Of Healer Guilt and DPS Envy

Back when hunters were my only endgame characters, I would get super jealous of those healers and tanks who could seemingly daintily dip a toe into LFG and be in a group seconds later, while I still sat waiting… waiting… waiting…

I saw being a healer or tank as being like the Beatles or Elvis as people flung themselves onto their car. Everyone wants you. Everyone loves you. You are needed.

And ya know what? Having an 80 healer has largely proven to nail that point home. On my druid I get invites for PuG heroics in a matter of seconds, most days.

But there is another side to that too. A whole ‘nother side that I didn’t realize until last night.

See, I finished up our weekly ToC25 on my hunter. I was getting sleepy cause I’d been up for a really long time. But there was somebody in our Vent (though not in our guild) begging for a healer for a quick Ulduar10 he was setting up. He’d been searching for a while, apparently, with no luck.

So, I hopped on my druid and went. With the strict conditions laid out from the top that I was getting tired and could only stay for a few bosses until they found another healer.

Aaaand a couple hours later I was still there. Eyelids drooping, reaction time all over the place. Why? Cause I felt bad leaving. I was a healer. They needed me. The Raid Leader would whisper me every so often, “I’m sorry, but I can’t find another healer :(” So I stayed. Even though I really just wanted to go to bed. It was a bizarre phenomenon.

Finally somewhere around Thorim or Mimiron or one of those bosses (I was too tired to really have any sort of situational awareness anymore, and any remaining healing skills I was hanging onto had been flushed down a proverbial toilet sometime around Hodir anyway), a DPS had to leave. “No problem, we can replace a DPS really easily,” said the Raid Leader.

And suddenly I saw the horrible other side of the coin of being “needed”. Suddenly I really, really missed being an expendable, “DisPoSable” DPS.

But then the Raid Leader added that now would be a good time for me to leave, and they would tough it out and try to find another healer, so I mumbled something incoherent and hearthed away and was asleep within about five minutes.

Man. You healers and tanks didn’t tell me you had it so hard with the Guilt complex. I’m sorry. /pets you all

36 thoughts on “Of Healer Guilt and DPS Envy”

  1. Were you in the mountains? If you were in the mountains, chances are it was Thorim. Just saying.

    As for the healer thing. Yeah, gotta pick and choose. I chose my mage. Healer is fun when you feel like just playing without any preference to role.

  2. It is more difficult for a healer, but it’s even worse for a tank. Tanks are at an even higher premium than healers are these days, because it seems like most warriors/paladins/druids/death knights are more interested in DPSing rather than focus on the aspect of their class that’s needed most. (Really frustrating having a 4/5 group needing a tank when you have a ret and a dk in group and neither of them want to respec)

  3. I never realy healed. But I tanked a a couple of time sucessfull.Once as bear in the Dead Mines, anothertime as enh. Shaman in Ratzhofen. Both back in classic times. But I know how hard it is to get a decent healer or tank. Especialy during leveling, when they are all skilled for DD/Solo.

    The ratzhofen one was a great experience. My Shaman had the highest level in the party (3 other shamans and a lock) I head to do the jobs of both the Tank and the Tanks Healer (had to heal myself mostly. The other shamans threw in a heal now and than when I got critical). Was one of the smothest Ini runs I’ve ever head.

  4. Yeah, there was a post about healer guilt over at ILikeBubbles (I think) that covered that territory, or, more specifically, how to say NO.

    My priest is pretty much as burned out as you can get and still function. It ain’t pretty.

  5. I think it’s somewhat of a personality thing. For example, I’ve never had a problem saying no and not feeling guilty about it, so that was my case as a healer.

    “Awl, want to join us for blahblah?”
    “No thanks, I’m really tired/logging out soon/doing something else/plain old don’t feel like it.”

    Sure there is an obligation to your friends or guild, but there’s also an obligation to yourself to enjoy the game and/or get a full night of sleep.

