People expect WAY too much from healers

Community General Discussion
#1

Healers need to:

  • watch everyone’s HP
  • watch own HP (sometimes healers even neglect that because too much going on)
  • watch tank’s CDs to not overlap with yours, play around your tank
  • perform a good healing rotation or people die
  • move out of stuff and avoid all mechanics
  • in many cases, do healer-only mechanics
  • interrupt (with CC sometimes because we aren’t given interrupts for the most part)
    and so on.

One huge difference is in the healing “rotation” which is much harder than what DPS deal with. DPS don’t have mini-heart attacks while doing their rotation because someone dropped from 100-10% in less than a second. So, healing rotation is already more intense than anything else for that reason alone.

And yet you DPS players are asking us heals to DPS now. You, who don’t interrupt things that are meant to be interrupted and rely on your healer to power through it, who don’t bother even moving out of puddles, who watch the healer get aggro and not even help, who do your 4 button rotation mindlessly and think you’re great at the game now.

Too much is expected of healers, and the proof is in the numbers. There’s always a healer shortage and I wonder why? Look at heals in both PvE and PvP, look at the 50+ arena groups at all times listed waiting on a healer, or the raids that look like this 2/0/14 waiting on heals.

If the tank pulls too much and dies - oh the healer sucks
if the DPS dies - healer wtf?
if the healer dies - healer sux lol kick pls

Worst role out there and you’re trying to make it even harder. How dumb.

62 Likes
#2

and forget ‘kill explosive’.

8 Likes
#3

Agreed. It’s why I don’t play a healer anymore. I can be healing my booty cheeks off and some guy standing in 900 different kinds of fires/goo for 45 minutes will be like “wow healer sucks”.

21 Likes
#4

I disagree. People should have high standards for everyone. Including healers. At least in higher level content anyway.

Lower level where everyone is learning is whatever.

14 Likes
#5

as someone who occasionally heals (and does a pretty good job of it, if i may say so myself) i feel like tanks get more pressure.

don’t get me wrong, our job is important, but stress-wise, i find tanking more stressful. you gotta keep aggro, interrupt the mobs, use mitigation abilities, and if you die, you get blamed first.

now, am i saying healers have a hard job? no. it is still difficult (especially when the tank wants to go-go-go, and all you wanna do is slow down and heal’em up) but to me, healing isn’t that difficult.

well, you should be dpsing… when everyone’s health is full of course! not all the time, but when health-bars are full. i mean… better than doing nothing during down-time.

my point that i’m having a hard-time getting across: healers dpsing, i’m 50/50 on. but more importantly dps should stop being so stupid and actually, y’know, dodge mechanics. if they did’nt stand in the fire/poison/blizzard/spikes/etc, and actually moved out of zones, maybe they would’nt need us healers to do dps.

anyway, not here to argue, just wanted to say healers dpsing should’nt be the big deal everyone makes it out to be.

9 Likes
#6

Something like half your bullet points are points every player has to worry about regardless of role.

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#7

The only reason I play a healer is so that in a situation where everyone turns out bad, I can just heal myself, run away, let everyone die and leave the group.

Self-preservation > all

4 Likes
#8

A whole dissertation because you don’t want to cast an occasional offensive ability while you’re sitting there not healing or cleansing.

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#9

I would just like to say that hunters (dps) do have it pretty rough. We are always having to make sure our pets are summoned. We also have to make sure they are dismissed when dropping down in Gnomeregan. Also, hunters get blamed for everything. It’s not our fault that tab target doesn’t work right. I mean, come on man!

1 Like
#10

In M+, the list of tank responsibilities is pretty long too. It’s really no wonder why at any given time M+ LFG tool population consists of 8 gorillion DPS, 5 tanks, and 5 healers. Why would anybody want to take on the mess of crap that either role has to deal with when they can just play DPS?

3 Likes
#11

Honestly the lesson I’m taking away from all these healer threads lately is that a lot of people seem to only just now be coming to the realization that playing this game well at a high level is a difficult task that requires you to excel in several different skill sets.

I’m not sure why this is news to so many people. Tanks and DPS have to multitask at high level content as well (if they’re worth their salt that is) so I’m not sure why this discussion is always centered around healers exclusively.

12 Likes
#12

He is probably busy “doing mechanics” like that guy in the other thread with 50% active time in the fight lol.

1 Like
#13

You probably could’ve just put this post as a reply to the thread it is very obviously a reply to.

That said:
Given your logic about what each role has to worry about, why are the tank or DPS even using mitigation cooldowns? That’s your responsibility.

They need to focus on killing explosives, killing the mobs in the correct order, coordinating interrupts (hell, they should just stop interrupting and let you heal the damage… it’s not their job!), CC’ing appropriate mobs… and all the DPS based mechanics.

1 Like
#14

This :point_up_2:

High level content it hard and takes effort. In other supprising news nba players have to play hard against each other…

11 Likes
#15

are disc priests still doing dps-to-heal? sounds to me like you want disc priests.

1 Like
#16

The minute healers have something useful to do during their downtime that isn’t damage I’ll be fine with them not doing damage.

My main concern isn’t that healers do damage specifically, it’s that they do something useful with all of their GCDs. Funnily enough, I have the same expectation of DPS and tanks as well. If you can tell me something useful you can spend your GCD on when no healing is required then you feel free to do that. Until then the options are rather limited.

6 Likes
#17

the concept of timing precasts must elude you.

1 Like
#18

Precasts count as a time when healing is required and thus I would not expect you to use a damage spell in that GCD.

That said, I would really be surprised if you needed more than maybe a 1 GCD buffer to prepare for a precast.

1 Like
#19

15 second pre cast on first boss in mists is it? Man you need some more haste…

4 Likes
#20

Do any of you “pure” healer not feel bad when you wear any gear with haste? Knowing that you’ll spend 60% of your time doing nothing anyway?

6 Likes