So I’ve been a main healer for… well since Legion. I love healing keys. I won’t pretend I’m elite, I’m not, but I find that I feel like I have the most impact on the success of the group when I’m healing.
I decided for next season to switch over to a rogue and oh my god is the pug experience different for dps.
First of all, I am apparently the only competent healer on earth. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen healers fail to meet 1m hps during a heal check in, like, a +6. My success rate in keys is like 1/10th of what it is on my healer.
Second, tanks, oh. my. god. tanks. The amount of low effort small optimizations that tanks don’t even bother with. Things like stacking the mobs together. Obviously I can and do help out, and the rest of the group should help with kicks and stuff to stack packs on top of each other, but it is ultimately the tanks responsibility. As a tank one of your jobs is to use your abilities and position packs to increase the dps of the entire group. If that’s news to you go figure out how you can make it happen. None of that is to even say the number of tanks who don’t let combat drop for a single second so I can restealth (which is an extremely worthwhile boost to my dps).
A pleasant surprise for number three: getting into pug keys isn’t really that bad. I don’t really keep up with the meta so idk if assassination is like the top cheese this patch but for the most part if I want to play a key and it’s not 6 am in the morning, I am in a key within 5-10 minutes.
Anyways, just wanted to throw that out there because I’m bored and want to talk wow.
…I recently have started switching my focus to DPS from healing as well, but reading this just reminded me that the reason I started healing yearssss ago was because I could “save” groups and runs from failing as a healer. Might go and abandon this warlock and rogue, don’t mind meeee.
I switched from dps to heals this xpac. I enjoy it much more. I’ve sprinkled in a few tank runs but just don’t enjoy it much. Even branched out to rsham from hpal too. It’s been fun.
I do boomie on the side and man is it rough sometimes. Sure you’re #1 in damage but then you’re watching healers struggle, melee dps not use interrupts, dps do 75% of their total damage, and so much more.
Makes me miss my Mistweaver something fierce. Even in the DPS economy you’re still hard-carry or fail. Random M+ is a mess.
I felt the opposite, I think as a good dps you can really bring a lot to an M+ run, I feel like as a good dps you can make the group win. As a good healer you can make the group not lose if the rest of the group is already enough to win, and that’s kind of boring for me personally. I’ve had the opposite experience where I feel like most healers can meet the heal checks or my dps can just heal myself or block enough damage to overcome it. So when I’m not healing this xpac I think, fine, well anyone else can be doing what I’m doing as a healer.
I think it’s normal to feel like the keys arn’t going well if you just switched from healer to dps. It is kind of a big switch, moving the focus from healing the group to wackin’ the bad guys. Not to throw blame, but are you sure it wasn’t yourself that was holding up the group success? What was your dps, when compared to the other 2 dps in the group?
I know you mentioned interrupts so that’s good - many people just ignore them which is half the problem in mythic + pugs (with unnecessary damage)
Yea it’s literally 1/5 of the effort, whether you’re a tank, dps, or healer, you are 1/5 of the team (assuming all the dps are relatively equal and everyone is pulling their own weight).
Now, the skill for each role is different, and subjective, but I’d say as far as skill level it is tank > healer> dps
This is a bit of a diva take from pug rogues IMO. Tanks are conditioned to pull pack to pack without letting combat drop by the community and by things like trinkets and embellishments that incentivize not dropping combat. If you have a regular group that has a rogue in it, sure maybe its reasonable to accommodate them; but in pugs rogues are rare and tanks aren’t just going to shift gears from how they are used to pulling and probably don’t even know it matters to you.
It’s not a diva take at all. First of all, accounting for the needs of your dps is good tanking, so yes if you have a rogue in the group that means you change your strategy. Second, it’s a dps loss overall. Not only are you geographically spreading the packs out by chain pulling but now the group loses the tanks dps for those seconds while they’re regathering (if they regather because none of them seem to know that you need to stack mobs)
Yes I am reasonably sure of this. It’s a new character so I make rotational mistakes and have been caught tunnel visioning a few times I definitely won’t hide that, but no, grand scheme, I am often doing more dps than higher geared teammates and if the entire group was playing at the same level we’d time. I think the issue is that at my gear level I’m doing +6 to +9 for now and I think there’s just a good amount of people playing at their skill cap in that range.
This actually didn’t contradict my point if you have reading comprehension skills.
I also dropped healing recently in retail in favor of dps. Healer design has gotten to the point where you’re expected to be constantly doing damage while healing -more than historically just doing some damage during downtime- so I figured I might as well just be a real dps.
I actually havent had many issues with healers. It’s only been a few times where I’ve noticed healers being particularly bad at not just using their utility, but their actual throughput.
So, if the dangerous mobs in a pull are dead because you focused them down and there’s just a couple of non-threatening melee chumps left at like 10% health; you’re saying its a dps gain to stand there fighting those two nothing mobs instead of just pulling them to the next group and letting them die to aoe?
If you by chaining increase the other DPSers damage by 1 million each and the tanks damage by 500k, that trumps not chaining and increasing your dps by 2 million.
If it’s a tank that waits until the last mob has like 10% hp before he chains the next pack, then that’s just a dumb tank.