[ Opinion ] Healing Pugs is much worse than Tanking Pugs

[Alvito]

I agree man, saying volcanic is enough D priceless healing a pug that takes 5 volcanics into face in 20 seconds and after a wipe says that the healing is a bit low.

It is even better when it is the healer getting gobbled up by those then bitches that aggro isn't being kept when 100% of their dmg taken is from volcanic. Of course if you run with random people, expect random things to happen, good or bad. The upside is tanking or healing with newer people or a poor group can make you much better at the role you are playing. I look at pugs as potential practice or skill honing.

[Queen of Hamsters]

I'm of the same opinion as you and have been for quite some time now. It just seems like it's much more likely that you'll be teamed with idiots if you choose the healing role, meaning you are also the one taking the flack most of the time. I prefer to tank pugs because I get to decide the flow, the routes and pulls.

[Kokolums]

I used to heal pugs on my holy priest and enjoyed it but they feel gutted. Weve lost power word shield which was a nice aid in healing. Weve lost fear which was a nice aid in healing. Makes it very very hard to pull an amazing clutch save. I dont like holy priest now.

Resto shaman is where its at. I can pull a clutch save with my aoe stun totem or my aoe super heal totem.

Also to react more quickly i designed f1-f5 for casting healing surge on each party member with this macro:

#showtooltip
/stopcasting
/cast [@toonname] Healing Surge

[Gyrotex]

Lol, I really had to share this with you guys!!

[nekobaka]

^lol. Well I would be if it was not late at night. Bottom left is me when I end up in mana management mode and have to keep the tank and competent DPS alive.

[donbooger]

The tanks fails are a lot easier to see. 1 shot? You messed up your mitigation. Pull too much, pull wrong group etc. Everyone knows where a tank messed up and they will rarely get blamed for a wipe on a basic pull if nothing stands out as a failure from them.

Healers however. It takes good dungeon knowledge and experience to judge a healer correctly, something rare in casual players. Pug healers are lambs amongst the casual wolves. If you wipe, the health bars were lost on your watch, you will get some blame from those who don't know better.

[Deleted]

Pretty much.

It's also a reason why you rarely see good healers in pugs.

I play all 3 specs to a high level and I don't pug as a healer, like ever, since I got my tank spec going, and I'm a main healer.

[Wild]

I hear you and see it as a valid argument. My guess is however that you might feel this way more if you play non-self-sustaining tanks, i.e. not a DK, DH, and Pally, to a lesser extent? I.e. if you NEED to be healed pretty much all the time like a Prot Warrior or Druid - then yes, you 100% rely on how decent your healer is.

This is partly explaining why we see so many "bad" DH tanks who just leap out of reach all the time, knowing that they'll self-sustain for a while. DKs would do the same, if they could, but luckily they are nowhere as mobile - lol...

Posting this thread and reading responses was actually an interesting experience for me, that put me back on the fence, I have to admit.

As in -

I already have 3 tanks (DH, DK, Pally), and I don't want to tank every night. Yes I still believe that I do better (and have better overall experience) as a tank, but I simply don't feel like tanking all the time.

Which is why I think I've chosen Resto spec for this new Druid. Sure, it was painful, and less "in control", as I've shared in the OP, but e.g. last night I've jumped on Resto again and healed DHT+2, and had the best experience ever! It was chilled, people were mutually respectful, I didn't need to dash everywhere and grab mobs like crazy - was just running behind everyone keeping them up like a grandpa.

I think there is definitely a place for this spec-playing variety. I guess I'll just avoid flat-out shit places like EoA and VotW when I'm healing?

U can have good luck or bad luck with pugs. It seems u got into a good group, which is fun ofc. Bad groups can stress u out easily, if u have to make up for others mistakes.
I feel u, if u dont feel like tanking 24/7. I have been resto dru since vanilla, always as main. Never got bored. However, every now and then ai like to do some tanking or some dmg. Thats normal in a game that gives u so many possibilities.
Btw, EoA is one of the easier dungeons, especially when it comes to affixes. Votw can be a bitch. DHT is always fun n easy.
Find ur way, heal the dungeons that u feel like. E.g. I dont tank HoV, cos i dont feel like it

[Deleted]

Deffo true now.

