On the denial that mana will matter

From when Blizzard first announced that their intention for the Cataclysm healing design was to make mana management matter again and make using the right heal at the right time more important than keeping raid members topped of, I knew the playerbase would resist it. I had a feeling that players would be hesitant to give up their limitless mana pool, in spite of the downsides that healing design has brought on the community. There's something about human nature that just isn't willing to give up the luxuries one has already obtained, even if the cost of those luxuries makes them not worth having. That's why so many lawyers and other professionals stay in jobs they hate when those jobs pay well (I'm only targeting lawyers here because I know many who say they hate their job); they have adjusted to a certain lifestyle that those jobs make possible, and thus they stay in them, even though they dread going to work each day. I'm sure there are marriages that continue to exist for the same reason.

Well, we players have a similar relationship with mana and healing. The luxury, in our case, is mana pools that never seem to run out, no matter how much overhealing we do. The downside, then, is boss attacks that do ridiculously large amounts of damage and require split-second timing of heals, for without those elements to add challenge, healing would be a brainless activity, a boring one that wouldn't actually require anything of the player. Now, I'm sure people have differing opinions on whether huge damage spikes are a fair price to pay for practically limitless mana, but it seems that Blizzard believes it is not a fair price to pay, which brings us to this quote from Ghostcrawler on the official forums.

Q u o t e:
If you have to use your inefficient heal too much, you will go OOM.
If you take too much damage, you force your healers to use their inefficient heals more.

Avoidance reduces damage. Stamina does not.

"I think the issue is that some players are rejecting the notion that mana will ever matter, in which case there is no reason to approach surviving as a tank any different than you do today. There's not much we can do to disabuse anyone of that notion until they see the content." -Ghostcrawler (source)

It's easy to follow Ghostcrawler's logic here: The reason stamina is so emphasized by tanks is because a larger health pool gives healers more time to react, and healers need that time to react because boss attacks do so much damage, and boss attacks do so much damage so the boss fights can actually be challenging for healers, and the boss fights wouldn't be challenging for healers without those large attacks because healers have a largely limitless supply of mana. Because Blizzard wants to change the third link in that chain, they have to change the fourth, and by doing that, they will change the second link, and thus the first. All that is a long way of saying that avoidance will be more important in Cataclysm than it is now because of the new healing design.

So, why the hesitation to accept this design change? Perhaps players see their effectively limitless mana pools as a necessity when they consider the fact that Wrath of the Lich King bosses have high spike damage. It's hard to worry about using the most mana-efficient spells when taking the time to consider which spell is right for the job could result in the tank dying, after all. As such, rather than recognizing the spike damage as a result of the large mana pools, they see it as the other way around, that they focused on having high mana and regeneration so they could use their inefficient but powerful spells to heal through the spike damage. This is all conjecture, mind you; I could be completely wrong about this, and would appreciate some affirmation or denial from those who do raid.

However, what I do know for a fact is that the players that are still holding on to the ideas of high health pools and limitless mana for healing are holding on to crutches used to overcome challenges that won't exist once Cataclysm hits. Perhaps this is out of habit, or perhaps it's due to comfort with the familiar, or perhaps these players are afraid to give up the tools they need now. Whatever the reason, I have a feeling this trend will continue into Cataclysm. Tanks will gem and enchant for stamina, healers will gem and enchant for spirit, and who knows? Maybe it will work. Maybe what the tanks lose in avoidance, and thus gain in damage taken, the healers will gain in gross healing output as their super high regeneration allows them to heal more without running out of mana. Then again, by focusing on regeneration, healers will be losing out on having higher healing-per-mana, so that added regeneration may not be enough to make up for the extra damage taken by tanks, especially considering that healers will be healing everyone else, as well. We'll just have to wait and see.