Dealing with Serpent (Statues)

 

Ah Monk healing will indeed be an interesting thing. Mending others in combat through use of Statues (similar to totems), direct heals, and an ability to heal through doing damage (akin to Atonement).

Monk healers will be using the same Int Leather that Druids are using right now. Instead of using the Chi of  the dps/tanking monks, healing as a monk will currently go to the basic mana bar augmented with the new Light/Dark Force. While seeing a healing class use other resources would be very nice, when you take a look at it deeper you'll realize a few things about healing that kind of forces it into the old mana bar. While less so now than earlier in the expansion the goal they pushed for healing was for it to be about making the correct choice for the situation. If you use the fast, big heals too much, you'd run into a wall at the end of your mana bar too quickly. Conversely if your raid ignores necessary mechanics and takes too much damage you'll also run into an empty mana bar. This allows things to actually be difficult. If Monks were to use Chi then there would be no end to either one. They could heal forever as long as they had the throughput to live through everything. You can see how this could be very broken in both PvE and PvP settings. Mana as a limiter is a great, albeit boring, factor for the endurance of a raid team and takes into account both the skills of the healer, and the skills of the raid. No one wants the one shot mechanics that are required to counter infinite healer mana that we saw in many places in Wrath.

So how will monks heal? Obviously we have very little to go on. In fact the only skill we have to go on is one of the statues:

So this works on both functions I talked about earlier. Healing through statues, and healing through damage dealt. Statues will be something very important to the strategy used to take on bosses. Do you 2 in melee and one in ranged? Perhaps the other way around? If you were a monk healer now you could just drop 3 on top of each other for Ultraxion healing. You could even go with a kind of triangular setup to maximize healing inside the three, while still covering a large portion of the room, perfect for the kind of "expand and contract" encounters like Baradin Hold's Alizabal. Think something like this:

With the raid normally stacked up in the center. Each side of the triangle being 20 yards and a 20yd radius circles at each point. Set them up that way and you get a literal Venn Diagram of Healing radii.

Considering each circle is 40 yards across, that's a lot of room to cover in such a simple setup.

So if you're a fan of the style of Atonement Disc, mixed with a bit of "totem" use, you'll probably be one to enjoy Monk Healing in Mists. I know I'm certainly going to give it a try.