I have some new Least Favorite Things that I thought I would share with you, from my new perspective as a healer.
1. People who won’t run back after a wipe.
If I have to run, you have to run. Period. End of story. This is especially annoying when the non-runner is a resser himself. If you, Mr. Druid, Priest, Pally, or Shammy are too good to res me, then I am most certainly not going out of my way to res you. Why should I run back and then waste mana on ressing and healing your sorry butt? I’m not a mage anymore. Water ain’t free. And you can just forget putting my life in danger to res you, I wear plate too, with all the increased repair cost that brings. And I’m a lot squishier in it than I look. Nobody will be better off if we’re both dead, especially not me.
This came to a head in Underbog a week or two ago when I was still in Outland. I was running with a warrior tank and mostly melee DPS. The last boss in Underbog is at the end of a curved tunnel, and if you get out of his LOS he’ll stop aggroing you. So when the tank and all the DPS bit it, I bubbled and ran around the corner to get out of combat. Everyone ran back except the tank. So I grudgingly snuck around the corner and tried to res him. No good, the boss aggroed, the res was interrupted, and I barely made it back around the corner alive. He begged, he pleaded, he told me he’d let me know when it was safe to come back. I told him he could run or he could continue to eat floor, I wasn’t ressing him now or ever. He (finally) got the idea and ran.
2. Usurper Tanks
This didn’t bother me particularly when I was DPS. As long as somebody tanked I probably wouldn’t die. But as a healer, knowing who the tank is, and knowing that they’re specced for it is everything. And trying to coordinate with dethroned tanks has opened my eyes to how horribly disrespectful to the tank it is. If you sign up for a group as DPS you’d better stick to DPS. I don’t care if you think the tank is going too slow, or if you think that whole marking thing is a dinosaur in this age of AOE (I always request that the tank mark, I have to judge periodically to get a haste buff, so I like to be able to target something the tank actually has threat on, not just the adds chillin’ in his consecrate… and a nice fat skull makes it very very obvious).
This happened to us in UK the other day. Naelian happened to be tanking, which made the whole thing personal, but I’d have been upset on behalf of the tank no matter who it was. He had to go AFK for less than two minutes because his cat was hacking up a hairball on the rug, and while he was gone our DPS druid dropped into bear form and kept on going without him. Not cool DPS druid! He asked us to wait, he wasn’t gone longer than he said he’d be, and we waited for you when you went AFK earlier in Nexus! Not to mention, since you’re feral cat specced you’re very hard to heal compared to a plate-plated prot pally. When Naelian came back from AFK, the druid did not return to cat form, but instead kept running ahead and tanking. Grr! Naelian was annoyed, so he just stood there and didn’t fight at all (a fair response if you ask me). Finally I had to say: “Excuse me, I’m confused… as healer, I have to know who the tank is…” and the DPS druid sheepishly dropped back into his kitty suit and let Nael take over tanking again. But what he did was unbelievably rude.
3. Saving your butt, then being abandoned to die
This happens to me all the time in battlegrounds, and I hate it. It’s really fun to heal a lock through a long fight with a DK and win. It’s really not fun to heal a lock through a long fight with a DK until I’m OOM and the DK then notices me and comes to beat my face in. I just saved your ass, Mr. Destruction… I’m running on empty now and can’t save myself, help me! Oh wait, you’re running the other way? Damn, not again…
A delightful example of this was a warrior I kept on his feet during an Arathi Basin the other night. It was a long fight, and he and I were the only people at the Gold Mine. He had about three DKs and their minions running everywhere, and I managed to heal him right up to the very end, until the last DK noticed me and I got squooshed. The infuriating thing about it was seeing the warrior brag in /bg right as I went down that he’d just defended the Gold Mine all by himself. What do you think I was doing there, hmm? Picking my nose?
So, everybody, appreciate your healer.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
3/3 pains in the butts!
1) I just encourage the group to move on
Likewise I now leave corpses to other rez capable classes when there is only one head. I may be the party healer, but I'm not the only party rezzer…
2) I had a group in Nexus the other day… Warrior tank, that wasn't Tank spec'd, without tanking gear… he was squishy… 2 Locks & a Hunter. The Pets drew aggro… the players drew aggro. I was throwing heals around like a mad Gnome, so I got aggro.
I like one healing target, not 8!
