I think this is a problem with many classes now, not just healers. How many times have you seen/heard someone say, "I rolled a DPS warrior". I don't know about you, but having played a warrior for the better part of a year every time I hear that statement it simultaneously makes me want to throw up, and gouge the persons eyes out with a fork. When I looked at the classes for WoW, I looked at warrior and said, wow tanking seems like it would be pretty interesting, I'd like to do that. Sure I needed and used a 2 hander to level, but every time I entered an instance for probably the first 4-5 months of the game I had a sword, and shield on. And the only reason I stopped doing that was because doing UBRS in nearly full epics gave crap for rage.

Even now I'm more frustrated with NOT being able to tank. I have almost the best non-raid tanking gear (with the exception of the enchanted thorium stuff because I'm too cheap to buy it), on my warrior, and its frustrating knowing that if I taunt on say the tiger or panther that I'm going to nearly get insta-gibbed. We tried an alt MC, and my hp bar was like a yo-yo.

Going back off topic. Sub, to understand what it was like not only would you have to unnerf warriors compared to what you see now, I'd have something like 8.5-9k hp, 1400-1500AP, and 30% crit or so, if you scaled my relative power vs the majority of the playerbase. The difference between me, and other people who could do MC/Ony then, compared to the majority was mind-boggling.

edit: fixed my grammer.

Well, my point was that Blizzard has given many classes many different routes to follow and from 1-59, it works great. We have Shadow Priests, "DD Warriors", Feral Druids, and so forth. However, my point is that once you begin raiding, your guild and gear tends to pidgeon-hole you into one specific role (Warrior for tanking, Druid for Healing, yada yada).

I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but it may be a significant factor in Priest burn-out.

Haha, really? Crap, tanking Z'G in my shitty tanking gear should be fun. :laugh:

Yea, I definitely can't say first-hand what it was like being a Warrior pre-Pat days, but I remember the awesomeness that was Might.

I have to ask, and this mostly in the context of my other thread about trying to understand good raid healing, what do you think about auto-cancel mods?

My feeling about a healing priest is that the class works pretty well up through BRD and all of the 5-man content. There is a lot of room for ingenuity and skill in healing, and the process requires more attention and thought. Once you start getting into multiple groups, however, the challenge is not really there and healing degenerates into the least-common-multiple type approach we see today where everyone uses flash heal all the time.

There is just a brief period where the raid content necessitates a real healing strategy. When we first started Firemaw, we had three healing rotations, and there was some "healing outside the lines" required during this time where I felt I could go above and beyond to save someone's ass and the raid. Now that our priests are geared up sufficiently, however, mana regen is never an issue anymore, and we just FFA heal all day. It can get boring.

I think the priests that complain most about the issue are primarily a by-product of the guild they're in. There are guilds that get all over healers against Broodlord if a tank dies to MS + blastwave or a drake thrash + shadowflame. They don't understand how easily tanks can die in BWL and the amount of burst damage they can receive. So there's frustration there for the priest when they're blamed for a random occurance that killed the tank.

And truthfully, just about every tank death for us now is when there's some strange coincidence where a bunch of priests land their heals at the same time and a lull of no healing occurs coupled with the burst damage I mentioned before. There's no easy way to see when other people are healing or when their heals are going to land and there's no way to actively predict when you should start a heal in order for it to land when the tank is actually missing health. So you just end up spamming that flash all day hoping for a heal to land.

Useful tool, dangerous if overused.

I use mana-conserve mods on most trash, and in the simple "big melee boss that hits the tank" scenario (Golemagg, Hakkar, Chromaggus, etc.) when more than 5 or so healers are healing the same tank.

Other fights require more finesse. I want to time my heals to land within 0.2-0.3 sec after a Shadow Flame. I can't do that with mana conserve on. Or sometimes I'd rather lose mana to overhealing than risk having a spell autocancelled 0.5sec before completion when the tank ends up taking burst damage 0.3sec before completion.

