I’ll never understand how or why people can find healing and or strictly supporting fun. Furthermore I’ll never understand the thought behind Blizzards implementation of it. It runs directly against every instinct I have as someone who has been playing video games since the early 90s.
It’s like imagine playing Quake and you can choose to either be the quakeguy, running around blowing holes in bad guys with an assortment of killer weapons, or you can be some dude in a dress following him around, staying out of harms way and lobbing medpacks at him while you keep your eyes locked on his hp bar. Which sounds more fun to you?
I get that healers are a necessity in the context of WoW, and that in a battleground the team with a healer will invariably win vs the team without one, but my god is it totally unfun being a healer. Doesn’t help that support abilities and utility are so braindead. Yes you have access to some very powerful buffs, but you just cast them and that’s it. No interaction, no management, just set and forget buffs.
Healing/support should have always been something you do through doing damage or actually being in combat. More or less like the iteration of Holy Paladins in BFA (im not super clued in on them but something like how their healing is amped up when they are closer to their target, encouraging them to be in the thick of the fight). Making you stand in the back 30 yards away from the action playing whack a mole with health bars was atrocious game design.
My point is, healing blows and it blows even harder in vanilla because classes that can heal blow at doing anything but.
Hard to explain if you don’t enjoy it, but I enjoy support, healing, tanking, and narrow roles. Even now, my favorite BG is AV—and I like to carve out a narrow objective. Maybe I’ll wipe or delay their pull, corpserunning back to get that one last sigil of misery/silence in there. Maybe I’ll sit on my rogue and just recap a single tower once or twice—waiting for that moment that they leave a lone defender that I can sap/blind/cap, making their last tower burn 2 to 3 minutes late in a race where 30 sec can turn the tide.
Healing and support fall in the same category; knowing that the narrow actions of one could turn the tide of the entire match, often moreso than extra DPS thrown on top.
Healer-wise, they’re pretty valuable as long as you know how to play to your strengths. Tank-wise, there’s not much use outside of the tanking in AV.
If you really want to play a non-dps role, you can pick up a feral druid build that, depending on the gear you’re wearing, can do pretty decently as a tank for AV, a dps when attacking, and a healer for support.
As a druid resto and shaman resto, this is the truth. As a Lock I watched out for the horde healers. It was rare to get help.
I see streams where the streamer is complaining about heals and pointing out that they are standing next to the healer but often the healer is trying to survive while this DPS/Tank is trying to get kills. Its a selfish game at times.
But when people have your back, it can be a lot of fun keeping the team alive. I just kept a list of people and avoided them. I have a similar issue as I loved healing and I might go Spriest and crossover later to 21/30 and then again might not. Or I might finally try mage and be a friendly one.
Then it’s just a oneshot fest. Burst damage outscales health pools fairly quickly. Healers are much more useful in AV though, as it’s basically PvE honor farm.
AV being a good tank will very much make a difference. When playing against PvPers who had little PvE experience it really shows when they have to tank (and dps) the Elites. If a tank loses aggro a well timed fear or other CC can wipe an entire raid. Especially if they don’t really understand PvE aggro mechanics.
For WSG obviously a druid is excellent at being FC but anyone can do it. Any class. And a tank in good gear with some healers can be a nightmare to kill.
Honestly though it can get old listening to people complain about peeling. I do my best but if I am a mage with 3 hunter pets chasing me around it is hard to even know where the priest is standing never mind peel for them. And half the time I try to sheep someone to peel and someone else hits them and breaks the spell.