I might keep my main in Cataclysm

As much as I applauded many changes to raiding in Wrath of the Lich King, personally WotLK wasn't really a good raid experience for me. Basically I felt I had made the wrong decision at the start of the expansion to level my holy priest first, and use him as my "raiding main". It turned out that I found raid healing in WotLK a lot less fun than raid healing in vanilla WoW and BC. Raid healing had become too fast for me, and I hated the fact that I couldn't use slower healing spells any more, or the fact that it didn't matter that those slower spells were more mana effective, because mana never ran out anyway. I did enjoy the tactical challenge of healing in the slower vanilla WoW environment more.

So I was toying with the idea of using a different character class as my main in Cataclysm. If I'm just spamming a fast spell anyway, I might as well play a dps, and avoid the added stress and unjust blame laid on healers. But now I'm reading news about Cataclysm that make me rethink that idea. Maybe healing is going to become good again in Cataclysm, and I might keep my healer as main in Cataclysm. Via MMO-Champion:

"Quote from Blizzard staff
Health Pools in Cataclysm
Health pools will be much larger in Cataclysm and healing will be lower. That should help address some of the overly binary feel of PvP and PvE encounters.

You'll still be able to kill people as well as be able to heal them. The pace will just be a little slower and both healing and killing should require more than 1-2 buttons.

Tanking and Healing in Cataclysm
You missed the part where I said health pools will be higher. Imagine a boss that takes say 3-4 hits to kill a tank, but it also takes a healer 3-4 heals to top her back off. Now efficiency of a healing spell can be as much of a consideration as direct throughput, since the tank is unlikely to die in your next GCD. Now coordination among healers can be a bigger deal since efficiency will matter. Now maximum health on the tank classes will matter less because the question of how long you can survive without a heal landing is largely academic. Now avoidance on a tank can matter a little more because saving healer mana becomes as important as being table to take the next hit.

As an aside, healers will actually need enough healing tools and enough distinction among them so that they are really choosing the big, expensive heal vs. the small, cheap heal vs. the fast, expensive heal, to name just a few examples.

Classes balance in Cataclysm and burst damage
The gear scaling is "easy" to fix, meaning we know what to do and it just requires a lot of work. We are prepared for players to be sad when their ratings convert less favorably, but most would agree it's good for the game in the long run.

I already addressed the burst issue above. If the bathtub is bigger, then the rate of health pouring in and going down the drain don't affect the volume as severely."

Higher health pools, leading to the return of tactical decisions of what speed vs. efficiency of healing spell to use? Count me in! This seems like an excellent idea to me. And as the devs mentioned, the same solution will also fix the issue of some classes being overly powerful in PvP due to burst damage.

I'm just wondering what form exactly these higher health pools will take. Will a naked level 80 character have more health after Cataclysm then before? Or will it go up dramatically with every level increase from 80 to 85? Or will the health pool only be increased via more stamina in gear, enchants, and gems, so that stamina suddenly becomes the most important stat for all character classes? And what about the size of the health pool of regular mobs outside dungeons, will those increase as well, making combat overall slower? Personally I'm all for slowing down WoW a bit, it had become a bit hectic over the last expansions. But I'm sure some other player will resent reducing the pace of the game.

The other consideration is that if I still hate healing, I now have a backup plan, even if I used my priest as my main: I now have dual spec in shadow, and I'm actually dealing an above average amount of damage when I join a group in a dps role. So leveling the priest first makes more sense than lets say leveling my mage first, because with the mage I have no choice at all which role I want to take.

What do you think about the announced changes to the health pools in Cataclysm?