of Healing three times first. What if Prayer of Healing isn't right for healing that fight? Well then I'm casting Prayer of Healing three times for no real reason, actively making a bad decision for the sake of a buff. That bothers me. One of the commenters said PoH is getting redesigned, which is something I didn't see myself. Perhaps that will fix my concern - but right now PoH is such a situational spell that to cast it 3 times in a row would never be effective, for healing or mana management.

The same sort of applies for Renew - Renew spam isn't really cost effective for mana nor is it fun to play, so I'm wondering if by having a Renew Chakra buff they're going to encourage the continuation of a spam playstyle that wasn't that fun to begin with. Take in mind priests don't really have any HoTs other than Renew, so we don't get to make HoT decisions like druids do. Why would they have a chakra 'stance' designed entirely around one spell when they're saying they want us to have to make decisions? It'd be cool if it's used in situations like... Preparing for XT's tantrum in Ulduar. You shift into renew spam for one small portion of the fight, then shift back into another mode of healing. That'd be cool, right?

It sounds promising when you think about all these complex fights and the different way you could shift to heal them, but look at what happened with Valithria Dreamwalker. This was a fight designed for healers, and what did priests do in that fight? We did the same thing we always do. We weren't the all-star dragon healers, we were healing the raid from add damage. I do that all the time anyway, so it made me feel like the design team, in all their effort to make a cool healer fight, forgot priests existed. So now look at how Chakra works into fights... Are they going to design every fight in Cataclysm with priest healing in mind so that we can have fun shifting between stances in battle and not get stuck just keeping up one same stance for the entire fight? Or are they just going to say "okay, this is a fight that will be healed primarily with HoTs, so druids will rock and priests can just go renew spam stance this fight." I want to believe Blizzard won't go with that latter alternative, but there is so much extra manpower required to design complex and fun fights for every party/raid role, and even more work would be required to tailor to subsections of each of those roles. Blizzard's time and resources aren't infinite. "Bring the player, not the class" is definitely a way to make the game fair to all players, but it's also a brilliant design move to make designing content easier and faster. Instead of trying to appease all the healer subsections, you can just appease the healers. Well if that's the case then what's the difference in playing a priest or a druid?

This is why I'm saying that A LOT of time and care needs to be put into Chakra to make sure it's executed properly, otherwise it's just going to fall short of it's original concept. I want Chakra to make holy priest healing cool, complex, fair and fun, but I'm worried I won't get all four.