A question for tanks~

[Runalong]

When I first started healing back in Vanilla WoW I was taught not to heal people too quickly to avoid overhealing and therefore wasting mana. As I moved over to tanking I never really worried about my health dropping a bit as long as the healer seemed to managing OK. I guess some tanks are of a nervous disposition.

[Maelwys]

When I first started healing back in Vanilla WoW I was taught not to heal people too quickly to avoid overhealing and therefore wasting mana. As I moved over to tanking I never really worried about my health dropping a bit as long as the healer seemed to managing OK. I guess some tanks are of a nervous disposition.

But can't cautiousness occasionally be a good thing - particularly in games where Aggro control and damage mitigation are much less powerful than WoW?

Any way we slice it, not keeping the tank topped up reduces the buffer your group has between "Yawn, things are fine..." and "Oh Crikey, PANIC!".
Sometimes it doesn't matter that this buffer is reduced. Sometimes it does.

Unless your healer's Cure 1's are ridiculously powerful, there's no wasted mana in keeping the tank's HP bar at, say, 80% rather than 50%. Obviously that's an extra 30% buffer.
The Healer doesn't need to heal the Tank's every little scratch - just throw them a Cure 1 every time they're sure the HP granted from it won't overheal.

Tank and Healer Opinions will vary as to what constitutes a "safe" buffer for the type of content they're currently running. But generally-speaking a group will get the best results when the Tank is kept well topped-up unless there is a very good trust relationship between the Healer and the Tank. As another poster mentioned earlier in the thread, even on lower-difficulty content, keeping "more buffer than you need" can help because it raises the number of foes a tank feels comfortable herding for AoEs. (A good Tank generally sees their role as attempting to manage aggro for the entire team. This makes them naturally cautious, and unwilling to engage more enemies than they're 100% sure the team can manage...)

[Runalong]

Response to Maelwys..

Yes and no. As someone whose healed and tanked for a while I'd say that it really boils down to the encounter in question. It's not always necessary to keep the tank topped up at max health especially if it's going to result in unnecessary over healing (Where avoidable of course).

More often than not healers would only overheal during periods of expected high damage and then go back to 'normal' healing the rest of the time. You also have to take into account class mechanics i.e. some classes being pre-disposed to reactive healing or overhealing.

[Tanaya]

As someone whose healed and tanked for a while I'd say that it really boils down to the encounter in question.

That sums up the entirety of this thread. I've stated this previously in another thread, but the ability to do DPS on WHM really depends on how well your party performs.

Nullie, please keep trying to squeeze in whatever DPS you can during dungeon runs. There's already enough players who believe healers should just heal and then stand there and do nothing until another person takes a hit. That is -a lot- of potential being held back due to status quo.