Handling "Bad Healer" Complaints (as a healer)

[Meowse]

Throughout WotLK, healers were so overpowered that they trivialized the other roles. Bad tank? Put a Paladin on them. DPS standing in the fire? Holy Priest or Resto Druid spamming Rejuve. Only the 2-5% of WoW players who engaged ICC at low buff levels ever experienced a fight that required the other roles to perform to capacity. And healing was so overpowered that, even with the burden of the entire raid on healers, they didn't have a serious challenge. In WotLK, the only way your group could wipe was huge, hideous, blatant errors by a non-healer (tank pulls 5 groups at once, DPS pulls the boss directly onto DPSself, etc.), or abject incompetence by the healer.

The WotLK experience has conditioned every class to blame wipes on one of these two factors.

The cause of wipes has changed. Modern instances, even 5-man instances, require top performance from healer, tank, and DPS alike. What has not changed is the expectation in the WoW player community that wipes are the result of hideous, blatant errors by a non-healer, or abject incompetence by the healer.

The result of this, as heard frequently in the "Blizzard's response to Healer complaints" thread, is healers getting blamed (or even kicked from group) for every wipe, even if the tank breaks CC, the DPS stand in the fire, and the total damage output of the group drags the boss fight out to three minutes.

This isn't, in my opinion, a fatal problem. The queue timers for healers are down to under a minute again, and if a group has the bad judgment to kick a good healer because someone stood in the fire, the next group is likely to be much better. But it's a problem, and a frustration--and even if it's not a practical problem, it's an emotional problem. No one likes to hear "HEALER YOU SUCK" followed by a group kick.

So. What strategies have you, as healers, found to ameliorate this problem? Some that I've tried:

1) Warning the group that they need to let me drink to full mana after each pull, use the available CC, and stay out of the fire.
2) Healing the DPS when they stand in the fire, even if I run out of mana before the boss dies.
3) NOT healing the DPS when they stand in the fire, even if I run out of mana before the boss dies.
4) Blowing all of my cooldowns, and a mana pot, per trash pull, in order to keep the DPS who are standing in the fire alive.
5) Delighting in the groups where the tank marks and the DPS CC, and trying to be grateful when bad groups are kind enough to blame me for their failings and kick me so that I can find one of the aforementioned delightful groups.

None of these are entirely satisfactory, although the order of effectiveness is something like (5), (1), (4), (3), (2). Each has its own problems.

I'm looking for ideas. Let's brainstorm.

[levandor]

Well, so far nobody complained about me, but well, try to macro this:

Forgot to heal? No, i DID NOT forgot to Heal, i LET YOU DIE

What else you can do is this:

a) get recount
b) switch to the Deaths tab
c) stupid DPS dies in fire
d) Post recount of how he died in the fire
c) profit

and yes, i love recount, its such a handy tool!

Or get ensidia fails (or what its called) and set it to: announce fails in /p
so that nifty addon will post in your party chatt after each fight, who failed at moving away from bad stuff

And last but not least, the most important abbility for all healers, you should have recived this arround lvl 15, if not visit your class trainer again:

dont care for idiots
cast time: instant
costs: 0 Mana (@ lvl 85)
Makes you not caring for people which suicided in an dungeon and trying to blame you for it.

Really, just dont care for it, let people die if they fail, in worst case, you get a new group within seconds.

[Zacksauce]

If ppl start to pull I announce in the party if you pull it I will let you die. As I explain each boss I say at the end. If you stand in it ima let you die and ill laugh. I only pug normals though. We have a set group for my heroics. Grant it I am raid geared I can easily heal the people in a normal. I choose not to because they need to learn the hard way.