Healers for Heroics

[kronpas]

It was frustrating at first, but thing gradually settled down afterward. With fast paced leveling, people are rerolling healing alts left and right. My queue as heal at first was almost instant, but now its getting longer and longer. And I think its good, we need more people playing heal even though their mains are DPS/tank - they will help the community to adapt to the new healing model.

[Kaynot]

used to be enhancer shaman(since TBC) only but because of long pug queue times i run most heroics as restoration.In WotLK i healed with my disc priest alt for fun.
Still i cant say healing is hard, for me its around same level as dpsing as enhancer-you have to move fast (small WotLK HP pool says hi), you have to avoid damage by interrupting mean casts (<3 Wind Shear),you have to time your abilities properly.
I read restoration guide on wow forum,reforged haste/crit to spirit and i dont have any mana probs if people dont eat damage they not supposed to.
From my POV healers (at least resto shamans) are doing fine,with 333 gear(not enchanted!) you can heal every encounter in every hc dungeon, the only requirement is that other group members know what to do,avoid aoe/cleaves and make use of cc.If they dont you as healer should explain tactics politely instead of whining/flaming

[Nørf]

People see fun differently. I don't think the new level of hard is fun or challenging in a good way, it's RNG and being helpless. So yeah, I'm close to quitting. BC hard, then I'll be game.

[RodneyStanger]

Healing (heroics) isn't hard, nor was it ever. I was holy at 80, I healed to 85 and still am. I'm rolling pvp specced and geared and have no issues whatsoever.

Don't take this as an attempt to brag, and please do not say "paladins are OP", all I want to say is people are exaggerating the difficulty of healing. A lot.

[nerdraaaaage]

being a resto shaman from all through ulduar-ICC, i had little to no trouble healing i leveled 80-85 as enhancement because it was my offspec. at 85 i noticed a very big change in healing... i respecced my resto spec into pvp enhance becuz i always had a thing for enhance pvp :] ... i went back to resto pve in like 3 days and now im rocking a 350 ilvl ;] just fixed a few of my enchants and gained more heroic pieces.. shouldn't be hard for others either.

[SilkforCalde]

People see fun differently. I don't think the new level of hard is fun or challenging in a good way, it's RNG and being helpless. So yeah, I'm close to quitting. BC hard, then I'll be game.

That's wrong though. It's simply not even close to true. It's not harder. It's just different. If you're having that much trouble, it's simply a lack of knowledge. Nothing more, nothing less.

[ruuBEN]

Been healing since TBC started.
ain't gonna stop healing.
holy paladin. it's the only paladin. ret and prot does not exist to me.

[Fergand]

I'm sorry..... I decided to re-roll for Cataclysm and I'm not high enough for Heroics yet... =(

I've been playing Healer for a long long time now, and I'm not going to stop just because it's a challenge again...

Though I'm sure it's not so much the difficulty, as much as the frustration... People have got used to getting healed through preventable damage (such as fire) because us healers have been able to handle it... Now many of those same people don't understand that we just cannot do this anymore, and so healing gets much more frustrating, as we fail because someone else is too dense to figure out they're causing problems...

[Njae]

Healing has never been really hard, sure if you have mentally deficient dps that has a problem moving out of things on the ground it is hard but that is more of a problem with the people playing dps and not the healing.

Been healing with all 4 classes in different periods of the game since vanilla. Coming now from wotlk to cata it took 2-3 heroics to adapt to not having an infinite mana pool and relying on one heal to do all my bidding.

[Unbelievr]

I, too, welcome a challenge. I love healing premade groups or guild groups as a shaman, even though the gear may be a bit lacking for multiple group members. I do not, however, sign as healer in LFD anymore. I got tired of being blamed for every mistake the others did, and that I couldn't save them from. Tired of having everyone stand still, waiting for a heal when I'm drinking. Tired of dps tunnel visioning their dps and still have nothing spectacular to show for it. Tired of being vote-kicked because I wasn't a paladin.

Instead, I sign as elemental. I can do really great damage, help topping off people between pulls, provide emergency heals and consistent interrupts. I can taunt, have elemental totems to help out, and thus feel I can really shine as a support character as elemental. I can even back up the healer when the group starts focusing the blame on the healer yet again. In a random heroic I won't have much time to click my buttons at all, because keeping everyone up can quickly keep me locked on globals in the worst situations. I can also actually explain fights inbetween trash packs without risking any lives, and dungeon guiding was really one of the lacking aspects in the start.

It's not that I'm scared to heal heroics, because I'm fully capable of doing so, but I feel that I'm much more useful as a hybrid dps instead.

[Fuzzzie]

I personally am enjoying a bit of a challenge. It's a lot more fun than throwing up a couple rejuv's and WG and then looking to see what's on TV. It was defiantly tricky the first few run's I healed, and we still wipe from time to time, but those occurrences are becoming less and less. Once you get your mana over 100k and get some practice in and learn the fight's it's not so bad.

That being said, we have lot's of healers in our guild and everyone seems to be having fun with it.

[Pascal]

I've wanted to start healing because of the changes.

Haven't swapped my OS to resto on my druid yet because my original plan was to level up my shaman and heal on him. But... northrend is awful, so that plan isn't going very well.

