It’s obvious. Pugs got harder with heals that actually need to heal. It’s not like SL anymore where you can solo a key with an SV Hunter.
Sadly this skill level is not well suited for everyone and the majority is running in guilds this expansion. So I guess you need to find a set of friends or community members to enjoy this expac
Catching up on Loremaster quests, doing Big Slick in the City dailies, BFA Assaults for the 750 tiger, heck even farming ZM for mount crafting.
Not gonna slog through another 18 with 20min overtime because the group has 2 warriors, a hunter and a rogue and I have to deal with random spooky ghosts on top of my usual responsibilities (or the triforce of paladin/paladin/priest and none even try to help with the spooky ghosts cuz they’re not specced for them on purpose).
Enjoy your 15min group gatherings 
From my knowledge lots of dps players expect healers to solo the affix and some tanks don’t deal with enrage properly, so this week is probably just annoying for them. In my keys I saw some 2.5k healer being visibly overwhelmed by the affix despite us doing the mechanics properly on dungeons like HoI, because for some reason, the Monk tank didn’t play the affix well and didn’t help dispelling. Felt kinda frustrating as a warrior to see this without having control
havent done any m+ all expansion because my loading screen time sucks… by the time i load in the whole group would of replaced me 
From my experience the Affix may make it worse, but healers being super scarce has been an issue all season (it’s been somewhat bad in S1 but got dramatically worse in S2)
Frankly with the healing nerfs, selfheal/mitigation requirements on DDs and massive damage coming out in some pulls/bosses I am pretty sure a lot of healers just don’t want to play with randoms. It for sure has gotten a lot better with tuning (the healing requirements) but at this point I feel like a lot of healers have been traumatized either off the role or off playing with randoms.
What I don’t get is how there’s 2 important but underplayed roles in the game and one got the “can solo high M+ bosses” treatment, drawing a lot of players to it, while healing is just getting harder and harder.
Yea there’s some top notch groups finishing dungeons without a healer (using incredibly strongly tuned off healing specs like Paladins or S1 Enhancement Shamans) and personally I’m even in the “if I play healer I want to heal and not DD with the occasional AoE heal” camp, but damage in S1 and moreso S2 feels incredibly binary. People are either full health or at 10%. Healers are under constant stress. Someone doesn’t play mechanics, they become the healer’s problem.
Blizzard SAID the health/dmg increase + healing nerf were to enable them to tune the whole process to be less binary, so healers have to triage heal rather than fighting constant mega burst and people dropping from 100% to 10% health if they fail mechanics but I don’t see this in practice at all!?
tl;dr nobody suffers from bad random teammates as much as healers and damage patterns can be hard as hell to deal with (especially when people take additional avoidables - which is never their problem, but the healer’s)
Can’t blame em for avoiding the role/random groups.
But how does this make sense, when you have bosses and packs in dungeons like HoI, which do unavoidable big damage to the whole group?!
There’s a stark difference between healing a key where the total avoidable damage taken is in the million for the whole run and where it’s in the range of the million in just 2 pulls and then going to like 20-30 million over the whole run. It’s insane how much avoidable damage some people eat to the face.
Not sure who doesn’t understand whom but I think I agree with you?
I tried to say that I don’t see Blizzard’s stated goals with the … let’s call it healing tuning reflected in the live game at all.
There absolutely is NO “not everyone has to be 100% health all the time” or “abilities don’t have to nuke everyone from 100% to 10% health all the time” in the game right now.
Healers are NOT busy triaging people, instead they have to know beforehand when big damage will be coming in and be prepared to get the entire group back up asap while trying to instantly react to massive fail damage (oops full health melee ate a swirly and is now almost dead, there is a massive damage tick coming in in 2 seconds so I gotta top him off in less time than that) and people can almost never be left at less than full health (because fail damage and a lot of those group explosions do like 80-90% of their health, so if they’re not full they just die)
It’s just extremely stressful and demanding and I can’t blame players for not wanting to deal with that or sticking to playing with people who they know won’t make their job harder than it absolutely has to be.
I know there have been times in WoW where you actually had to make decisions on who to heal, who to leave at 60% health for now … where you couldn’t top people off in 1 global if you combo’d your spells in a certain way so you actually had to put effort and thought into managing your party’s health. (classic was like that, Cataclysm I think as well)
Now it’s basically all about fast reflexes (to heal avoidable damage taken before the player dies to the next damage instance) and knowing the encounters by heart so you have your big heals/group heals lined up for that ability that would otherwise wreck you. PLUS anything but an exceptionally good healer relies on the group using their defenses/off heals to help out, which many randoms simply don’t (and many healer players simply aren’t capable of)
It’s super stressful and as a healer you always feel bad when someone dies whether it was actually your fault or their bad play and there is no room to actually “manage” the party’s health. Either you whack the moles with great reflexes and foresight or you’re in for a terrible time.
