Unwanted healers - how DPS is all that matters

People wonder why healers seem to be in short supply, and it's no wonder, really.  I feel like there is a push for less and less heals and more and more DPS.

Remember how all those days of crowd control and focussed DPS - we still have the focussed DPS but these days all the DPS have to do is hit stuff and avoid a bit of bad stuff on the ground.  Crowd control is for people who don't know how to tank.  And NUMBERS are so important now - it's not about how you play but how big numbers you can get, and of course your raid awareness comes in a distant second.

Sometimes it gets so bad that people don't want to interrupt their rotations for DPS to go and do other things like kite a mob, kick a turtle, or break traps because they are so fixated on their numbers.

And yet, healers are expected to heal more than ever.  Most high end guilds gear their DPS first and then their tanks and then their healers (I could be wrong, maybe it's tanks first) so that an encounter can go down faster and so in reality there is less for the healer to heal because the encounter is so quick.  And the numbers of healers now required in a raid seem to hover around 2 instead of 3.

And interestingly, the converse is true also :D (but not in my case!)

Healers and tanks should have an offspec, a lot of people say.  Because some fights need only one tank and 2 healers so then the players can still have a role in the raid otherwise they will have to sit out to bring in what we need.  But I really ENJOY healing. If I wanted to DPS, I would roll a DPS.  It seems a little unfair sometimes to me that healers can have an alternate role (like DPS or tank) but a lot of DPS have only that role - DPS.  Hunters. Mages. Warlocks. Rogues.  They don't do anything except hit bosses and having to do things outside the hit-stuff-and-break-it is boring.  Look at Dark Animus.  The warlocks in my guild thought it was the most boring fight ever and stupid, and they were not the only ones!  Rogue friends of mine from other guilds said the same thing!  I found the fight fun and cool because it was different and I still had a lot of healing to do - I wonder if I would find it as much fun if there was no healing to do and people just had to avoid bad stuff.  I guess if that was the case, then you could run a raid with no healers if there was nothing to heal.

The other day we were doing Immerseus which we now 2 heal and could even one tank, and in the last stages, there were only two of us healing the blobs at the end.  Aza complained that it was the slowest kill ever - but really, how fast do you think 2 healers can heal all those blue blobs?  I'm not that great at it - 4 is my maximum and that's if they're in range - but when you got 6 DPS beating on blobs of course it's gonna be quick in the early stages!  Now if we had 3 healers the last phase would go quicker, but the first phases will go slower, but no, nobody thinks about those things.  It's the healers going slow!

As it is, healers are hard to come by.  They keep getting broken - Bish got sick of healing and wandered off to have a break.  Taloski was awesome but had other things to do.  Asys is going strong for now, but he did switch from tank last Tier and was saying he wanted to DPS next tier (but has since changed his mind).  Bladewind had a baby and now has a second one on the way and doesn't want to commit to raiding anymore.  Gutsy left, Voe stopped playing and Priestietute went away for a while but now she is back.  The only healer that has been around consistently is me.  Now whether that means I have no life except this game OR that I am the only one crazy enough to stay in one role all the time.  Perhaps it's because I'm not a Gen Y... but really it's because I love healing. If you get pushed into something you don't enjoy, you're more likely to give it up.  That's the same for real life work - if you hate your job, it's hard to keep going at it.  Lucky for me I love healing for a job AND in game or my life would be damned miserable indeed.

Even Jasyla, whom I looked up to for healing, is now a mainspec hunter.  Healing was boring for her in 25 man (AoE heal AoE heal AoE heal) and now she's having much more fun healing alt 10 mans as there is more to do (I asked her this at Blizzcon).

I am fortunate that the officers have offspecs and alts who can fill in the healing whilst we patch up our roster, and I over-recruited some healers to help fill in for the times I can't raid.  However, Kyxyn and Aza said that we really had to start 2 healing these encounters... and I couldn't help but bristle even though I know why they said it - because we needed more DPS to get the encounter down, not more healers and certainly not an undergeared healer.

The problem is two-fold - if you keep making a healer sit out for a DPS, then that healer will stop turning up to raid.  If you keep making a healer DPS who doesn't like it, then they will also start sitting out because they don't feel important or useful or perhaps don't even ENJOY playing the game like that.  And healers who sit out are not getting gear.  Not getting gear means you can't keep up and uh oh you're falling behind in healing - vicious cycle!  We should play what we enjoy - that's why we play!  So, when all your healers are gone and the DPS or tanks are forced to heal because of lack of healers - won't they be upset because it's not fun for them too?

Last night we had no bear/cat and no hunter, mage or windwalker so we didn't have crit.  That probably affected our DPS a lot, but we still managed to get Nazgrim down even though it was a bit of a struggle compared to the cakewalk it was last time.  It made me think about what the others said, and about my offspec, which is tank, which I like because I can run around on the Isle and not die and still kill a few things.

So with a heavy heart, I respecced to feral kitty.  I bought the legendary cloak and handed in my Tier tokens from Flex on Sunday.  I don't like kitty. But without any of the classes listed above, it might be useful to have it, and I will have to practice my Lolcat DPS before I can be ready.  My ilvl is 535 but some of my gear is awful as I hadn't really focussed much on it - from now I will have to change my loot spec to feral so I can get some stuff.  Still, it's not too bad for raid leftovers.  But can you imagine Navikitty and not Navitree? Would it be something like this?

I'm not sure if I CAN DPS yet - I don't think my other healers are strong enough to 2 heal from Wing 2 just yet but they might find their healing a lot better without my sniping their heals all the time.  Sometimes if you stop holding their hands, they will show you they can walk just fine on their own.

"Navi look! I'm healing all by myself! Propped up with this ridiculous fish catcher..."

In my opinion, the new raids can't come fast enough.  No more having to make people sit out with this awesome flex system in all raids except Mythic (old heroic).  Maybe I can get away with being carried in my DPS for a bit with a larger group and switch to heals if they are struggling.

I wish there were more encounters where healing was a good part of the encounter.  Immerseus (SoO) has a healing component, as well as Tsulong (ToES), and of course Dreamwalker (ICC), and that always makes it more fun.  I hope when the expansion comes there is something that requires a lot of CC so the DPS can do something else (and they had better not expect us healers to be doing it) other than hit stuff, get big numbers and yell at the healers to heal better.

In the mean time, I have to make sure nobody breaks my healers, certainly not my new ones.  Poor Asys is already used to copping teasings from me - I think he's think skinned enough to take the pressure that the rest of the raid puts on us. I hope the new healers will be the same, because really, we aren't that tough a group - but that doesn't mean I don't expect great things from you.