Healing has not felt this unrewarding in a while for me.

[Benjignome]

I'm playing disc and absolutely love it. The blend of atonement heals and shadowmends/shields all while weaving in dps is phenomenal. If you're hating healing perhaps try a different healer. Also... Of course healing pugs is going to be a shit show, a lot of people don't care about mechanics and expect you to outheal it. I have a solution, stop healing them and let them die and carry on your dps/healer hybrid spec and kill the boss anyways. Don't encourage stupidity by healing people standing in shit.

In regards to burst healing players I feel like disc is in an amazing spot btw. Shadowmend + grace heal huge chunks with shields to stabilize damage. if you hate healing pugs then grp with 4 other friends/guildies and push harder content. It's a blast. I'm pumped for mythic+ this week!

[Deleted]

I'm not sure, is it possible that this new system is allowing for greater leniency in dungeons than before?
Whereas you used to have a group disband in azjul nerub iif a tank died to the first two trash packs let alone one of the 3 big spiders. Is it not possible this system allows for underskilled tanks to faceroll afk and still eventually get through?
Used to be, spike damage, spike healing if they died to the spike damage then they need to pop a cd or get better gear first.
Now it's slow repetitive damage and slow repetitive healing. If you can't heal it do you need better gear or skills or does the tank? In all likelihood with current content and difficulty unless you're afk the tank probably needs to learn his cds and rotations

[Gestopft]

The main fault I find is the designed inability to save people from large damage spikes outside of Major use of CDs.
Health pools greatly out scale heal amounts and tanks are now mostly responsible for their own safety.

Since the healer is in great difficulty to compensate for other player's mistakes at large health loss spikes, the only job left is to slowly pad health bars, small bit by small bit.

...

Either people do mechanics well and it is quite boring to heal, since there will be little damage at all.

or

Mechanics are not followed and party-members take such large amounts that the menial heals often wont be able to compensate in time and they die regardless.

I think the design intent is in part to make sure DPS are responsible for doing their part to stay alive- i.e, if they fail to avoid damage back to back, they are most likely dead, and it's their own damn fault. If healers are able to heal DPS through all sorts of stupid, then that becomes the expectation. And to be fair, a dungeon group that is good at avoiding damage has almost always been boring to heal. See how you feel about raids- raid bosses generally have more sources of unavoidable damage than dungeon bosses.

That said, I sort of agree with you on how it "feels" though; I like that sense of control as a healer- now you feel a little more helpless.

[Zka]

You should all try holy priest.

I did. Fell asleep of boredom after the third dungeon and went back to disc.

[Ursiel]

I did. Fell asleep of boredom after the third dungeon and went back to disc.

But how'd you switch back to disc if you were asleep?

Also, to the thread in general, I've genuinely enjoyed healing so far this expansion. :| I used to play only DPS, but switched towards the end of WoD because my guild needed it and tbh I've never had so much fun in the game as I'm having now. I adore my little holy pal.

[Melkorr]

At least they made questing and solo farming significantly harder for healers too. Only in Blizzards mind do you fix a shortage of healers by making it harder for them to do anything or force them to dps. For the same reason we don't have fighys that force dps to heal we should avoid forcing healers to dps.

I've actually never felt better as a Paladin. If I speck shockadin, I can kill some mobs faster than some casters and with wings can take out 5-7 mobs without dying.
Also, I love keeping on pressing buttons while in Dungeons, you feel like you have something to do all the time instead of just healing and patiently waiting for players' health bars to drop you can also switch between helping out with damage and healing your group.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

I've never played a healer so have limited insight here. I do tank a lot, and have had healers tell me "Please pull faster; I'm bored" or whisper "I'm a geared healer, so you can pull big if you like"...

I'm all about coordinating with my healer, but can't read minds. A little communication goes a long way.

[Banquetto]

I did. Fell asleep of boredom after the third dungeon and went back to disc.

Haha, I've been Disc Main since late TBC, and this 7.0 iteration of it has pushed me away to Holy. I tried a few instances as Disc while leveling from 100 to 110 and just couldn't do it. Particularly when a fight ended and everyone was on half health.. I just stared at my bars and thought "what do I do now? just leave them at half health until next fight?"

