I used to always play a healer in WoW, but it started to get really stressful a few expansions back and I switched to DPS. Every once in awhile I get the urge to try it out again, but every time I dip my toes back in it’s always just super stressful, even just doing a heroic dungeon or something.
Healers of WoW, how do you guys do it? How is healing not stressful for you?
Tanking stresses me out 5x more than healing does. I’ve never gone too far (healed between M+10-15 but it’s the most fun thing in the game which makes it way less stressful and if someone dies it’s 99.9% of the time because they ignored 1 shot mechanics or ignored mechanics that saturated everyone in so much damage that I didn’t even feel bad about it.
I laugh have a good time, freak out drink…screw up in RLP first boss by panicking and dying get called out and feel sad then build back the previous feelings by clearing a 15 SMBG instead of the overturned 15 RLP…
Then wish I’d rolled a WW monk to make healing someone else’s problem…
Seriously though blizz fix the difficulty difference between keys… My god.
I’m at peace when healing because I know that it’s often out of my hands. If a dps get a mechanic on them and neglect to use a defensive, or stand in a swirly and take 190% of their health then they just die.
Everybody (usually) knows why they died, too, so there’s no flame.
I love being stressed out and struggling, but it does feel a bit unreasonable and binary in difficulty this expansion. There is a difference between “struggling” and failing because of other people. Healing is actually a heaven or hell role in this game currently. You either have to do absolutely nothing and get free loot because your team is good, or you are almost guaranteed to fail and should abandon the bads before you lose your soul.
They really messed up healing this expansion.
This has been exactly my experience healing this expansion, too.
I make myself think I’m the best healer ever so if anything goes wrong I’m still good and it wasn’t my fault 
Ok, but honestly, I just don’t take the game seriously enough to worry about failures and if someone might get mad, lol.
Practice with friends. I only tank for friends, but not PUGs. (This is mostly due to me not having a lot of routes memorized, though.)
Yeah it’s a weird form of codependency. I think they want to set up the game in a way that “good dps” are “impressive” to healers compared to “bad dps”. It definitely feels bad and creates a lot of animosity within the community. Groupwide AoE ticking for 90k a tick every half second because jimmy the rogue forgot kick? It’s pretty lame.
It’s low stakes relatively speaking.
I have many other actual stressful things happening in my life, so I try to remember this when I’m struggling in a dungeon. Placing it into perspective helps me to stay grounded.
I mostly heal battlegrounds. It’s more forgiving and gives me room to experiment. Sure, there’s drama sometimes, but I just laugh at the ones taking it overly serious.
Spite
Try adjusting your UI a bit to where you can put the bars in a place which is easier for you to see.
Try using an addon such a healbot or vuhdo.
A lot of solutions to mitigate the perceived stress. I just use zperl and have the bars where I can see them fairly easy.
Switching from classic to retail … retail healing is a cake walk in comparison. A lot of the tanks have stupidly good self-healing and if dps are taking damage it’s because they’re standing in bad.
I think BG’s are actually a great place to mess around with healing. People are going to die, the “objective” is usually just the match itself. So get in there and give it a go.
I play healers specifically because I find it’s more intense than playing DPS. I always have to pay attention, stay ahead of the damage that’s going on, and triage our party’s health bars. I don’t find it too stressful, but I really enjoy having to prepare for upcoming damage situations or quickly react if somebody is in trouble.
There’s definitely a bit of a learning curve though. Especially if you play a proactive class like Resto Druid, where you want to be aware of damage that’s coming up so you can prepare the group by having Efflo and HoTs ready to roll into a SotF Wild Growt once the damage goes out.
I try to approach it as my sole purpose is to deny honour kills to the enemy. It all becomes impersonal math then. 
After I downloaded Yummytv’s VuhDo UI and learned how to use it, healing on my preservation evoker has been very fun, and very easy, but I’m not a masochist, I’ll stay away from high keys on it and just heal for fun 
F1-F5, hotkeys, 6000 DPI mouse. “Assist” the boss or mob to heal tank. Never stressed.
I run with my guildies.
I am reverse. I cannot fathom how healers function at a basic level.