I know some content creator types were complaining a lot about incidental healing, and we now see that being mentioned when nerfing things like prayer of mending. The problem with this for specs like holy priest or resto druid is that “incidental healing” is part of their class flavor, or was supposed to be. HoTs or PoM don’t see a ton of immediate impact when you press the button, but they’re supposed to be a significant part of your kit.
Nerfing that side of specs and buffing your spammable direct heal just means a lot of your value comes from spamming flash heal or regrowth (something that was already too skewed for druids). I don’t see that as being any more fun or interesting, just generic and boring. Druids should see more value coming from HoTs and holy priests should be able to at least spec into a lot of value coming from PoM, especially as oracle. There are 9 holy priest talents and 5 oracle hero talents that mention prayer of mending, it should have high value when speced into them.
The supposed change of pace for healing in Midnight also should have been an opportunity to see a lot more value coming from HoTs and things like PoM since supposedly we weren’t going to see people’s health bars drop and be immediately re-filled, yet that’s exactly what things still seem to be in M+ testing from the videos I’ve seen. Lowering burst healing would make sense if people’s health isn’t yo-yoing as much anymore, but the damage output of enemies is a huge part of the equation in terms of whether or not that makes sense.
For prayer of mending in particular, it would be a lot more interactive and less “incidental” if you added a more interactive mechanic to it, like you did in season of discovery where direct healing on a PoMed target caused PoM to proc and bounce.