Prot, Ret, Prot, Ret...

Q u o t e:
All of the multi-target healing for Paladins -- you know, the two new really exicting spells -- were both revamped very, very downwards at roughly the same time. And they had been implemented already.

I'm not entirely sure what this means, and in any case, numbers aren't a very sensible thing to focus on at this point. They are the easiest thing to change.

Healing Hands heals for about 6x more than Healing Stream.

Light of Dawn may be the most powerful AE heal in the game in terms of raw throughput, but it is balanced by not being spammable.

Q u o t e:
It's still hard for me to imagine healing the raid like the other raid healers with these two spells...

Good! We don't want you to heal the raid like the other raid healers. :)

We do want you to be able to heal the raid however.

Q u o t e:
In smaller group encounters both light of dawn and healing hands seem like they will be a lot less effective than a 25 man raid because there will never be enough targets grouped up for them to really do enough healing to justify the cost.

That's a fair concern, but on the other hand, the distances involved in dungeon encounters usually aren't as great as ranged encounters, and because the fights don't last as long, you're not always in danger of running out of mana. Assuming we keep Light of Dawn at a 30 sec cooldown, you'll probably get less than 10 on a dungeon boss, and that's unlikely to kill your mana.

Q u o t e:
The videos I have seen of Light of Dawn make it seem more like a line heal than a cone heal but I assume the spell is still in early stages considering it use the horn effect from ulduar motorbikes as a graphic.

It's a cone and we were pretty generous with the area since we understand that it's not always easy to predict where the outer area of a cone is.

Q u o t e:
being aware of positioning is something very different for all healers. Currently we don't even have to be facing the boss to use judgments of the pure- a sign that developers realize that healers don't care about the way they are facing. I'm not saying it's automatically a bad thing for a healer to worry about positioning but it's a much bigger difference then you give credit for.

I'd say not caring about the direction your'e facing is a bad thing. It's understandable given the evolution of the dungeon or raid encounter, but we don't think healers staring at party frames and never looking into the game world is a good thing for the game. Now granted we can't just slap your hand every time you don't look at the boss, but it's a good long-term goal to get healers to pay more attention to the world and less to the UI.

Q u o t e:
Or maybe it should heal for more if less targets are hit? I don't know, but there seems to be literally no scenario in which this spell is worth using in the 5-mans we have access to so far. It just doesn't heal for enough, and it can't hit the caster. I wonder if there is a chance this will heal for more if it hits fewer than X targets. Or if there is a chance it will include the caster in the heal.

We'll keep an eye on it, but nobody is in heroic dungeons yet (nor even 85s) so the healing challenge isn't too great at the moment.