[Raone]

I am enjoying healing this expansion moreso then any other expansion. No longer is it just wack a mole asap or their dead. What I am enjoying more is finding ways to weave in dps while healing, doing some Mythic+ Dungeons pushed me hard to keep up decent DPS while healing. I didn't need to dps but the fact that I could with good use of CD's and HoT's made it more enjoyable

[squeekinator]

i like the healing, but then again I am a resto druid

[Zka]

Particularly when a fight ended and everyone was on half health.. I just stared at my bars and thought "what do I do now? just leave them at half health until next fight?"

People are usually not at risk of dying if not topped up between pulls. So it's not a big issue. Just plea them on the run, it will be easier to top them up as soon as you have a target.

[Asrialol]

BM dps macro from BC says hello. Since your location says "hunter forums", you should be familiar with that one. Oh, and shadowbolt spam from BC too.


Yeah, the DPS stand in fire! That's the goddamn problem: mechanics are designed to put a DPS from 100 to 20%, and your tools do not allow you to keep them up. Now keeping them up against everything would be stupid, but you should be able to get at least some margin of manoeuver. Not to mention tank health pools, where even 500K+ crits barely top them up.

Errr, what mechanics are designed to put a dps from 100 to 20%? Very few mechanics in current content does that. Those that do in dungeons usually have a mechanic to reduce that damage as well.

[Alvito]

I've actually never felt better as a Paladin. If I speck shockadin, I can kill some mobs faster than some casters and with wings can take out 5-7 mobs without dying.
Also, I love keeping on pressing buttons while in Dungeons, you feel like you have something to do all the time instead of just healing and patiently waiting for players' health bars to drop you can also switch between helping out with damage and healing your group.

Holy pally does boat loads of dmg, they are doing just fine when it comes to that. Holy priests and druids that don't want to keep stance dancing are the ones that are just shit out of luck.

[Deleted]

Holy pally does boat loads of dmg, they are doing just fine when it comes to that. Holy priests and druids that don't want to keep stance dancing are the ones that are just shit out of luck.

Then the druids don't understand how their affinity's work. There is no gain in DPS by going cat vs using moonfire / sunfire / wrath. On the contrary, going cat requires you to go melee range (bigger chance of getting hit by AoE damage) and waste a GCD to get into cat and more wasted time moving. Most efficient is to get the affinity for the affinity bonus and use spells to DPS during those dead moments. Over an average bossfight I can toss in about 60k dps up to 90k dps with a good group.

On topic: Groups are just used to being healed trough everything that gets tossed at them. I've not been frowned upon so far but some groups it's really stressfull to pull the group trough. A compliment once in a while would be appreciative though. I know I hand out a compliment if I see you meet that extraordinary tank or dps.

[Wild]

[...]
Boss fights are often very two- dimensional :

Either people do mechanics well and it is quite boring to heal, since there will be little damage at all.

or

Mechanics are not followed and party-members take such large amounts that the menial heals often wont be able to compensate in time and they die regardless.
[...]

What u describe has some kind of truth to it. However I dont feel that it's "unrewarding" at all.
-Healing a normal dungeon: people can stand in shit, self-heal will do
-Healing a heoric dungeon: people can stand in shit, healer can outheal the dmg
-Healing a mythic dungeon: people stand in shit, people die
-Healing a mythic+ dungeon: no personal experience so far. However I'd say that with people who dont get mechanics, dont even try. Finishing a mythic+ with a good group, not standing in shit, will be extremely rewarding.

So I dont see whats so unrewarding about it. Healing a hero with ilevel 810 was quit challanging at first. WIth ilevel 840 hero is faceroll or healers become DDs. Healing mythic with ur ilevel should still be interessting, even when people are not insta dying. There is always dmg incoming that needs to be healed, and if people are not stupid, its manageable too.
The question is what is rewarding in ur personal experience? IMO "Rewarding" is when u, as a healer, can make the difference at keeping people alive, doing ur job, finishing the dungeon, getting loot.
I find myself having a lot of fun in mythic dungeons, they are challanging, they need everyone to be focused, u always need to heal well, never experienced a faceroll mythic so far. So getting it done has always been rewarding for me.

[aziras]

Current dungeon design combined with speed oriented play style has shifted virtually all of the stress of a dungeon run onto the healer.

In the early days of WoW the emphasis was on control. I remember talking before each and every pull. Waiting for the healer to drink, marking the mobs for crowd control, discussing the plan. But now it's all about maximizing pulls and kill speed and zooming as fast as conceivably possible from boss to boss.

