Healing Is Boring
iTZKooPA on Friday, February 19, 2010 - 14 Comments Tags: dungeon healing, healing, healing discussion, instance healing, raid healing 
How many of you just yawned? Thanks crazy_ryan.
Getting my priest to the point that she could heal challenging raids took some time. I spent hours inside various dungeons farming loot and badges. It is to the point now that my alt has as many Glory of the Hero sub-achievements as my main, and that's without even trying. Initially the process was a lot of fun. As a poorly geared level 80 I was constantly busy spamming heals, dispelling and general riff raff. In essence, I was re-learning most of the encounters from the new perspective of a healer, so my brain was engaged. The switch from pure DPS to pure healing extended the replayability of these dungeon.
Unfortunately, I still hit that wall. You know, the one that makes getting instance X a drag, where you always speedrun instance Y, and contemplate bailing on Z. The wall I am referring to is being overgeared, and that's when healing is incredibly boring.
Overgeared or not, I always have to DPS on my rogue. If I don't then the instance, raid or daily quest will take far longer than it should. However, a healer doesn't really need to do anything if their tank and DPS are top notch, let alone themselves. Should the healer be overgeared as well, then only a few casts per boss encounter may be required. In fact, I've healed entire instances on my offspec, without casting a single holy spell. Yup, passive shadow healing is entirely capable of handling the flies landing on my tank. Throwing out a Greater Heal or passively healing during an encounter is not what I call interesting.
This boredom has put me in precarious places recently. The epic yawns of recent dungeons force me to try and create my own fun. For instance, I've begun looking for unusual places to stand during pulls, I've began talking trash on the DPS meters even though I barely approach the tank (when I am in holy), I find fun uses for Levitate and I've actually RPed being Dungeon Guide. Yes, I gave a full detailed tour of Halls of Stone, the lore and all of the pulls.
These side projects have kept things entertaining for me, and hopefully others, but I've let people get killed during my excursions. Line of sight issues, busy typing or DPSing and just plain not paying attention has lead to deaths, and even a few pointless wipes. Woops.
The boredom and complacency makes me wonder if giving out ilvl 245 gear via ilvl 200 dungeons was such a good idea. Here's a pipe dream: That by the time Cataclysm comes out the Dungeon Finder can dynamically change a dungeon's difficulty - mostly by modifying HPs of mobs - based on the average ilvl of the party. It wouldn't nerf dungeons below a set level, but it could make heroics stay interesting for longer.
Reader Comments (14)
I can totally see where your coming from, My resto druid is no where near as geared as your priest ( mostly 232 items) but i dont think ive used tree form in a HC for months. But i still find it fun becuase i always try to out dps the tank on every pull, hell on big pulls i can do nearly 4k dps which is always alot more then one of the dps in the group :p
Can you record yourself when you give those play by play on dungons? I think it would be funny to hear some.
Just fall asleep positioning yourself on the keyboard so you can faceroll every now and then. That'll get you through ;)
"For instance, I've begun looking for unusual places to stand during pulls, I've began talking trash on the DPS meters even though I barely approach the tank (when I am in holy)"
I'm sorry but, it's incredibly Annoying people like you who really makes dungeons that more annoying. You always manage to find the most remediable things to QQ about, and now your basing the Hard Work you got by getting gear with Boredom? So you annoy OTHER people in your PUG just to make you happy? Yeah, nice.
I've been almost everything in dungeons now Class wise, and let me say if you wanna make it more interesting, do it with your own darn Skill's! See if your Other spell's in your spell book will be more interesting in a situation (e.x. heal, pennenace, shackle undead, holy wrath, wind shock) and see how much damage you can Mitigate for yourself. A dungeon can't work without a Healer, and you don't Always get an "LOL, T9 Tankzors!". (in fact the higher your gear, the less chance you get)
And if you want a healing challenge in Heroics, go heal Halls of Reflection. See how long That lasts in your Offspec.
@Nextgener
Sorry but my goal in playing WoW is to be entertained. If messing around and doing unusual things will do that because I've outgeared certain content, then I am by all means going to do that. That being said, I am not a narcissist that will completely ignore the needs of my group to keep myself happy as you seem to think. If things begin to get hairy - be it a messy pull or an undergeared tank - I'll return to my designated role.