The fewer people are healing my target, the less useful and the more dangerous mana conserve becomes. With 10 people all using it and spamming heals, it's futile to try to squeeze in my own manually. With 4 people as part of a rotation keeping up a Firemaw tank, I can manually fit my heals in between theirs for maximum efficiency.

Perhaps. I would imagine the majority of the WoW player base is like me in the respect that this is their first real MMORPG so people roll a class not necessarily understanding up front the ins-and-outs of the end-game or that there is no way to "win" the game.

I loved druids in Warcraft III so it was natural when I picked up WoW to roll a druid. I thought it would be a lot of fun to shape shift and at the time I really had no clue what a hybrid class was and what roles I would be expected to fill when grouping with others. I would expect many others would probably have a similar story to tell that ends in them learning to love their class immensely or re-rolling.

I suppose you could call it a wall; for me it was a wake-up call. I was one of those crazy balance druids leveling up. (This was pre-1.8 so I got a lot of, "WTF's," whenever I used Hurricane...) I had the great fortune to join a guild that had a lot of raiding experience from other MMORPGs so I pretty much got my ass kicked from 40-60 in a number of ways. I started raiding Stratholme, Scholomance, and BRS around 40 with our guild to give you how much patience our members had. At 40 I would zone in and aggro half the zone and then I would continue to nuke away at various level ?? mobs in the most blissful ignorance you have ever seen. Healing? I don't have any points into that.

Needless to say my guildies kicked me until I started to shape up and understand what my role was in a 5 / 10 / 15 / 40 man group. When they finally convinced me to ungimp myself and respec to Innervate I was amazed at how much my survivability increased. Sadly the days of 1600 - 2000 Starfire crits were gone, but hey I could outlast nearly any opponent and solo difficult mobs that would have owned me pre-Innervate. It was a very good thing I learned early on why I was a total retarded tool because at this point in the game most guilds would not have the patience to babysit someone until things click into place for them. I may be the exception in thanking my guild for forcing me into a certain spec. but it was well worth it.

The point I am trying to make really revolves around this. I love to heal. I never thought I would, but it is infinitely more rewarding for me to heal than to do anything else. I feel like I have so much more control over what is going on. People talk about the yawnfest they have spamming frostbolts all night and all I can think of is:

I don't know how it could get more exciting than this for anyone. I remember early on when we were working on Ragnaros and I am running out of mana hoping to god the sons pop so I can innervate or my potion timer comes up so I can squeeze out another Rejuv. before the MT the crit. that finishes him. I loved learning fights like Golemagg when you really, for the first time, have to work hard on mana conservation so you and your off-tank can last the entire fight.

Even when it becomes second nature and MC/Onyxia/BWL is something that your guild can do in their sleep you still can find ways to make it more challenging and hone your skills. Healing was fine for the tank off-tanking the last Majordomo Executus add with 3 healers? Try it with two, hell see if you can do it with one and see how much better you have gotten from the days of, "wow we killed 3 adds that time!"

Gurg points out one of the keys to being a great healer IMO. Try to be proactive, it will increase your enjoyment of healing immeasurably. If you're doing things like having a heal already casting so it lands as soon as the Warlock who pulled aggro. takes a hit it makes everyone a lot happier and will already have you ready for fights that require it.

Anyway I am rambling on and haven't answered the OPs question.

The druid was my first and only character until I hit 60. Once I hit 60 I rolled a few other classes and have leveled them all to 16-40 to get an idea of how their abilities work. I enjoy the Warlock I am leveling now and I really enjoy my Paladin and Shaman. I guess that means I like the challenge of playing a hybrid class and playing the support roles. To me its a lot of fun. Even though I may not be able to farm as well as a rogue or PVP as well those things are all secondary to raiding for me so I don't mind too much. As a resto. druid I want to pull my hair out in AB 90% of the time. I am on a heavily imbalanced server with a 3:1 alliance to horde ratio and when I do get into a AB / WSG game its usually the most miserable PUG to grace that BG in the history of the game. I think the most frustrating thing for me about PVP is loving to heal and actually doing it makes me one of the first targets for the opposing faction. If anything I would say the spec. and gear I use for raiding is fine for me when PVP'ing or farming because that's the playstyle I love.