[axio]

I actually rerolled from a healer (Resto Druid) to another healer (Holy Priest), does that count? lol

[Nørf]

That's wrong though. It's simply not even close to true. It's not harder. It's just different. If you're having that much trouble, it's simply a lack of knowledge. Nothing more, nothing less.

Yes it is different. I'm not having trouble at all, nor did I ever say so. I implied that people see fun as something different and I don't believe that RNG and feeling helpless is fun, hence I'm not throwing my hands in the air. I also never stated anything IS hard, I said "I don't think the new LEVEL of hard is fun", that is justified by the majority, not me. Don't put words in my mouth, but it's ok, I forgive you.

[Piklez]

Made my first healer ever a month before the Shattering and loving it. I am still getting used to the new style of healing but I'll get more solid as I progress.

[Plaincow]

nope i still heal on my shammy the new style is fun but it can be more of a chore than fun to heal a heroic.

[Deleted]

Healing is piss easy man, Learn to not use fast heals cause they will get you oom fast. Realy its just about l2p. But that doesnt count for healers alone. If the dps is retarted and doesnt avoid dmg he dies. Then they blame the healer and kick him. Fun times those random Heroics. I think they should remove it. Random is not fun anymore. It was fun in wotlk cause it didnt matter if someone failed, you just healed him up without any problems.

Nowadays i just message in trade for a group and only take ilvl 350 or higher, makes hc's piss easy. realy. try it.

[darkwarrior42]

Holy Pally since Classic; brief excursion as main spec prot during TBC, but kept my holy set intact even then. Went back to holy MS while leveling through Wrath, have been MS holy ever since.

Not sure my outlook on the healing changes is quite as valid... aside from the fact that my core healing spells just seem to scale a bit better, our healing style is completely changed. Even if they hadn't tried to fundamentally alter the way healers operate between Wrath and Cata, I would still be nothing like what I was, simply because of the mechanics changes inherent to the paladin combined with the abundance of new spells at our disposal.

Still, quite happy with healing atm. Different that Wrath, but still fun.

[Janaa]

I've noticed a decline in healers majorly due to the difficulty of healing in this expansion. I think that it's a weak move on a healer's part to quit when it gets hard. If you're a true healer, you will deal with it and get better with the new style of healing.

So my question is: Are you a former healer that has re-rolled, switched spec, or gone to an alt to dps or tank?

Maybe you've noticed a reduction in healers in PUGs? Certainly, I've stopped running random HEROIC dungeons and primarily just run in-guild, as random groups frequently are extremely retarded struggle with basic game concepts, and as a healer it's common to be "blamed" no matter who caused an issue - unless that individual immediately owns up.

Undergeared tanks running heroic Grim Batol, and then stand there for the mace swings and blame the healer when they die.

Overgeared tanks who say "I don't need anything CCd" and start chain pulling, not realising that it's generally the healer's gear level/ability which determines whether or not CC is required, not the tank's (unless the tank is woefully undergeared).

Tanks and DPS who make the same mistakes, every run, over and over. DPS I've generally found more willing to "learn" as they don't want to get kicked from the group. However, there is still DPS dying to wholely avoidable abilities that can't necessarily be healed through (especially with the single-target heal priority system us pally healers have to work with), and bad tanks abound.

So no - I'm still a healer. I just avoid heroic randoms as it's a plethora of fail. I still run normals for rep sometimes, and if I find a particularly good group, I invite them to come do a heroic next. But I won't queue for a heroic PUG outright. Not anymore.

It's odd how in a guild run, when I say "hey guys, kill this mob first, as it silences/freezes/stuns/chains/bubbles/whatever me and prevents me from healing", a guild group does it - every time, or CCs it. Yet the same statement to a random run just gets largely ignored. Countless times (before I simply stopped running heroics in randoms) I'd tell people this, they'd ignore. Then, I'm unable to heal. Tank dies. So then they kick me. Yay. And this is after having to bubble on the previous pull because the same thing happened. So, no bubble, stunned again, and tank goes down in 4 seconds. Folks just don't learn. (In b4 "but in that situation you could have..." - I know what I can do in every situation. This story has been simplified, to describe a situation where no more "outs" remained. Thanks).

[TGS]

Honestly I think the problem is less the healers and more the tanks and dps that expect more of a healer than they can give. I know I've been kicked from groups even though I was healing just fine but the rest of the group didn't seem to do much to preserve their life and make my job easier and when a few people would die (Standing in ice slicks with increasing damage anyone?). The point is while the healer's job has gotten more difficult... everyone's job has but when push comes to shove it's usually the healer that gets booted first now.

Also I've found that noone seems to blame the tank when they overpull now... or blame the dps when they're pulling 3-4k dps thus dragging fights out far longer than they are designed forcing the healer to heal a lot more therefore go oom. Seems like everyone focuses on "the shit healer" even if it's not really the healer that's bad. It probably doesn't help but compound the issue that a lot of the groups are 3/4 guild groups in LFD and it usually goes 1 tank 4 dps and they end up having to pug the healer. So they would never ever blame their own guildies so it MUST be the healer's fault if they're struggling. Even if the healer (aka myself in a couple dungeons) actually overgears it.