How to ease being nervous about healing any harder content?

[ItachiZaku]

Do a bunch of battlegrounds. That's how i learned to heal. The health bars were flopping all over the place, so crazy and hectic (wintergrasp) that it made predictable PVE so much easier (still have people that thing fire will make their arrows flaming arrows, and therefore do more damage... it doesn't). What it also does, it gets you used to people dying. And once you get over the fear of people dying and knowing that sometimes, you just can't save everyone, you'll lose that fear a bit.

Mind you, I haven't healed a heroic as a 829 ilevel healer, I tiptoe into harder things - but mainly, this expansion, is that I'm learning to manage my mana. I can easily go OOM as resto druid, and so I'm more concerned with being able to toss a heal. And so after doing a normal DT with all 110s (random) and having to drink like 8 times... I still have work to do.

[Deleted]

We all still mess up sometimes. Most important thing is admitting it. If someone in my group dies because of me, no matter if it are friends / guidlies / randoms I always apologize if it is my fault. Evaluate for yourself what went wrong and do better next time.

[Deleted]

Lots of good advice above, I'd chip in to re-iterate what one post above said, pick one dungeon, study it, watch a video so you know what to expect from certain nasty trash & bosses.

Teaming up with a tank who knows that you want to take it a bit slow is probably also a very good move.

I've just switched to maining a resto shaman this expansion having played it heavily as an alt in the last 3. Healing feels more skill-based than prior expansions, it is all about making the right spell decisions (and talent choices) to maximise your throughput and mana pool.

Each healing class has it's niche. Resto shaman (the only one for which I can speak) has great AoE healing capabilities but not-so-great single-target healing so, for mythics, it was necessary to use talents to increase my single-target healing. I imagine Paladins might feel the need to do the opposite somewhat (I'm just guessing here though).

[Marrilaife]

I've refrained from raiding for like 3 expansions now because of it.

1. Join a guild where people suck more than you. Yes, there's always that "semi-casual" guild where people are unskilled, or always "lag", but try raiding.

2. Raid with them, improve, outgrow them, move up to a better guild.

3. Repeat until you reach the progress level that satisfies you.

A lot of people apply to their "dream" guilds and keep getting rejected / kicked instead of starting from the bottom up.

Also, if I wasn't clear about it... don't pug. Few bad pugs with toxic atmosphere can discourage a player for a long time.

[Deleted]

Just me 2 cents.

When I started healing back in wrath, I was scared senseless.
I remember feeling my heart pumping hard and the adrenalin running through my veins.

But as a lot of other people have already said here - just do it.
If you fail, then try again. Remember you do not have to be the best right away.

/Cheers
Warjing

[Archibalde]

I'm always afraid of screwing it up and getting kicked from groups so I never really do any mythics or raids. How can one solve this? I've refrained from raiding for like 3 expansions now because of it.

Start small and work your way up, and be prepared. Make sure you understand your class and spec well, and that you have the proper buffs available (food, flask, rune, potions). Read about all the fight mechanics and/or watch some videos, then do Regular/Heroic dungeons and LFR until you have all the basics down. From there it's just about learning a few extra mechanics in higher difficulties and it makes it a lot less daunting. Finding a good guild that's at the same level as you also helps take a lot of the pressure off.

[Deleted]

Thanks for all the advice, I am going to try it this weekend to see if I can do it.

[AwkwardSquirtle]

Thanks for all the advice, I am going to try it this weekend to see if I can do it.

You can. Do the thing, it'll be fine.
Also being kicked isn't the end of the world if something goes wrong, learn from what went wrong and improve. Note cooldowns exist for a reason, don't forget about them.

[ManiaCCC]

healing is cakewalk honestly, probably the easiest task in any encounter.

[Deleted]

healing is cakewalk honestly, probably the easiest task in any encounter.

With good players, yes. With other type of players? No. In raids with AoE damage, hell no.

[Saft]

One of the biggest things that helped me is to know when I'm at fault and when somebody else is. These days I will intentionally wipe an encounter when I see dps taking way too much avoidable damage and then call them out on it because it's often an indicator how the rest of the instance will go and If I make them aware that I'm not making up for tunnel vision then the rest of the dungeon might go better.

One particularly nasty fight is mythic Hymdall with tornados that hit for 1m. If I see too many of those being soaked by idiots or "forget" that dragons carpet the ground then I'll make sure they know about it next time.

At times people will call you out for wiping when they fucked up because healers are often easy targets. Damage taken on recount or skada is a lifesaver, when I do north of 200k hps on a fight and get the blame for a wipe I'm gonna start a fight over it unless it's like wrath of azshara or something equally demanding.