As tank i can go up to +12 in pugs and not be so bothered. I direct where the mobs stand so i can "force" melee to move out of crap and i can keep myself alive very well now if it's a bad healer.
As a healer i don't even bother to pug anything above +5 cause 90% of the time you get either a clueless tank which you end up spamhealing or clueless dps who constantly stand in crap or doing 200k dps with 890 ilvl. Or worse, a combination of both.

While i do most of my keys with guildies and refrain from pugging most of the time cause of above reasons, if i do ever need to pug something i usually do it as a tank and would not even consider going in as a healer.

Just did a 14 nelths and one of our dps bailed, another was like half a player needed all our cooldowns up on each scorp to kill them, bosses were easy enough though.

Bosses were easy enough with 1,5 dps on +14 with tyrannical? Sounds like a huge pile of nonsense to me.

[Deleted]

I'm the opposite as the OP as in my raid team you don't get opporutnitys to do this as it's all to smooth and all the bases are covered.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...3&type=healing

you need the pug LFR (looking for retards) composition to make it more fun and exciting, nothing worse than having nothing to heal or coming away with 80%+ overhealing because you are all trying to snipe each others heals.

i'm Holyhelper BTW

[Deleted]

I always tank.
Been guildless now for 12 years, as a tank you can force almost all mechanics towards your side.

Dps standing in fire?
Move mobs out of fire.

Deadly mob casting spell? Interrupt.
Many deadly mobs casting many spells, AoE stun.

Low DPS?
I do good dps as tank.

Bad healing?
I got good self-healing and can just kite forever if it's required.

DPS disconnecting?
Whatever, just gonna go abit slower.

Healer disconnecting?
Yeah, this is probably the only thing that can fail, but one of the dps can swap to healing if your lucky.

[ItachiZaku]

I loved healing the holiday boss on toons I hadn't used in awhile. That scaling idea is one of the dumbest fucking things ever. I que up as a level 26 healer, tank has 6 million health... my rejuv's still only healing him for 200 points a tick.... he goes down had and fast. Like, you obviously at total shit if you have 6 million health and can't keep yourself up on faceroll holiday boss, especially when you see your healer has 9K health and is green tossing 200 ticks on you.

I did learn how to disc heal with the holiday boss though. Holy is garbage, i blame the scaling but felt like bullshit.

[Orangetai420]

I main a resto druid, easiest job in the game. Its the best role to carry shit groups.

[Heathy]

I loved healing the holiday boss on toons I hadn't used in awhile. That scaling idea is one of the dumbest fucking things ever. I que up as a level 26 healer, tank has 6 million health... my rejuv's still only healing him for 200 points a tick.... he goes down had and fast. Like, you obviously at total shit if you have 6 million health and can't keep yourself up on faceroll holiday boss, especially when you see your healer has 9K health and is green tossing 200 ticks on you.

I did learn how to disc heal with the holiday boss though. Holy is garbage, i blame the scaling but felt like bullshit.

holy is amazing if you go with piety and benediction, you can stick up 4 poms and basically go afk.

seriously though, I was using circle of healing because you could sanctify and coh at the same time and get a nice double instant cast aoe heal and it was working really well for running m+ and topping ppl up.

i've been using the pom spec for a couple of weeks now and its amazing, I can match resto druids, best output i've seen myself do is about 700k hps during hymn. honestly if your struggling with holy, piety and benediction, keep pom on cooldown = win.

if you get the legendary holy legs aswell you get 6 seconds added to all the renews you cast for free. you very rarely if ever need to hard cast renew and it will be one of your top 10 heals.

its a really good spec because of the way the passives interact with each other, you have a trait on your weapon that makes pom heal ppl with renew, you have a talent that has a 40% chance to make pom leave a renew, those effects feed off one another. so while pom is bouncing around its leaving renews and triggering that weapon heal when it bounces to someone that has renew. honestly it makes some content almost afk-able. just fire off 4 poms, sit back and watch yourself top meters.

[micwini]

It probably is, but healers get blamed because they don't heal enough. Tanks get blamed for everything else that goes wrong.

