Where are all the healers?

[Alisi]

I know in Cataclysm, Blizzard tried to change how players approached the content by weakening healers by 80%.

Incidentally, I healed through out Cata in WoW and this wasn't what happened. Cata was a hardcore expansion. Cata still is a hardcore expansion. People still wipe in those dungeons. People complained that the dungeons weren't hard and so Cata was made with dungeons and such to be hard. Very hard. You'd wipe in Stonecore normal if you didn't use CC. But that wasn't the healers fault. You couldn't fault the healer if you didn't CC the right mob. There was very, very little hate going to healers when things like that happened. You couldn't overgear it and parties knew that. It was actually kind of nice because most of the deaths/wipes were obviously not the healers fault so you didn't get that healer hate. There was literally nothing a healer could do if that one annoying mob transformed into a force of nature or you let the guard sound an alarm. It was a wipe. It couldn't be healed through.

Healer wise, they didn't want us to spam heal like we did in WotLK so they did two things: give us a fixed mana pool and make us DPS to get mana back. The result was that melee DPS generally died. Blizz's response to this was manifold: 1) the gave melee DPS more survivablity via their class and gave them ways to heal themselves more, 2) the nerfs the dungeons themselves, 3) vastly restrict kicking and gave a lot of terrible penalties to kicking (which sucked because tanks were notorious for pulling everything just to wipe the group or go offline to get kicked so they could queue up instantly to a better dungeon -- you literally couldn't get a tank to do Grim Batol, for example), 4) you buffed your party when you solo queued, and 5) they started giving award bags similar to adventurer in need (though these contained much better things than in ffxiv or currently in wow -- they gave mounts and such.)

Cata was basically their experimentation in forcing healers to DPS. They didn't really revert the nerfs to healers. Oh, they gave us a buff here and there but we still had a fixed MP pool (which was the real issue) and we still had to DPS throughout. It was hard in the beginning but people got used to it. Especially the poor melee DPS. I wasn't kicked once and we're talking 14 or 15 wipes on expert dungeon bosses. LOL