Thinking about Healing

One of the lessons that has come to me as I have begun to actually begin healing conscientiously is one that is so obvious that even when it is talked about it bears little weight...because its so damn simple on paper:

Each Heal has a certain amount of health loss for which it is good for.

For example, a heal that gives back 100 points of health is overkill (or overheal) for a player with a only 10 points of damage.  This is such a simply and logical idea that I'm not sure it sunk in with me until I began to actively work at being a more efficient healer and I'm not certain how well my healing guild mates understand the topic in practice even though I'm sure they would all recognize its value in conversation.

What got me was trying to come up with a way to tell what size heal to use on players of varying health pools as my raid frames are normalized to size. Half a bar for a tank is bit larger of a health loss than for a mage. I finally settled on showing health deficit within the frame and have come to understand in general how much my various spells hit for.



For WoD however I have a bit of a different idea how would like to begin to think about healing and I may need to find a raid frame that can accommodate me.
With the concept of players remaining below max health for a longer period of time I have identified four stages of health:
Stable - players who do not require any attention to remain alive over the course of a damage cycle
Urgent - players who need small efficient healing to remain alive over the damage cycle
Critical - players who need large/fast healing in order to survive the damage cycle
Expectant - players who will die without a major personal or raid CD during the cycle

A damage cycle is a predictable period of incoming damage that includes background damage, avoidable sources, and the timed events which signal the cycle. Malkorok is a good example of cycles within cycles. Each smash includes puddles to soak, players going airborne, the smash itself, this repeats three times then a breath, this larger cycle itself repeats twice before p2.

I would love to be able to set my frames to change color based on the category of damage they are in, display the current health deficit, display current absorb amount, and display predicted incoming heal.
Plus of course the normal debuff and ability tracking.
I'm actually not certain how useful it is to track names so long as role is tracked. Healing is healing and you could have name appear on mouseover maybe? I don't know.

The point here is to build these distinctions based on the toolkit available with color coding to help alert you to the type of healing needed.
Until I can get a firmer grasp on what health pools and healing will look at though this remains something in the back of my head.

I do think that if blizz pulls off the new model crit will gain greater value than it currently has though with multistrike and all the other tertiary stats perhaps it will just blend into the background along with HoTs.

Again until the new model makes an appearance it will be hard to tell.