  6. Welcome to the world of hybrids. If your main spec is DPS, you will get to play it 10% of the time in raids because of tank/healer guilt. There is no escaping it.

  7. @ Josh – My guild actually likes me better as a DPS. PuGs, however, are an entirely different story…

    @ Awlbiste – Normally I am similar, I think I underestimated my tiredness last night though… x_x

  8. Just like Celaeno said, healer guilt was something that largely contributed to my burnout on Anea.

    It was admirable of you to stay on for as long as you did though. I don’t think the guilt will totally go away, but I hope it gets less as time goes on!

  9. I get the request to heal an instance on my priest, and if I’m not in shadow form, I make sure I am. Well, if it’s for a pug. For the guild or friends, I have a hard time saying no. If it comes down to the guild needing me and hubby giving me a baleful glare, guess who wins? I’d never use hubby as an excuse..he is always a reason!

  10. Like others said, you have to learn how to say now. And come on, a “quick Ulduar”? How is that possible.

  11. This is something I’ve had a lot of trouble with, especially in the past. Right now we’re not in a healer shortage with my group of friends, but for a long time in burning crusade, I couldn’t log in without being asked to go somewhere – and as the only healer in a guild of about 15 people, that usually meant instances and healing the entire time I was logged in, every day, even if I was way undergeared or underleveled for the instance.

    It about caused me to quit WoW.

    These days, with multiple healers at 80, it’s a little easier – but I’m starting to get /tank/ guilt with my warrior now that she’s 72, and I can’t decide if I want to learn how to tank, or if I want to stick to my guns and say no, this character is for me to screw around and do things that don’t require major instance stress. We’ll see how long I hold out.

  12. What is worse is I am used to getting sucked into chain guild heroics for tanking on my warrior and when I took a few days off of the game some people actually thought I was angry or avoiding them. What really happened was I got back a working tv and got to play my ps2 rpgs again 😀

  13. Welcome to the world of hybrids. If your main spec is DPS, you will get to play it 10% of the time in raids because of tank/healer guilt. There is no escaping it.

    And yet the very same hybrids who have this huge necessity to exist demand equal DPS to pure classes who have no such luxury.

    Pardon me for having absolutely no sympathy whatsoever.

  14. Honestly you just get tired of healing eventually and the No’s just come out.. after awhile of refusing to heal it eventually evens out and you have peace 🙂

  15. @Rilgon Arcsinh “You’ll get no sympathy from me!” /Ike

    I honestly think that is why I have retired the Priest. I honestly worked the fun out of my class because I just Healed whatever was thrown at me, and never took a break.

    Shadow was fun, but that only made me miss healing more!

    At least with the Death Knight it feels like I am DPSing, just with a hell of a lot more survivability and TPS.

    Oh well!

  16. I have the worst kind of healer guild. I am a pally healer and the GM of a large guild. It is very hard for me to say no because I would do anything for my guildees. In my realm, there seems to be a shortage of holy pally’s, so I sure am in demand.

  17. This is why I love Dual Spec so much. All those Hybrid DPS classes can have an Off spec Healing/Tanking build and take matters into their own hands.

    There is still a lot of guilt when it comes to raiding – I know my 10 man group often don’t end up running if I have plans on a Friday night for example and I feel terrible every time.

    Back to the dual spec love though 🙂 I love knowing however that my sister can with a simple switch of a button go from being a DPS spriest to a Disc priest to complete the daily heroic and she doesn’t have to wait for me to log in to come heal her run.

  18. @Saphirei And before long, you start saying “No” when we ask you to DPS.

    Also, Pike dear, a “quick” Ulduar? Really? Come on now. 😛

  19. This was something I was indirectly confronted with back in early TBC. I had just taken on the mantle of raid leader for a relatively large group, and somehow that also meant it was my job to oversee the construction of 5-man groups when people wanted them as well.

