What is mana expenditure? The blue graphic that underlines my character name never changes.
Penalty? You don’t need to dps - when raiding it’s completely unnecessary as a Holy Pally unless you personally feel like doing so. There is no healing penalty from deciding not to DPS. And if you want to DPS, just choose Blessing of Summer instead of Aura of Mercy. That would affect your healing, because you’re giving up free heals - but that’s a choice you would make based on the needs of your group.
The issue IMHO is that there are times when healing is almost not needed, then players are quickly hit with a mechanic that kills them to quick for the healer to respond.
I would like to see more dmg being healed on the low end, but less peak dmg. Basically fill in the valleys by knocking down some of the hills.
I think the problem I’m seeing in this post is thinking there are “nothing we can do scenarios” that exist in keys below maybe like 24s.
Different encounters have different damage profiles, you can’t just throw opposite damage profiles together and try and make some comparison.
The third boss in HOI (I can never remember the name) has a much different damage profile than the last boss in HOI for example.
Dealer and Hakkar were more rot based (unless of course people failed and spreading the debuff on dealers than say the first boss of sanguine depths or second/last boss of halls of Attonement.
Make the game easier. Arbitrary hardships and time wasters are not fun challenges. No one here is gonna be rank 1, stop acting like it. 
Blizz has addressed may of the issues. I gave the example about Sentinel Talondras as it was one I personally experience about 2 to 3 months ago. Before the nerf. Friends and I got stuck on that boss. They key was a +20. Mind you one or two of us was on characters we had just started playing again and was just below 430 item level, think I was 427. But our healer was a Paly and was 437 at the time. We asked our other guildmates that had around 3k IO how did they deal with that. They said you have two options. Reroll Dwarf or be a Paladin. It was never about skill, it was just bad game mechanic design. Which again was fixed. Now its zero problems.
It got nerfed of course, and through the magic of infinite scaling it’s high damage reappears just at a higher key levels.
Kinda.
Go my back to my example, say you have your hero with 30k HP.
Our goblin is hitting 20k hits every 3 seconds.
Healer one is able to heal for 100k, but it takes him 5s to do so.
Healer two is able to heal 9k every second.
Healer 3 is able to heal 20k every three seconds.
Healer one, despite being absurdly overpowered, can’t heal through this goblin. Our hero dies between healing events.
Healer 2 is in a good spot. Lots of ability to heal, but not do much else.
Healer 3 is the best, though, because he can address the damage and have a free second for positioning, damage, or casting a utility spell.
If we change it to 2K every second with a 14k hit ability (still same mob dps)
Healer 1 can go one more damage event.
Healer 2 no change, still has to spend every second healing.
Third healer now has attrition between big events, so he either had to weave in small heals or leave people in danger between his big heals.
It just makes healing worse for everyone.
If, instead, our healing values and damage are cut in half:
Healer one now full heals with considerable overhealing just before the damage is fatal, but he does catch it. He’s now viable.
Healer 2 and 3 still deal with the damage the same way, able to gain ground over time.
TL;DR: we need to nerf mob damage and player healing. Everything unfun about healing is because these two values compared to player HP are too high. This change doesn’t make healing any easier or require less relative throughput.
A lot of top healers have also pointed this same thing out. Healers are doing more healing then they have in the past, yet still feel like they cant.
Healing is completely fine. Please shut up. This vocal minority complaining about how trash they are at the game is getting ridiculous.
Yeah, I’m mostly just parroting things I’ve heard from multiple rank 1 healers. That’s why I can explain it, because I had to go through the same learning curve, imho, because it’s not intuitive. I was a healing main in BfA and early shadowlands, so I remember what it’s like. My HPally alt now just does weekly 20s for vault, but I can definitely feel the difference.
I am setting up a healing spec this week. Plan to craft bracers this week and swap over. I have healed many times in the past on my Shaman and Disc Priest. But since Priest isnt even leveled up yet. Will just stay on my Shaman and roll heal. At least then my team mates will have someone dependable to run keys with and since I also raid lead. One less healer taking the night off to worry about needing to having someone swap to fill that role.
I’ve healed on Pally, Druid, Shaman, and Evoker. Healing is just not fun this season. Or last season, tbh. They need to come up with a way to fix that whatever it is, because we’re heading into a third season soon, and that drought doesn’t show any signs of getting better.
That said, paladins are the least offensive right now. Their rework took the damage spikes into consideration, I feel, so it’s hard to say wether or not this is just a new norm, and other healers are going to get reworks to be more spikey, or if this is just a coincidence and they’ll tone down the spikiness across the board.
I guess, too, they could change nothing and we could see another season of >80% rep for hpal.
I have only really healed this expansion and last so my experience is limited to that. (Some BFA but I don’t count that as I don’t remember it really) I feel like there have always been difficult dungeons in every mix and at least one free dungeon, which is nice. This expansion however, I feel like healing took a sharp turn in difficulty, at least for me.
There are some dungeons that I feel like if I blink or look away I might die or others might. Maybe that is true for dps/tanking in higher keys too so maybe that just comes with the territory. But I feel like I have to work a lot harder to heal people up this expansion.
It probably has a lot to do with the revamp of classes with specs where I actually have a healing system rotation as a holy priest and maintaining my little naaru for ramps is super important. In the past expansion, flash concentration just carried and I didn’t have to really worry about anything else. Now I am worry about word CDs and if I will have enough to pop and build a super naaru for an upcoming damage burst. Outside of my naaru, my heals just feel super tiny.
That plus the healing nerf at the beginning of the expansion…and then again at the start of season 2 just felt like swimming upstream. That might have been a mental trick, I sometimes wonder if ignorance about that nerf might have been better for my brain 
.
And dude, how can you even comment on a thread where people are pointing out issues with pugs when this is what you do? Lol 
have not set foot in an m+ s2 on my priest.
healers dont need affixs to deal with, there is plenty of damage and debuffs going out to deal with as it is , compound that with the expectation of doing dps (i run as disc so not a big deal) and dps classes that tunnel DPS and ignore inrerrupts, mechanics and fire on the ground. no thanks.
and there is a huge gap, which was closed a little bit last week but everyone wants the meta healer
if they want to get healers interested make affix’s so they are optional for them and beneficial, but not a wipe if not done. stand on something on the ground or cc a mob or heal a mob or something for a dps or healing burst or mana regen or reduce a CD by X seconds… something like that would be much more attrctive. these affix’s are trash and need to go, just scale the dungeon based on the level if you cant get affix’ sorted then remove them.
This expansion is great. I play all my alts with zero stress.
I quit my Holy/Disc Priest, the Resto Druid and Holy Pali. Put away that stupid Shami and Evoker. Monk is button mosh dumb.
My son followed suit as well. As did the guildies.
After nearly 20 years of done it all, we have done it all.
Are you listening, Blizzard?
We want premium classes. I would pay $100 a month for a Cleric that is top DPS, HP’s, and can tank a whole raids worth of pulls while still able to type to the welfare plebs how horrible they are…
Or fix your shheeeett.
Healing is fine. It was easy with lots of downtime before and high keys wanted dps during downtime. Bad healers heard this and assumed they needed to in a 2 even though they were either overhealing or doing nothing. Those healers came here to cry even though said dps was not needed at their level. Blizzard then reduced the downtime as I said they would so you wouldn’t feel you’d be forced to dps and now those same people make posts daily like this post
“Healers don’t need affixes” is proof you haven’t set foot in as no group worth a damn leaves it on the healer.
They’re the same ones who forced the devs to reduce their downtime by nerfing healing.