I remember reading that the idea in Cata is for no one to be at full health , most of the raid will be injured all of the time , even the tanks .

Lots of constant damage and no , nearly dead to full health healing , just a matter of triage, and keepin the tank as high a possible , i like the sound of this, but im sure it will bring on a swearing fit of mammoth proportions when i have to heal on my Priest lol.
And for non healers it's no more standing in stuff and not being worried as ill catch a heal soon ..those days are gone i think :)

Just setting up Clique for my beta priest took a while with all the spells we have as Holy.

Lets see if I can remember them from tactile memory...

MB: PW:Shield
Shift+LB : Renew
Shift+MB : Greater Heal
Shift+RB : Heal
Ctrl+LB : CoH
Ctrl+MB : PoH
Ctrl+RB : FH
Alt+LB : Dispell Magic
Alt+MB : Mass Dispell
Alt+RB : Cure Disease
Shift+Ctrl+LB : Holy Word: Chastice (to get all the different Holy Word spell variants)
Shift+Ctrl+MB : BH
Shift+Ctrl+RB : PoM
Shift+Ctrl+Alt+LB : Divine Hymn
Shift+Ctrl+Alt+MB : Guardian Spirit
Shift + Mousewheel forward : Chakra
Ctrl + Mousewheel backward : Light well

Its worth to note that since my priest is not specced into desperate Prayer and not at level cap yet so she does not have access to Leap of Faith yet so both those healing related spells are not bound yet. Maybe I should bind Shadowfiend and Hymn of Hope to something as well... hmm...

I will probably move some bindings around to make it more "intuitive" later on. Maybe use "mousewheel forward" more for stuff like PoM and Lightwell and "mousewheel back" for Leap of Faith to indicate something like "away from me" and "towards me".

You are completely right, Leei. At least, at the moment, this is very much the case for 5mans. Triage is the name of the game, i've found myself keeping the tank high enough, keeping myself alive, and then just saving mana for the next heal (/oom), without being able to do any healing on the dps. It's a completely different state of mind people will need to get used to.
I'm sure pushing cooldowns as a tank will also become more pro-active (omg i used that word!), instead of only pushing it once you're already low on health. At least, that's what i normally did :)

Erina, amazing how much you have bound! (and yes, i've known this for longer)
I only play with keys 1-5 or 6 or so, and the rest, i click. I definitely don't use all the spells in my arsenal as well. Things like "heal", which was supposed to make a comeback, seems pretty useless at the moment. The heal is tiny (4k, 6k crit) and slow (2.5sec?). Although i must check the HP/mana ratio on that one, maybe i need to use it more for mana saving reasons. But it seems in 5man, the fights are so quick, that i don't really have 2.5seconds spare time to only push out a 4k heal. HPS just needs to be quicker.

Archangel as disc is still bugged, giving me about 3.2k mana for a 5-stack. Bloody annoying...
Did get myself http://cata.wowhead.com/item=58483 made on Christa last night, now self buffed at 90k HP, which seems pretty much baseline for anyone at lvl 85.
Ow, and Hadnor dinged 85 too last night. Levelling really doesn't take that long at all :)

I saw that my premade priest character had copied over so I guess I can try some more challenging stuff now. Noticed they had activated further questing for low level worgen so I have done a bit of that.

Are those the premades with full 346 (heroic) gear? I've encountered a few of those. Pretty funny to see someone in that gear without ever seeing any of the normal instances, but ok.
I'm at the 329 level now, so i can start doing heroics. But i won't yet. Still wiping plenty on bosses (and sometimes even trash) in normal 5mans, so i doubt heroics would be a good choice.

I'm sticking to my idea that, if this difficulty will go live, we'll see a LOT of people struggling in 5mans for a long time! :confused2:

And that idea makes me absolutely giddy, Christa!

No, ilvl333 blue gear that require lv83. Nothing über fancy.

I have now uninstalled my Cataclysm beta. I have played through the things I wanted to try and I am not really feeling the love. Maybe things will change later on, but for now I will spend my gaming time elsewhere.

Shame :(
I've copied a few premades over today. They are now fully epic geared. Did half a heroic (deadmines actually) on Christa, being disc. Was in a group of all epic/heroic blue premades, but Go%@%$mn! the damage is high! Wiped a few times, on trash mostly.
I'm sticking to my expectations that a lot of people (including me surely!) will really have a hard time gearing up for heroics/raids, if the difficulty stays as it is. I wonder a bit if it will, because Blizz wants to let everyone see the raid content (at least on normal mode). At the moment, i'd say it'll be damn hard even gearing for that (i.e. getting 5man heroic gear).

I really wonder how things will pan out when Cata goes live. The whole mechanics are based on limited healing mana and throughput. Healing surely will be a completely different ballgame. I just hope non-healers will adapt to this as well ;)

By the way, for those that are interested: the haste and crit values at full epic gear were pretty low. I remember something in the order of 10-11% crit and haste in shadowpriest gear, about 4% haste 10% crit in healing gear, and simulair numbers for healing druid gear. It's a big difference from the 30-odd % we have at lvl 80. Didn't have any enchants or gems in yet, but those won't make a huge difference.

I like the sound of it being hard.. i dont want to be done and bored within a few months with the Heroic 5 mans ...and healing wise , im sure this will be a long over due visit back to when you actually needed , as a tank , to hit those CD's and life savers to help out when things got hot.
I even remember doing a 5 man with Proto, Siana and others that we were working out for a good few hours.

I like the idea of it being harder as well, but I cant see it lasting, because too much of the WoW demographic these days is the 13 year old epic collector that is going to QQ hugely on the forums, and everything will probably get nerfed back after 2-3 months. I think those of us that want a bit of a challenge are going to have to make the most of the time before 4.1