    We had a couple very dutiful tanks that would always appear just when we needed them, drop what they were doing and hop into any group that needed them at a moment’s notice. After a while, one of them just stopped logging on very often. When I finally caught them online again, I asked why they stopped showing up all of a sudden thinking maybe something IRL had come up. Their answer? “I’m getting really tired and burnt out doing all these groups all the time, but I don’t want to have to tell people ‘no’ and then feel bad about it.”

    After hearing that, I decided to check in with our healers, who were in the exact same boat, and got much the same response. I was a bit dismayed at first, but decided the best way to handle it was with an announcement on the guild forums, outlining the feelings of these players and emphasizing the need to respect the fact that they needed breaks, too. Once people began to understand the strain we were putting on our tanks and healers, they started to back off a little and were much more polite and understanding about asking those players to help them. Things eventually sorted themselves out, and our tanks and healers worked out amongst themselves a rotation for healing our DPS, like “Okay, I did the last group so you get the next one.” that ended up working out very well.

    Having played all three roles now, I can’t say I’ve ever encountered The Guilt personally, but then I’m a surly individual that no one wants to deal with anyway. 😛

    (End novel.)

  20. There is another side of the coin you will likely discover. I recently got a priest to 80 -my man is a hunter- with the express purpose to heal. I have two healing specs and no shadow spec. I have no issue saying no to groups at all. I play on my terms at all times.

    The oddity is that I get treated like craaaaaaap on my healer. People are downright rude to me, which never happens on my hunter. Maybe its that im not super geared on my priest (but definitely geared for what im doing). or maybe its the role but i’ve definitely noticed a difference.

    When I was first playing, many years ago, we treated healers and tanks like demigods. I was kinda hoping for some of that treatment, but so far, no dice.

  21. Better to be turning people down than to be turned down.

    I don’t know how many times in BC I was turned away from a heroic pug because I was dps (even worse: I’m a hunter = “We already have one” or “We need a mage for cc”.) Our guild has an abundance of healers, but a dearth of tanks. Really frustrating when the LFG channel is full of DKs, pallies, and warriors who will only dps. Apparently spending 30 minutes and completing the daily H while in your off-spec is a whole lot worse than spending 2 hours in LFG just to get in to a group because you will only dps.

    To all hybrids who don’t have a tank/heal off-spec, fail. That’s what you’re designed to do. Even if your gear isn’t awesome, even if you suck at tanking/healing, for the good of the entire server, be willing to switch. You’ll make lots of friends real fast.

  22. @Lyraat

    Your feeling fine? Since when does anybody has any obligation to do anything in the game? You say these people /fail and I say they /win. By playing what they want to play they are having fun. I know myself I have a Dk dps/tank and am the usual offtank of the guild. You can be certain that whenever I pug I dps because thats what I like to do best. I will only tank a pug if I need something out of there.

    Selfish? Absolutly. But I learned the hard way it’s not worth your time and enjoyment to do things for perfect strangers who in the end don’t care about you.

  23. It’s so true… I struggle with this all the time. When I log on, I have invites to do raids and groups piling up within 5 minutes… and most of the time all I want to do is check my mail or run some dailies ::weep::

    Sometimes… I’m just scared to log in.

  24. @Rilgon: I actually abandoned my Hunter in favor of a Shaman because of this exact issue. It’s a little weird not topping the meters anymore, but I never spend more than 10 minutes in LFG.

    Part of the problem is that nobody wants a sub-par dps. The great fear of the hybrid is that their dps will be so poor compared to ‘pure’ dpsers that nobody in their right mind would invite a hybrid dps to a raid. When that happens, hybrids stop being hybrids and start being ‘pure healers’ or ‘pure tanks’.

    Pure dpsers have the opposite fear – that their dps will be so close to that of hybrids that nobody will bring pure dpsers to raids because they lack the added flexibility of hybrids. ‘5k dps’ just isn’t as good as ‘5k dps and can switch to healing’.

    At the moment, Blizz’s solution appears to be to supply hybrid dpsers with unique raid buffs (like totem of wrath on my elemental shammy) and a ‘hybrid tax’. Their dps stays lower than pure dpsers, but they bring sufficient benefit to the overall raid that nobody minds.