Hehe - yah, back before it suffered the nerfing. It was horrible and I loved every second of it. Our GM hated me so much and would kick me out of groups to make me go level after I would low-level-aggro pull something and wipe us...

Anyhow - I guess I applied the scenario the OP described specifically to me and my experience, but I think my first post and one of your earlier posts:

pretty much sums up what I attribute healer burnout to. I think people are not clear on what they are getting into when they choose a particular faction / race / class and then they want the epics like everyone else and end up doing something they don't like or even hate just to get into a guild.

I think paladins are the best example of this I can think of. Our guild has had horrendous turn-over with Paladins. We cannot get Paladins who know what their role is to save our life. We have even had Paladins spec'ed holy with nice healing gear join up to only re-spec as soon as they are tagged and decide they are going to be a crit-a-din or tank.

Ah, I see what you're saying now. I guess I was hinting at that too, to a degree, but yes- very good point.


Edit- Actually, what you say seems to mirror what's been said earlier that people will roll a healing class just to get into raids and then end up playing their DD alts or respecing like that Paladin you mention.

Maybe they should put a gigantic disclaimer on the character selection screen whenever you mouse over a healing class. :laugh:

Until you can duo DMW with a warrior, none of you have shit on me.

I honestly think that the of purely non-holy classes rests soley on the shoulders of poor instance design. The "pew pew and outlast the monstars" philosophy of MC design essentially gaurantees that 20 hard working people can drag 20 lazy people through free epics provided that certian characters and classes be forced to roleplay one specific type of character.

I would like to see instances with diversified talent requirements and approaches. Whose to say that every 40 man instance needs to have bosses that take 40 people? Why not design an instance that has lots of smaller bosses sprinkled amoung big ones forcing the raid to split into smaller groups. Hell, get crazy, throw a timer on there requiring several smaller groups to accomplish set goals before the end-game monsters could be reached.

Blizzard has hinted that they would make more instances which had encounters that needed different talents/classes and I seriously wouldn't be suprised if Naxx's 18 bosses weren't designed in a "40 man zerg boss 1, 2 , 3 ... n " fashion.

Hey cool, Gurg mentioned me in a post. :)

It never occurred to me to play a healer class to get into groups, but I did strongly consider Warrior when retail hit. Warriors were in high demand then, and I enjoyed getting my beta warrior to 30. I stuck with warlock anyhow (though I do have a 60 warrior alt).

you rolled a support class...

Which class doesn't support the others?

rogues are pretty selfish if you ask me :).

But seriously though. Everyone rolled their class how they want and can play it how they want. Now just cause they choose to play their IUSETHEWORDTOONBECAUSEIMAGIGANTICFAGGOT how they want does not mean blizzard has to pander to that and give loot to help that group and same thing goes with RLs not having to bring those type of players along for the ride. Roll your shadow priest and do your BGs. Or change to a rogue and not get in anyways. Your choice, that is my opinion.

I had the misfortune to not entirely understand the abilities of a shaman and figured they would be more effective as healers(closer to a druid). I really should have rolled a priest but have to deal with what i have.

I'm not disagreeing with you and the only reason I don't use EM yet is that I need to keep forcing myself to think think think or I play Kjon like I dps on Taeme. But you also probably do realise I meant something entirely different from how you (and good healers) use EM.

Just saying.

