Healing is haaaaaard.

[Goonygoon]

If it makes you feel any better, I had a tank ask me what "Active Mitigation" was yesterday... In Vault of the Wardens Mythic. The day before on Arcway Mythic, I was told to stop dps'ing and heal. I will give you one guess as to what class these two were playing, and one guess as to what (healer) spec I play, haha.

The glory of start of expac dungeons. I do love the challenges, I just hate the players.

[Valithyria]

It's probably not your fault, you just got a bad group. So far healing has been a blast and not that hard at all, ofcourse sometimes people die but that's more due to ignoring mechanics.

[Wries]

Violet hold trash waves have been a b'tch with randoms but not so much with guildies. I think there are avoidable things that some dps/tanks aren't paying attention to in there generally.

It was also one of the first heroics I did and I thought for a while I just sucked beyond redemption and should not be a healer. But went more dungeons afterwards and it turns out the group just sucked and they should unsub (bitter and snarky here)

[Berndorf]

Do more than one dungeon before you try to gauge yourself as a healer.

[Fistfury]

Don't feel bad. I started healing mythic VH on my holy paladin at 822 with 2 relics and some blues. We wiped on that bug boss like 2 times, it wasn't a PUG group - the group was just taking stupid amounts of damage, and I lost the tank. It happens. I did some reading, made the group adjust, and we got it. I had a 798 DPS, a 725 tank, and a 840 Havoc DPS, so it was slow enough to start with. I literally wanted to throw my computer out the window on some of those trash pulls. Literally FOL spam + pushing everything on CD and blowing 3/4 of my mana pool every pull.

[Hawthorne Wipes]

For VH, there as pointed before, there are a couple trash packs that hit pretty good.
Its not a problem if the groups know things like..stunts and interrupts..

[Ahovv]

everyone always blames the healer instead of blaming themselves.

chances are it's not your fault.

I don't think I've ever let a tank die in a heroic dungeon unless they pulled 5 trash packs and then removed line of sight.

- - - Updated - - -

For VH, there as pointed before, there are a couple trash packs that hit pretty good.
Its not a problem if the groups know things like..stunts and interrupts..

You don't need coordinated stuns in Violet Hold. It's one of the easiest dungeons to heal because the trash packs are small and several cannot be pulled simultaneously.

[Lightwysh]

Remove holy light from your bars for now, FoL is all you really need. VH is dumb, if your tank isn't a warrior spamming ignore pain, expect to blow CDs and your artifact ability on this 5-6 mob spawns.

Holy is the shit if you have a good group and you can dps the boss. Doing 150-200k dps while spot healing the tank is just fun.

[Enitzu]

I heal heroics on an 812 monk with zero issue. That includes only having 1 relic and not even finished the class campaign. If you are struggling then more than likely its just a terrible group.

People keep saying DH tanks are bad but you prolly just got a bad player lol. I can tank on my DH and have the healer go dps for heroics. war, druid, and dh are prolly the strongest tanks by a long shot atm.

[Deleted]

For the first time in a very long time it's nearly impossible to blame the healer when people die. People die to interruptable aoe or standing in front of cleaves and shit like that. I had so many dungeons as HPala where I thought I'd rather reroll. I tanked a dungeon where the healer was bad and found out it's just bad tanks that made me feel that way. Went back to Pala, did dungeons with friends and it went fantastic.

[Taeldorian]

Honestly healing isn't that hard, but with a really bad group it can be extremely annoying.

The one thing about healing is you're watching people, so you know exactly what people are doing wrong (at least in dungeons) which can really change how you feel about pugging. You notice how many mistakes people make, you notice what mistakes people make, etc.

But if you have a decent group it should be easy. A good group makes mythic dungeons a cake walk, but any decent group and healing should be fine. You should be able to tell what kind of group you're in after healing them for a few minutes.

P.S. I know all healers lost their interrupt but I've been in so many groups that just don't use their interrupts unless I ask them or say something. It makes me miss rebuke so much.

[Deleted]

I always feel a bit drained after VH, it's just like one of those Mario levels that auto-scrolls. I'm a Pandaren, I like to take my time.

I'm with ya man. I think dungeons should require more down time, rather than having longer trash. For that same reason I always preferred to play on my own in Diablo. They gave movement abilities to all of the classes and from that point onward it's just... rush, rush, rush, the entire time; until your brain is numb. I'm dreading mythic+ for the same reason. A timer which rewards you for faster clears? So there's gonna be absolutely no down-time where you can just chill and make small talk with the group, like the rest of the game, then, I guess...?

It's bad enough they all but eliminated mana from the game, and there's no water breaks where you get to collect yourself and consider how to tackle the next challenge.

/gripes

[Frumpy Frumpy Frak]

I did heroic Maw of Souls today, it wasn't completely awful like my first run but it was still a pretty stressful experience.

The trash before the last boss took a good 10 minutes because no one was interrupting, fortunately we didn't pull too much extra stuff from all the fears we were hit with.

I think I'll stick to tanking.

[Deleted]

I really do have to give 2 thumbs up to the healers I've seen lately who are interrupting a lot, doing a far better job than most of the dps.

Thats funny because only resto shamans have an interrupt.

[Danner]

Long story short, I'm a paladin who tried healing a heroic for the first time today, I got Violet Hold and it didn't go well in the slightest.

All my gear was mythic quality, I had int trinkets equipped, I had healbot installed, I knew how to play the spec, I levelled my artifact to 13, I had decent relics in each slot and still I had to spam Flash of Light and blow all my cooldowns before the first boss just to keep the tank alive.