  25. Being needed like that also allows for you to be not so nice. If you told him for a couple of bosses, then being so needed would allow for you to say “bye bye I have to go”. It’s not like you would have been blacklisted. As you have stated you are needed and they should have been actively searching for healer the whole time. I would say you both had an agreement and you held up your part of it and he failed to follow through.

  26. I’m getting a case of this too since I started earnestly gearing up my Resto Shaman alt. He’s actually doing quite well in a decent mix of T8 and T9 pieces and equivalents.
    I tend not to do guild raids with him as that is reserved for my Hunter main but I did fill in for another guild on a 10 Ulduar run and they offered me an invite and a regular raid spot! It was tempting.

    In fact, I get a lot of compliments on my healing from total strangers in pugs so I must be doing something right, and I’ve honestly been tempted to make the Shaman my main for a while. DPS are a dime a dozen, healers (and apparently good ones) are more rare.

    So yeah, I’m feeling more and more obligated to heal these days.

  27. My main is my very nicely geared hunter. My alt is my resto[/enhance] Shammy. If you know gearscores (if you pug you should) the shammy is at about 4.1k and the hunter is around 5k. The resto is nicely enchanted and gemmed and it takes a hell of a lot of noob-standing-in-fire for him to go OOM.

    My shammy gets all sorts of shit when things go wrong. It’s quite amazing. And it’s always DPSers. They are throwing 800-1200dps in HEROIC ToC-5 say crap. It’s nuts. They stand in the fire and poison clouds. How do I get out of the junk on the ground, toss a heal to them, and they don’t manage? They also can get one-shotted! I didn’t even know it was possible(!?!) any more but somehow some especially poor clothies manage it.

  28. My Main is a Resto Shammy and as such I will never dps. I can collect the gear but outside of doing dailies I will never have the time to work on my dps skills. I too have been in situations where i know that If I leave they will be sitting around for days waiting for a healer. Its nice to be needed but at the same time once someone knows your good at it they hound you. I am leveling a Pally right now so that when I can make her a cow I am already at the top or near the top. Already I have been forced out of DPS into Healing to get a group quicker. Good thing I like healing.

  29. I played a Disc priest through part of BC and all through Wrath. I don’t raid, so it’s heroics, pretty much (well… I healed Sarth once – ONCE, and VoA) and… yeah. I know this.

    Healer Guilt tends to crop up for me when there were people asking in the RP community channel (which I honestly haven’t been in for over a month) or in my guild channels for a healer, just one healer, please we only need a healer, and this is how I’ve managed to be sucked into groups with people I don’t like very much – because people I DO like are asking for halp.

    It doesn’t help that any class I have that can heal has a healing spec. Except my 60 shammy ’cause I haven’t bought his secondary spec yet. So that’s… Pally, druid, shaman #2 will have one at 60, waugh.

    OT but I also disagree on “If you don’t have a tanking or healing off-spec and your class is capable of that, /fail” ’cause there’s very little that’s worse than making someone tank or heal that doesn’t enjoy it. Trust me. I enjoy tanking, so my DK, warrior and pally are all tanks – but I sure as shit ain’t gonna expect somebody that HAAAAAAATES it to be sitting pretty with a tank gear and spec. That’s just asking for trouble, and I demand that mah groups have FUN. OR ELSE.

  30. and yet, I do the same thing to my Tank mates when I’m on Squidly (Resto Shaman)…

    It helps if I am with one one of my pet tanks and they are tired too… Maybe not for the other 3 DisPoSables, but it’s easier to walk away from my perspective

  31. I’ve gotten healer guilt off and on over WoW, and avoided playing as a result. Now I have gotten to the point that I tell people what it is I want to do and let things go as they will. I started tanking a bit though recently only to discover the other side of it in tank guilt and I haven’t quite gotten the hand of that at all. So I am now avoiding my tank.

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