Yes, I’ve played a healing class – and to be absolutely honest, I’m very, very bad at it. Why? Well, part of it has to do with lack of focus – when there’s more than one thing happening at once I tend to get confused and wander off to sort the items in my character’s backpack by color and size rather than healing the tank; mages have the benefit of being up there killing stuff, usually mashing a two- to four-key combination of spells, and things are much simpler (bad guy roasts to death or kills me.) The other part of it is that my impulse is to hurt things rather than help things so I end up specializing my healer in Incinerate Infidel rather than Mystical Band-Aid.
So take it as a given that I’m a completely rotten healer and therefore probably not qualified to speak too much to the issue – except by observation. As such, here’s my guidelines:
1 ) Be an excellent multi-tasker. You have to pop around from person to person slapping heals on tanks, buffs, curing poison or disease, rezzing the mage, back to healing the tank, shielding the mana-sink rogue, all while drinking potions, avoiding overhealing, and dodging aggro. Remember, healing is a job, not fun. If you can’t handle that, play the above-mentioned kill-or-die mage.
2 ) It’s all your fault. Everything is your fault. Mage blows up the enemy before the tank gets aggro and the Mage dies? Your fault for not healing fast enough. Rogue dies to sixteen monsters because he decided at level 10 to stealth past level 40 elites? Your fault again. Mage stands on the Magic Cyanide Bomb even though everyone was screaming at him to move just two feet to the left and stop getting injured? You lousy healer, why didn’t you devote your entire life to keeping that poor soul alive? Party wipes because the tank body-pulls two elites? Guess what – your fault. Just accept it; you are the martyr to your party’s sins, you take them unto yourself and absolve the wicked of their deeds. It’s a priesty thing.
3 ) You will NEVER see the fun content. Oh, you’ll get to go to the Temple of Eternal Flatulence and fight Gaslord Beano, but you’ll NEVER remember a bit of it because you’ll be too busy making sure all of the little pictures of people have green bars instead of yellow or red bars under them and you’ll be shoved in a corner standing looking at the pixilated wall because LORD KNOWS you can’t have any graphics lag during the fight lest someone die. Two weeks later someone will say “Hey, wasn’t that Gaslord Beano fight cool? Did you see the massive Poot Minions and how they sprayed green goo all over us?” Your response will be “What? Did we fight him? I don’t remember anything except that the wall was a light gray while the other dungeons have pinkish gray walls.” Also, you’ll have your graphics turned down to the Lego People level because, again, if you lag PEOPLE DIE.
4 ) You can never solo. This is because the game designers of almost every single MMORPG yet created have, in their wisdom, given healers a spec line which is tantalizingly damaging and yet no-one can ever spec that line. Why? Well, it’s simple. If you spec damage you suck, your family will disown you, your manhood (or ladyhood, I suppose) will wither and drop off. Every person you meet in game will spurn you because you are not playing a True Healer because you want actually to be able to kill a green-level monster once and a while. So it’s like the developers are sadistically teasing you with a spec that you can never have; there it is, just one click away, but if you spec that way you’ll never get a group, and what’s more rumors will spread about Dingo the Damage-Specced Healer and you might as well delete your character and go play Hello Kitty Online because no-one will ever group with you, you selfish bastard.
5 ) Corollary to above – it’s not YOUR character, stupid. Like the sunshine, the rain, and little cute bunnies, healers belong to everyone. You can’t ever do anything YOU want to do with your character because damnit, Jim, you’re a doctor, not a person. You can’t spec the way you want, can’t wear the equipment you favor, wield the weapon you like best, or even play at times you prefer because you HAVE to be optimized to heal people the way THEY want to be healed.
6 ) Again, from above, you can NEVER have an alt. You’ll ALWAYS be playing your healer. “But,” the whine rains down from /guild chat, “we NEEEEEEEED a healer for the Lord Batguano fight!” Therefore,
7 ) You’ll never have fun. You get to experience the life of an accountant, frantically balancing numbers on a screen, mashing keys and watching mana, staring at the wall in dungeons, following a group of ungrateful shitheads around and preventing them from dying.
8 ) Finally, you’ll experience the level of human kindness you would expect from your average ungrateful little First-Grader. You sacrifice your fun time to keep a pack of unruly, aggro-grabbing, over-damaging, reckless whiners alive and what do you get? Nothing. You hear complaints up one end and down the other if the party wipes but never “Hey, we made it through that one ‘cause the healers are cool.”
9 ) PvP. Why bother? Take everything said above and make it a thousand times worse. Your side loses? The cry echoes through the land: “OUR HEALERS SUCK!” This is despite the fact that you’ve spent an hour healing, rezzing, shielding, and buffing in between getting killed by enemy stealthers because none of the glory-hog DPS classes bother to stick behind and watch your butt and protect you. You aren’t a person, after all, you’re some sort of sophisticated AI who’s supposed to rez and heal on command and otherwise shut up and have absolutely no opinions or feelings. Your side wins? Again, you hear nothing but the deafening silence of people Taking You For Granted and not bowing down before you for even bothering to come out for PvP. Oh, and of course you get no real victory points (unless you play a game which blessedly awards points for healing in combat) or other benefits.
10) Therefore, if you want to have fun, you’ll inevitably roll up an alt on the opposite faction on another server (or the same one, if you can) and pick a rogue or mage to play because then you can spend your entire play-time running around in PvP battlegrounds killing the people you normally heal up over and over again in some sort of psychotic gleeful revenge-murder daze. Go ahead, enjoy yourself without guilt. It’ll be cathartic.
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