Quote Originally Posted by Connor View Post
So healing is so easy nobody need any form of practice or means of understanding it, yet somehow people are constantly complaining about ‘bad healers’. Which is it? Is it so easy anyone can do it thus there’s no need for anyone to get a better understanding of healing relative to damage output, or is it something people might actually not understand and that’s why they’re doing bad?
Here are the things I've seen that might cause one to consider a healer "bad":
  1. They get one shot by a mechanic.
  2. They spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out what to do for a mechanic and neglect to do anything else in the meantime.
  3. They freeze up as mechanics start hitting people and HP bars stop dropping. (See also: 2.)
  4. They forget to heal themselves before the next raid wide hits.
  5. Their last 10 dungeon runs featured immortal tanks and DPS who avoided every AoE. They didn't expect that this run was going to be the clown car.

(1) isn't fixable with a striking dummy; (2-4) are less that the healer hits the wrong heal and more that that the healer fails to hit any heal at all; and (5) is all about trying to stay awake.

Given how relatively infrequent damage is in this game, there's not much to be learned from healing a bunch of striking dummies. You've got all the time in the world to pick a button.

It's the pressure and chaos of actual combat that's the hard part, the "well, you had 10 seconds to get a heal out, but you spent 4 of them trying to figure out where in the arena the DRG died, then the next cast bar started up, so you spent another 4 trying to figure out how to resolve the mechanic, and the final 2 running to safety (and not quite making it)."