This basically. When the boss starts casting a group damage I start precasting my strong heal so it hits a split second after the boss. During abilities like static cling I already have CDs ready and move my mouse over ppl to save them if they fail it.
I chose this play style and I don’t really mind it. I’m not doing too much M+ anymore because I farmed the bulk of my gear and running them for a chance of getting something from the vault is…meh.
Well, maybe because DDs have 0 control/info over when such affixes drop?
Like, when I am playing Retribution and I just casted my Avenging Crusade, building stacks and suddenly a Afflicted Shade/Spirit appears, that means I as a DD have to potentially ruin my entire high damage rotation just to help the healer get rid of that Affix-Threat during the fight.
I can totally see why DDs rather take the hit than block it when it comes to such affixes.
But if we as players would have a visual Affix Timer or something that announces the next incoming shade 1 Minute ahead, people have at least time to plan accordingly and fight that way.
In Raids and Dungeons we can read the Boss energy bar for the mechanic cast. But we can’t do the same for affixes.
Your rotation is gonna get ruined if you don’t dispel it and it goes off. It’s -100% haste for several seconds if one goes off. That’s a far heftier penalty to your, and the parties, damage than dispelling it.
So when I played this Affix on this char, I had a weakaura tell me when the affix spawns, watched the spawn animation, hovered my mouse over and spent a GCD to see it dissipate. One dungeon the healer complained that they had been left alone dealing with the affix, which made me check details! for dispells because “obv they were full of it”. Apparently I only ever got the dispell on one single mob and on all the other spawns the healer snagged my target at the same time I hit my dispell button, leaving his dispell on CD and one affix mob alive.
I really don’t want to stand around for 3 seconds leaving my GCD free for a dispell and spending cognitive load I need for other stuff to make sure both mobs are gone and my dispell is actually on CD.
Incorporeal was much better with this. I macro’d a target marker onto my Hex and it was clearly visible that my Hex landed when it did. With afflicted I just see a dispell swirly and am done with it. I literally cannot sit there and think about that stuff for several seconds while dodging mechanics and trying not to slack in damage.
It’s not a well designed affix.
I realize there are a lot of terribads who just ignore the affix and I’m not trying to say they’re all actually trying to play it. Just that this honestly seems like a design flaw to me. [I only got the memo that poison cleansing totem works today, so that should help tremendously in my case, but I still think the affix’s design is suboptimal for random groups to coordinate]
That’s not entirely correct. There are several ways a player can prevent being affected by it, not just by getting rid of the Souls.
For Paladin:
For general:
Besides that, usually it is not much of a big deal to get rid of the Souls if I have 1 or 2 Words of Glory ready, simply because I can heal them instantly full. Doesn’t mean it is not super annoying to have them around in the first place.
Difficulty can be designed without creating super annoying mechanics that want you to close the game and potentially uninstall it.
Edit: It would be already a huge relief if their spawn-cadence wouldn’t be every 30s in combat but every 45s.
I don’t believe you are unironically arguing you would rather bubble than dispel.
You would be surprised. In M+ I use my Divine Shield a lot for such stuff when I am in that moment in my full damage rotation. I use it in boss fights to ignore their mechanics, I use it outside of boss fights as well when needed. Edit: Just to mention, it has a 3.5min CD for me due to talent “Unbreakable Spirit” so I can even “spam” it more than usually possible.
It is quite the useful skill, IF you are not too afraid of using it at all. Same counts for Avenging Wrath/Crusade (AC has 2 Minutes cooldown and 25s uptime, so basically an effective 1,5min CD).
I see so many Paladins not use their wings whenever they have them ready, passively lowering their own performance and damage output during trash fights, resulting in a few minutes longer time overall in the run before completion.
It’s the same problem people have in my other main game Destiny 2. They save their ultimate way too long in PvP and PvE, instead of using it actively every time resulting in far more overall super charges than they have if they bottleneck it for “worst case” situation in boss fight only.
Edit 2: Or like when you are playing Skyrim and hogging all those potions and food items and never using them in the end because you play better than you come into situations where you would need them.
Bruh… What. 
+17 isnot interesting bracket for anyone to join tbh . unless its for score
healers choose either 16 - easier option or 441 GV or they look for +18 for 444 .
hero gear farm ? ye lol no that comes passively from doing dungeons anyway and GV.
It was the same thing for 18s, we sat as 3 dps for 30 minutes before I gave up on a NEL18.
Yeah, healers are very thin on the ground at the moment. Although don’t fancy playing one myself to be fair…last times I’ve tried it’s been a disaster, so, noooope.
You don’t interrupt casts, you don’t avoid damage that can be avoided, you stand in void zones, you don’t give a damn about the affix, you don’t pay attention to healers’ mana and chain pull, you have “healer wtf” on macro, and after all this you sincerely don’t know where healers are?
p.s. By “you” I mean most of dps/tanks in LFG, not specifically the OP.