[Paschlina]

Its all about experience. The more you do it the easier it becomes. You get used to your keybinds. What spells to use and how to prioritize correctly.

The next tip is to be confident in your healing. You need to know when someone died through lack of healing or their own mistakes. Own your mistakes and learn from them it will make you a better healer in the long run.

This is absolutely fantastic advice!

Make mistakes. Own them Just smash your head against the wall and you'll quickly pick up on when and where the different roles needs to be taken care of. Healing is all about experience.

I remember my first raid when i swapped from 3 expansions of DPS as Rogue, to healing back in WotLK. I was nervous. Piss-my-pants nervous. That feeling will still be there sometimes.

[Deleted]

As others have said, just go for it. I wasn't feeling comfortable when I healed my first challenge modes back in mop, but I had a really great pug there and they respected that. They also gave me very good tips on how I could improve although I messed up quite a few runs. Anyway it was a great experience and most importantly I gained a healthy lot of self confidence from it. Just be honest and give your best, there's neither rocketscience nor witchcraft involved.

[Auxora]

This also and the recommendations don't just apply to healing. People have the same nervousness over dps and tanking also. Dps is almost worse because you can't control the performance of other people in your group, it's kind of just a luck of the draw if between the 3 dps in a mythic group if it's you and 2 130-150k dps, or you and 2 200-250k dps that could potentially make you look awful on the meters if you aren't on point. Tank has that nervousness too since they have to know the pathing for every dungeon and are essentially leading the group. Healing just follows and has no in-group competition so although it's tough in different ways, in other ways they should be less nervous.

Generally people in mythic groups are cool though, and if you are nervous and joining a mythic through group finder you can kind of tell the groups to avoid if you are just starting them. The "840+", "know your stuff or get kicked", "fast run or else", "don't suck" are the ones you'll want to steer away from when starting (and even after lol). But doing guild runs first, or even just making sure you focus on 1 or 2 dungeons and being really comfortable with them in normal and then heroic are a good way to go. When you can do heroic easily then you know it's time to move on. Also take 10-15 minutes and watch some Youtube videos of the mythic dungeons with tips (look for Halls of Valor mythic guide on Youtube, for example) which will have info on what to watch for in heroic->mythic differences and try to memorize those.

Eye of Azshara, Halls of Valor, or Darkheart Thicket would be some of the easier mythics I'd recommend starting on first. You probably don't want to jump right into the tougher ones like Maw of Souls mythic (Helya is a pain) as your first one.

[Deleted]

In mythics, if a dps die.
It is virtually never the healers fault as virtually almost all damage sources can be evaded.

[Virond]

It's not as bad or as tough as you've built it up in your mind to be. Once you get the first one out of the way, you'll feel better about the subsequent ones. Remember that most of the failings in higher-level content is usually a team-based fail and not something you can pin on one person, like the healer. Some people don't understand that and think dying means that the healer isn't doing their job, when in reality there was an add not being interrupted or something like that. Wipes happen, if it was your fault apologize and move on. It's not a big deal.

[xpose]

In mythics, if a dps die.
It is virtually never the healers fault as virtually almost all damage sources can be evaded.

Nice sarcasm, tell me again how I can evade the Crystal Spike on Neltharions Lair

[Tolian]

I've been healing for several years now on my shaman, so take this FWIW, but one of the tools I use when I'm learning a new healing alt (recently disc as an example) is I would go to the proving grounds in my garrison and just keep running gold or endless until my heals and what buttons I pushed for each became second nature. I could have just worn that newness off in Normals or Heroics, but I felt bad about making some poor group suffer through me trying to remember what button I'm supposed to push when, so I just made the NPCs suffer for it. Poor Oto died numerous times...haha.

Otherwise, just go into a group and warn them. Healers are in high demand at the moment, so as long as you're not a terrible player (DIAF type) on top of being new to healing I think most people will be understanding. And if they're not? There's always another group looking for a healer! ;-)

[Spotnick]

I had the same issue when I started healing, but I was kind of forced into it because in our alt run we were short a healer, and it was with friends, so it's much more easier when you group with people you know and they know you might screw up.

I remember it was Halfus in Bastion of Twilight, and to my enormous surprised I was top heal by the end of the fight, and by the end of the Cata expansion I kept healing in my alt run, and it became my main role since the beginning of MOP and never looked back.

Really the best way to get better is to heal bad groups in bad gear... once you handle that, you won't have issues.

[Dominus89]

I'm always afraid of screwing it up and getting kicked from groups so I never really do any mythics or raids. How can one solve this? I've refrained from raiding for like 3 expansions now because of it.

If you do end up being kicked cause for whatever reason, or called out, just ignore it. Dont let a bunch of jackasses ruin your fun, eventually you'll get better and to get better, you need to do harder content.