And I am not overgeared for the beginning of HoR, so it holds my attention as is.
"Line of sight issues, busy typing or DPSing and just plain not paying attention has lead to deaths, and even a few pointless wipes. Woops."
If I were grp you leader, you would've been booted.
I do this stuff all the time, except I'm a tank. So, i do things such as large pulls, rocket boots off cliffs/into other packs, parachute cloak ftw, and my favorite, kiting bosses. Tyrannus in PoS runs all the way through the tunnel, all the way down the hill, and all the way to ick and krick when i parachute cloak off.
I'll have to admit I dont like this mindset of yours. We all know that heroics above a certain gearscore are tedious non-challenging chores that have to be done in order to get our frost emblems. I'll admit as dps we might have a bit more fun in trying to stay ahead of other dps, but the basic goal we all in a group share is to get our tedious boring chore over as soon as possible. Last night our priest thought it would be fun to try to do the heroic as shadow, causing a wipe on the 2nd boss in Violet Hold, with all party members having 5200+ gearscores...
Maybe he was having fun, but the other four in the group were rigthfully annoyed for being forced to restart and basically do the chore all over again. Just do your thing and help four other people to get their emblems with the least amount of time required as that is the common goal all five party members share and is more important than your personal (lack of) entertainment or challenge.
I feel for ya on the boredom of healing heroic instances. For the fun of it I try and get on the DPS meters. XD My fave place to go to is CoT:CoS cuz I'll gather up all those ghouls to just Holy Nova them down, then see how long, (while doing HN,) it takes me to need mana. I will use my pet or my Hymn when we're sitting around waiting for Arthas to move his slow butt along. I guess you can say it's a sort of training for raids. Less down time for mana means better runs on trash, and less chance of running out of mana in the middle of a boss fight.
LOL....I laugh at this article and some of the comments because they are all so true. As of late, the first thing I do is look at my tank and DPS. If my tank has a gearscore of like 5400, i dont even bother to switch to my resto spec. I drop rejuvination and regrowth on him before each pull, then I just nuke the shit out of everything i can.
I usually get home from work about 630 AM and I jump on wow and do my daily before I go to bed. There have been many times in the past where I find myself nodding off during a boss battle, and we don't even come close to wiping. Come to think of it, besides HoR and PoS, I cannot remember the last time I saw a wipe in any of the Dungeons.
Great article. I think any healer can understand exactly where you are coming from.
LOL....I laugh at this article and some of the comments because they are all so true. As of late, the first thing I do is look at my tank and DPS. If my tank has a gearscore of like 5400, i dont even bother to switch to my resto spec. I drop rejuvination and regrowth on him before each pull, then I just nuke the shit out of everything i can.
I usually get home from work about 630 AM and I jump on wow and do my daily before I go to bed. There have been many times in the past where I find myself nodding off during a boss battle, and we don't even come close to wiping. Come to think of it, besides HoR and PoS, I cannot remember the last time I saw a wipe in any of the Dungeons.
Great article. I think any healer can understand exactly where you are coming from.
What I do is try and get the biggest heal possible when i'm in heroics.
Just spam your largest and longest cast heal and pick a number and see if you can hit it.
I set myself a target of a 20k heal on my Naxx/Ulduar geared druid. Got heals of around 19-19.8k throughout and finally managed it on the final boss fight, healing 20007. Makes it a little more interesting
Try DPS-ing on your heal spec, should speed up the fight, and can still heal if shit happens :D
I think the important thing is to make sure the people you're with don't MIND if you goof off a bit. I know if I was with a group of my guildies, or even just cool people in a PUG, I wouldn't mind a wipe or two if the healer was good but got busy typing something funny or whatever. I mean, I die pretty regularly ANYWAY, due to having low gear and learning a lot of these instances for the first time (I only just hit 80 for the first time a couple weeks ago). I'll get pissed if the healer doesn't know what they're doing, or if the tank can't keep aggro, but a couple of accidental wipes because we're trying to make this instance that we've all run gods know how many times a little more interesting? Doesn't bother me too much, and clearly doesn't bother the OP either. As long as he's not continuing to do it when people've asked him not to, I don't see any harm in having a little fun.
It is a GAME, after all.