3) Between being left to die, and charging with the group only to have the group stop to let the healer see if there are Horde waiting at the flag….
oof, yeah… your point 2 is spot on. It makes me soooo nervous when I get to an instance and several tanking-capable classes are there wondering which of them is tanking. Do you not consider this when forming the group? Just because you're a blood DK doesn't make you a tank. And your buddy the arms warrior is definitely not one.
To point1 : I flat out will not rez anyone when Im running a lower dungeon if I have to run when I play my healer. Sometimes I take mercy on them though when they release. I've been known to make people ninja log though for being 'so mean'.
To point2 : Can and will happen in raids all the time as well, though usualy not by the DPSers. When the person assigned offtank for some reason has Taunt in his rotation… I see you Mr. Offtank, your threat is not that leet, TauntTattle tells all.
I get my knickers all in a twist about it… my boyfriend thinks it's kind of funny.
What they're saying when they imply I should run back and res them is that they're better than me, and it rubs me the wrong way.
Regarding #3:
I played DPS before I rolled my healer, and it's very hard to break the PvE acquired habit of tunnel-visioning a kill target and not paying attention to your environment. (Of course this "PvE acquired" habit is also terrible for PvE. The fire is not a buff!) I imagine the Warrior you were healing truly had no idea you were there. After all, those Death Knights didn't. When you're spamming your Bladestorm because it's only got 45 seconds left on cooldown AND your Overpower key because Unrelenting Assault could proc at any moment, you're too busy imagining severed limbs and blood spray to notice your health bar subtly ticking upward from Flash of Light spam. This is especially true of spells with subtle animations instead of Penance laser beams and Earth Shield floaty balls.
IMO many of us have that very bad habit. I'm certainly not cured of it when I play my feral druid alt. As a healer I take advantage of it in battlegrounds by standing far to the back or side where the Alliance is unlikely to even bother attacking me. (This also works surprisingly well against Faction Champions.) I'll cast my "invisible" spells like Renew or Flash Heal instead of my obvious spells like Power Word: Shield and Penance (especially Penance). For huge fun in a larger scale skirmish, I'll zoom my camera out and watch the confusion caused by a bouncing Prayer of Mending.
I've seen viciously sneaky druid healers that stay out of Tree of Life form unless they're being attacked and spend as much time casting Entangling Roots and Cyclone as they do rolling HoTs. After all, how many HoTs do those DPSers really need? As a Priest, I'll often just Pain Suppression a focus target and start DPSing. The cooldowns on that and Power Infusion are so short as to be back up for every little skirmish. Many players are unfamiliar with spells like Holy Fire and Smite, and unfamiliar with the idea that a healer can do serious-ish burst damage. My DoTs and nukes are all macro'd like "/cast [target=targettarget] Holy Fire*" so I can swap from healing my target to assisting his kill without any extra clicking.
Many times when you cast an uncommon spell in a battleground you gain the psychological advantage of confusion. I have over 50 days /played and I *still* don't know what Shamans are doing most of the time. My arena partner had a million names for Hammer of Justice, and none of them were Hammer of Justice (Hammer of F**k, Hammer of G*y, Hammerstun, F**kingpallything).
Oh hai Gnomer! I am a bad contributor )-: /shame
*More thoroughly, "/castsequence reset=6 [target=targettarget] [harm] Holy Fire, Smite, Smite, Smite, Smite; reset=6 [harm] Holy Fire, Smite, Smite, Smite, Smite" so I can DPS my own targets if I need and so I can spam one button while I drink my coffee.
That was a lot of typing.
That is one long comment! But you're absolutely right… I was also DPS, an arcane mage, before I rolled my healer (hence my spot as a regular contributor on this excellent blog), so I understand the DPS tunnel vision. I suppose healers have a different kind of tunnel vision, but that's another story. I think I dream about raid frames these days… The point of bringing it up is hopefully to set off a lightbulb in the heads of those DPS that haven't healed before that this happens, and that healers don't particularly enjoy it.
But as you were saying, the "sneak heals" approach works REALLY well in battlegrounds… I just respecced my pvp spec to a holy/ret shockadin hybrid for this very reason. It's really delightful to be out there, dropping a stun, dropping a consecrate, then running away and blasting an exorcism, toss a few heals, run back to the fight whack someone with my shield, renew my consecrate, run away holy shock, toss some heals… I'm finding myself in the middle of the pack DPS wise and top 3 heals, and I very very rarely die. It's delicious. More forthcoming in a future post.