There are several things at play here. First off, initial class choice depends heavily on your background. If you were an old EQ raider, you came to the classes in WoW, did some research and figured out each class' role from looking at their skills. Before I played a minute of beta, I could tell you each class' role in the endgame, and it has been correct in nearly all cases (I never thought warriors and priests would be viable raid dps, and I thought paladins would be better offtanks). I never would have imagined rolling a paladin to play a damage dealer, like some did.
Players from the Warcraft scene went in with the characteristics of the WC3 heros in mind, and picked their favorite hero. Players from the Diablo scene went in with those classes in mind. Players from the PvP MMORPGs (DAOC, SB) went in with much the same ideas we did, but not expecting class designs that were dependant on NPC AI to work, etc. Everyone came into the game with a different idea of what the classes were like, and obviously some of these are disappointed when the paladin is no longer a holy warrior of awesome destruction, but rather a typical cleric. Some people simply picked the wrong classes.

Then there's the poor itemization of high end healers. The loot has helped us heal better indeed, but once we leave the instance, we're barely better than what we were at 60. The warrior, rogue and hunter can grind twice as fast and kill twice as many players as they did a year ago, while the holy priest, holy paladin and resto druid (and to a lesser extent, resto shaman) are much the same once they have to do something other than healing. There's no feeling of power apart from what you get while raiding.

To make it worse, the honor system was designed in a way that penalizes healers heavily. When my warrior friends were grinding to rank 14, they were better off going solo in the BG than grouping with me and duoing, because they ended up with more honor with the first option. Alone, I could do very little to get honor. Again, the healing priest is left feeling relatively useless until he has 3+ of his friends around. For a game to be able to keep pure healers happy, it has to be designed in a way that encourages grouping.

I have to be honest, even though I love healing, being a control freak, I would trade my priest for a number of other classes instantly if I could. The constant need for backup to be able to feel powerful, when that backup would be better off alone, is terribly boring in the long run.

I've never used EM and I probably never will. Once you train yourself to watch the right way, its much more useful to group all your raid together on the screen. While I'm healing, what I look for most is changes in color (which means a large decrease in health.) One thing I notice a lot happening in in BWL trash pulls is people overhealing the rogue that is at 25% health but stable and not taking anymore damage, but ignoring the warrior who just got crit for 50% of his life and is still dropping, but not yet below the others. This leads to dead tanks, and a frustrated raid.

I rolled a undead shadow priest to kick ass in pvp. this was back when ubrs was the high end stuff and pvp was pretty enjoyable. there wasn't any real "goals" and people where just playing around with this new cool world. then pvp got a bit old and at the same time exciting and hard pve content came out and I let my mage friend have our first TOEP. from that point onward it got more and more pve focused.

I love my role in raids, anyone that's helped push their group through new challenging content will understand what I'm talking about. On the other hands our rogues thought mc was boring as hell probably 3-4 Months before I thought it was a complete drag.

So, it's the price we pay I supose but surely it must be understandable if people that remembers when we where the best pvp class in the game and now finds himself with less dps than when he hit lvl60 and free hk for anyone with a good weapon whines a bit? every other class in the game would react the same way.

Not to be criticizing your technique Belac, I'm sure you're a great priest, but that particular problem regarding the warriors can be solved by setting up a good amount of MT targets and/or the new Player Targets. I just can't imagine myself being able to heal as efficiently raidwide without the use of EM, and I raided for many months before it came out.

Yeah, personally, my healing style is much more mob-based than player-based. I find it lets me anticipate rather than heal reactively, which helps keep people alive. In most raid settings there are a very finite number of sources of damage. It's much easier for me to pay attention to what each of the three Wyrmguards is currently doing than it is for me to pay attention to the health of 40 different people. EM complements that approach very well, by allowing me to focus on the action and potential threats to the raid, while still being able to see fairly quickly if someone is in dire need of attention.

I imagine that the feeling DPS classes get when they drop some gigantic crit on something is what I experience when I know I just saved someone's life when, by all rights, they really should have been dead.

Stupid question, but what's EM?

Emergency Monitor, build into RaidAssist.