Originally Posted by
Harekrsna
I don't know if the healer population on my realm is going down, but it does seem like healing is the least attractive role in the game now (since tanks got major attention).
If you think about it, being a dps you get to constantly compete for more damage, on farm, etc; and when you gear its obvious how it helps you improve.
When you tank now, you get to do high dps (more than dps classes if you know how to play), you get to control where the boss goes and how he goes, and you take charge of the group for trash, etc. Probably the most interesting role to play now overall (unless you hate being a meat-shield).
Healers on the other hand heal the raid up, their jobs get easier on farm (and therefore less interesting), gear helps but isn't obviously contributing since healing is the raid dies or the raid doesn't die; the boss won't die 50% faster because the healers gained 5 ilvls. As farm goes on healer burnout occurs far faster than it does for dps and tanks.
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The end result from what I can tell is that most healers get burnt out and want to quit the game before a DPS or a tank will get burnt out, to top it off there are already far fewer healers healing in a raid because of the extra responsibility (its pretty obvious when a healer screws up). The raid group that I raid lead is currently World 259 9/13H and we've recruited 1 healer in the last 2 tiers, we removed one healer for being bad and had our tank switch to heals. We have been looking for a healer to take our resto shamans spot for months now and haven't been able to find a suitable healer. So I'm definitely feeling the difficulty in finding quality healers to raid with. Its almost at the point that I'm about to reroll from my Warlock to a healer simply because we need a better healer (since resto shamans are pretty much garbage this tier).
It also is really damaging to lose a healer during progression, just like a tank.