As a tank, I have no trouble carrying a bad healer, I assumed that the reverse would be true as well. Is it possible for a bad and/or undergeared tank to invalidate the efforts of a well geared and prepared healer or do I just suck?

Kthanks, plz be nice.

You can only outheal bad to some degree.

Missing a single interrupt? - you can deal with it if you overgear things.
Missing a chain of interrupts? Wipe. Nothing you can really do.
... Apart from handling the interrupts yourself.
I'm often doing that; the idea is that throwing out an arcane torrent and/or holy word: chastise can save me from having to do millions of healing later. Of course as a holypriest, my interrupt is stuck on a 1 cooldown, so a chain of them is still not really possible to deal with. And lots of boss abilities seem to be immune to Arcane Torrent this expansion. It used to be the other way around!

Doing a double pull? - you can deal with it if the tank overgear things as well.
In fact, probably easily, if the tank overgears things.
But no matter what you cannot really pull double output, so you can't really handle it on your own.
You absolutely rely on the tank handling the brunt of it.
If you pull all your cooldowns, you might be able to manage double damage for 10-20ish seconds.
After that it's all down to praying every single heal you land is a critical hit.
Which might just happen. Some groups certainly assume it will.
But eventually you are going to be disappointed, and then it's a wipe.

If the tank is undergeared, he's gonna take silly amounts of damage.
You have literally no margin of error, and need to spamheal him on every single GCD to keep him up.
The truly terribly geared tanks also rely on most of those heals being crits.
That is still doable, as long as everyone else is doing their job of interrupting and not standing in damage.
Of course... yeah, you know how it is.

The worst boss to heal in the game is definitively the serpent boss in eye of aszhara. The damage output is high, everyone is taking stupid amounts of damage, and that annoying wind is blowing you into stuff all the time. So you have to move. Which means not healing. Which means the tank dips down to 25% HP again. And you then have to spamheal him like crazy to get him up again. But now everyone else is nearing critical levels. So you pull a Divine Hymn or something to save the situation. It's _barely_ working. But OH no! You're being blown into a damage zone, and must move and cancel the effect! But the everyone dies! So you say fuck it and eat the damage anyway, taking deadly damage in hope to save everyone else while your divine hymn does its thing. Which really isn't working... but you seek to delay it as much as possible. And then you die from that damage, and everyone is like "WTF healer, why didn't you move!?" followed by a votekick.

But even as terrible experience as that is, it's still a whole lot more comfy than healing heroics in Cataclysm. Cata healing was like that for every boss, with an added "fun limit" of being able to cast 8 heals before OOMing. Legion healing is amazing in comparison, and pretty much great in general. Just avoid those undergeared tanks. You really cannot deal with them unless everyone else is on their A game.

[Wild]

Long story short, I'm a paladin who tried healing a heroic for the first time today, I got Violet Hold and it didn't go well in the slightest.

All my gear was mythic quality, I had int trinkets equipped, I had healbot installed, I knew how to play the spec, I levelled my artifact to 13, I had decent relics in each slot and still I had to spam Flash of Light and blow all my cooldowns before the first boss just to keep the tank alive.

As a tank, I have no trouble carrying a bad healer, I assumed that the reverse would be true as well. Is it possible for a bad and/or undergeared tank to invalidate the efforts of a well geared and prepared healer or do I just suck?

Kthanks, plz be nice.

What tank was it? What spec?
I had the same experience in VH the other day. I wrote about it on this forum. I thought it was some kind of bug. I also had decent EQ, good skill, all CDs on tank (DH), and he died anyhow. I thought he specced DD instead of tank. Something was extremel weird that day.
Post here: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...5#post42289035
Did u finish that dungeon? Or did u have to quit?
In my post, it seemed that the tank could have been "red" not wearing all his gear without noticing.

[MasterHamster]

Sometimes it feels like there should be a popup window when a tank/dps dies telling them how much avoidable damage they took the last 10 seconds before dying.
I only have a tank so far in Legion and I make sure to keep an eye on the dps and how quickly some of them manage to get themselves killed. When some tard manage to go from 80+% to 0 in less than 2 seconds you can bet your ass I'm gonna call you out if you go verbal on the healer.

Oh look, you got hit for 900k by an obvious telegraphed ability.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

I found healing to be challenging during the pally artifact quest, but I'm pretty sure that's because I've never played a healer before and I suck at it. :P

[Charge me Doctor]

You can't just spec into healing and call yourself healer. You know, you have to learn your role first.

We had our SP respec into a healer for mythics, he was awful (and wanted to play disc) because he is not used to healing. He panicked every time something happened, spammed flash heals all the time (because he didn't know that he has ~20 seconds to heal everyone up and there will be no AoE for this time at all), he hold his cooldowns too much (on Xavius every time he targeted someone with his 5 seconds facemelt - he died, and healer didn't used his miracle, wings or any other cooldown), you know, usual stuff when someone is not familiar with his role and how you should do on an encounter.

So... keep it going and you will be fine

[Deleted]

Honestly, your tank probably sucked and DPS stood in nasty stuff. I've healed all Heroic on my 820 Resto Druid and had no issues, except for one tank in Neltharions Lair who thought I had infinite mana and my HoTs ticked for 400k. Still managed, it was tough though.

The only thing I don't like about healing in Legion is how easy it is to keep everyone topped off through light/medium periods of damage and how hard it is to keep people alive when they really get a pounding. I can spam regrowth on a tank, with full hots, and only stabilize his HP, let alone improve it or even keep up with the other group members.

Granted, situations like this are extremely rare, but it has happened and it's a struggle. Gear might improve that of course, I'm only starting to gear up.

PS: wtb good DH tanks. They've been a mess.