Wow Healer Role

Community General Discussion
1

Hi there,
wanted to put down a couple of thoughts around playing a healer in TWW or in modern wow in general. I will focus mostly on mythic plus content as this is what I play mostly.

Currently the healer role for me is a weird one. You are expected to “heal” the party but often the difficulty is either too trivial (LFR, normal raid) or too hard (high m+ dungeons).
The difficulty being to trivial means you can throw a passive HoT or just have a healing rain and the group will be fine.

The difficulty being to hard means you can’t really fulfil your role if the tank or the dps does not its defensive cooldowns properly. Or even in some cases like BDK or VDH there is no point in healing them (class design).

For me an ideal evolution of healer class would be a true support role (what a AUG evoker should have been). This is true especially that the healer gets “punished” if the group does something wrong (standing in fire, not doing mechanics properly).

The tank is often seen as a “leader” of the group by managing the pulls and pacing of the dungeon. When envisioning the support role I would say the healer should be able to help the party by not only doing the healing but also contributing by:

  • doing CC,
  • doing damage (buffs, debuffs on enemies or self cast spells),
  • providing external defensives

For me well represented support archetypes exists in other games. A good example is Marvel Rivals where support characters do the healing but also are able to contribute in many different ways (cc and even damage).

I often see ppl saying that healers should heal but often that not you cannot really influence if some player handling the mechanic correctly or is even using a health pot (which is mandatory in higher keys).
There is a reason why tanks are so powerful right now. They are in charge in their defensives and are mostly self sustaining.
I would like something similar for healers where your contribution is not only healing but also all forms of QoS.

This would mean all healers should have:

  • interrupt,
  • purge,
  • dispell (poison, curse),
  • BL or CR,
  • external defensive (DR),
  • external offensive to give a DPS.

Would be cool to have some unique way of showing off skill level as a healing. Usually healers do not get any credit for they play but all of the blame for group failures.

2 Likes
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We used to have that back when we could keep a tank alive at low health by careful triage. Additionally, good healers were ones that made great mana management and little overhealing, so that the group would need less mana breaks through a dungeon. However, the fast pace of the game nowadays does not allow that. So healers have become a half-dps that heals.

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Grand if you don’t have to deal with poorly geared “tanks” [dps roling as one for fast queues] pulling everything while they take huge damage never mitigating it… :grimacing:

4

But this doesn’t happen in end-game content nowadays, only in levelling dungeons, at most lvl80 Normals. I don’t know if dps specs can tank Heroics.

The issue of dps joining LFR as healers and refusing to switch to healer specialization is definitely still prevalent.

5

I meant DPS who are playing as tanks, in tank spec… not tanking in dps spec. :expressionless:

You even get them in the M+ falling flat wasting everyone’s time, because they’re not getting invited as DPS.

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6

Every healers role is the most multitask demanding out of all roles in the game in every content from pve to pvp, you have to heal, cc, dispel, purge and do dmg. Its just how it is if they are any good.

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