This can be great mindless fun for tank and dps. Zoom, zoom, kill, kill while dodging a few mechanics. But the only limiter on how much they can zoom and kill is the ability of the healer to keep up and heal through it. This isn't much fun for the healer, always feeling stressed and rushed.

The way things are going I expect the healer shortage to get much worse before it gets better. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, in the next expac, Blizzard starts to move away from the classic trinity and enables some form of healer-less dungeon runs.

They actually tried that in MoP with scenarios. Problem was that they were too hard to balance to give them decent rewards, so they became "do once for achievement" content.

I agree that the design is botched currently. The sense of adding "skills" to a group works differently for each role, and the current design is really not working for the healers.

Healers always had a problem. Their contribution scales "inversely" in lack of a better term. Skill plays a huge role in an undergeared group. Combine with poorly skilled tank and dps and the healer have to work overtime to make it work. Add a bit of skill and gear to the tank and dps and healing becomes indifferent. You can be the best healer in the world but that does very little to improve the performance of a group beyond a certain point. Yes, you can instruct people to chain-pull, triple-pull, and zerg through the instance to get a challenge. But unless the other group members reach past a certain skill-bar, it will just cause silly situations.
Great healers make or break guild speed-runs. But you need to be able to trust the other group members before you can really let it all loose. Playing that way in PUGs get ugly fast.

A DPS scale looks something like this: 0 dps /follow player, and then scales upwards without a limit.
A tank scale looks along the lines of: Instasplat, smooth run, godmode that can contribute to dps (most tanks can easily swap out gear and/or abilities in a rotation to make their dps scale with gear, like the pure dps classes - albeit a bit flatter scale).
A healer scale is like a binary switch: Did people die? yes/no. Good tanks/dps can make it easier with positioning and cooldowns, but to be fair I think only healers ever look at a recount "damage taken" bar to see who did well at avoiding stuff.

Some healer specs can toss in dps better than others, but it still feels like an afterthought. Something to do rather than idling.

It was less of an issue back in the days. Partly due to the way dungeons were designed, but also due to the way dungeon running was more social and slower paced. The combination of zerg-fest, impatient players wanting "fast runs", and playing with randoms makes it pretty unpleasant to be a healer.

I play a druid, so I guess I am more used to the constant topping-up playing style, rather than the frantic whack-a-mole healing style of some of the other classes.

[szandos]

I agree with the op. At least in WoD I only had to heal crappy dps that were standing in fire, now I also have to heal the crappy tanks that don't know how to use AM properly. And when the s**t hits the fan, you're spending the rest of the fight trying to catch up with your puny heals, hoping that you have caught up a lil bit before the next dps decides to stand in crap.

If things go wrong I want to do one oomph heal on a dps and then be able to forget about them until the next big thing hits. Now I have to keep spamming constantly seeing their healthbars sloooowly creep up, hoping that they are far enough up when the next thing hits. It's incredible unrewarding and stressful.

It's not really, hard, just feels crappy.

[ItachiZaku]

At least they made questing and solo farming significantly harder for healers too. Only in Blizzards mind do you fix a shortage of healers by making it harder for them to do anything or force them to dps. For the same reason we don't have fighys that force dps to heal we should avoid forcing healers to dps.

What? I find it much, much easier and faster on my resto druid than in previous expansions.

[Benjignome]

I feel like a lot of the players moaning in this thread are either vastly undergeared for the content they're doing, not optimized with artifact path or just lost when it comes talent choices. As both disc and holy I wouldn't call any of my heals puny outside of plea and its utility for atonement on the fly more than makes up for that. As a healer I feel like I'm in an amazing spot of being able to top people up AND dps to enhance our success.

Also if people are half health after a boss fight you just... Top them back up? Why does hp after a boss fight matter? Don't be lazy and spend some gcds. Disc > holy, embrace the new gods.

[Neliah]

I hope not... or maybe I hope so, so that I can give druid or pally healing a try. I've heard complaints from all of them so far though, with the exception of monk maybe.

You'd get a complaint from me as well, you either have tanks that basically heal more than you (warriors especially), or you're spamming your heals to the point where you're oom in a matter of seconds.
I've yet to see a proper balance actually, so I myself have been thinking of trying a different class to heal with ._.