[Deleted]

holy is amazing if you go with piety and benediction, you can stick up 4 poms and basically go afk.

seriously though, I was using circle of healing because you could sanctify and coh at the same time and get a nice double instant cast aoe heal and it was working really well for running m+ and topping ppl up.

i've been using the pom spec for a couple of weeks now and its amazing, I can match resto druids, best output i've seen myself do is about 700k hps during hymn. honestly if your struggling with holy, piety and benediction, keep pom on cooldown = win.

if you get the legendary holy legs aswell you get 6 seconds added to all the renews you cast for free. you very rarely if ever need to hard cast renew and it will be one of your top 10 heals.

its a really good spec because of the way the passives interact with each other, you have a trait on your weapon that makes pom heal ppl with renew, you have a talent that has a 40% chance to make pom leave a renew, those effects feed off one another. so while pom is bouncing around its leaving renews and triggering that weapon heal when it bounces to someone that has renew.

This guys knows what he's talking about :-)

[Heathy]

This guys knows what he's talking about :-)

I can't take all the credit it was the priest forum here that showed me the way, I was using a sub par talent choice and found myself doing 5-10% less healing than my bro who plays resto.

now in raids we are tied some bosses he'll do better than me but if I look at overall for a whole raid night we are usually tied with 24%-25% of the healing while the holy pala we have is a little less skilled and sits at about 19-20%

i was sceptical of how well the pom build would work, but it does work you can cast 1 pom every 6-7 seconds and its possible to have pom on all 5 group members, its duration refreshes when it bounces, there is a weapon talent that gives it a chance to not consume a charge when it bounces.

it absolutely rocks on fights with consistent ticking damage because pom will just bounce around like crazy, cenarius for example, you can crank out so much healing on a fight like that its insane. the poms aren't so good for a fight like ursoc where damage is basically individual bursts then nothing pom doesn't bounce so good on fights like that. but that is the sort of fight where you mostly spot healing anyway, using poh to get sanc off cd is still an option there.

[Nzete]

I agree man, saying volcanic is enough D priceless healing a pug that takes 5 volcanics into face in 20 seconds and after a wipe says that the healing is a bit low.

I have a thing with volcanic week and healing pugs. Clear something in the 7 to 9 range and call it a week. It is like the dps think that they need to marinate in it for a dps buff or something.

[Snackpack]

Pugging while playing the healer or the tank is pure masochism.

Pretty much this. I only heal m+ with a tank I know and trust. There are too many tanks out there who think they're immortal or don't pay attention to anyone but themselves. Tanking a pug is easier to carry but there's always the kids who spam "gogogo".

[Deleted]

Hahahaha. Thats some fucking great e-peening right there.

"FUCK YEAH". Instead of just casually walking over to the dps and laying down 1 aoe ability that will get threat of all the mobs in an instant because my threat modifier is increased by 500% and has made tanking the easiest role ever, I'm going to use a redundant ability, store it into my memory banks so I can go onto a forum and shitpost other people about how awesome I am".

If you think holding threat is all a tank needs to do then you're either an awful tank or a very ignorant dps/healer.

The tank needs to handle everything the dps does and more, be it interrupts, stuns, CC or mechanics. On top of that the tank leads the charge and needs to know which packs to pull, where to pull them as well as which targets are priority. This is even more important in mythic plus as you only want to reach 100 % enemy forces, no more no less, so with each dungeon you need to memorize which packs are the most efficient. Which of course is all messed up on weeks with teeming as the % is different.

On top of all this a dps can mess up and die and the group can still probably finish the encounter, whereas if the tank falls it's very likely a wipe. The only thing that tanks have an easier time with is an easier "dps rotation", but even that should never be a problem for any damage dealer, as they should have memorized their rotation well enough to handle in their sleep on target dummies in Orgrimmar/Stormwind.

I played dps from Vanilla to the end of MoP, and it's a really simple role most of the time. As a tank I don't give a shit whether or not you as a dps top the charts or not. If you stand in volcanic or fail to interrupt the Risen Scout's knife dance causing one or more deaths, I consider you to be awful.

To get back on topic;

I would probably never be able to play as healer regardless of whether it's a pug or not, simply because I would see so many more mistakes that everyone in the group makes, and I already see plenty as a tank. I have big respect for all the healers out there who manage to cope with all the mistakes people commit, and still manage to stay sane.