Healers are force multipliers. The more people they have to heal the more obvious it gets as to how skilled/unskilled they are. The effectiveness of your group is 100% dependent on that healer and what they can do to keep the group surviving.

 

You really make your team look bad with your comment, I do not want to bore you with math, but your opinion would suggest that your group of 8 players is made of 8 healers, or you expect your 2 healers to do 100% of work carrying the rest of the team.

Is there nothing the rest of the team can do to chip in to that 100% dependency?

Edited October 7, 2013 by ELRunninW

I find this statement the best one I read so far!!

 

A healer can only do so much. I'm healer sage, healer trooper, healer scoundrell I like healing. It is true that a healer can compensate for any one's fault. But we cannot compensate if tanks keep targets together. or basically if the group doesn't know the mechanic of the fight. we cannot compensate that we have to heal everybody constently. I hate it when people say it's healers fault stop blaming them and look at yourself first. are u doing max damage? (are u sure) are u using your defensive cooldowns to maximize damage reduction in a fight. are u taunting the right target. Are u killing the right target.

People think that only healers and tanks are important but DPS also. LEARN YOUR CLASS for god's sake.

if u don't know how to maximize your damage/second for like 6 min. long. your just playing for fun and shouldn't even try HM's !!!

 

at least that's my point of view.

 

and again, I disagree.

 

because in personal experience of doing group content on all 3 roles as well as general observation... many a time when wipe is blamed on a healer, its actually anything BUT a healer's fault.

 

the reason why people tend to blame healers is because healers are supposed to stop you from dying, so a lot of people mistakenly extend that to "death=not being healed enough"

but I will repeat it again. healers can only do so much.

 

I cannot heal you when you LoS me, I cannot heal you when you don't interrupt debuff that should be interruptible and the resulting dot ticks faster than I can heal, I cannot keep healing you if you keep standing in cleave you shouldn't be standing in, puddles of bad, and I most certainly cannot heal you if you fail to avoid one shot mechanic. I cannot heal faster then my GCD will allow me to, I cannot compensate for everything.

 

healers are an important part of trinity mechanic (which btw is NOT used in every single MMO that ever was or will be, that statement just shows how inexperienced you are), but they are NOT significantly more important than the rest of the group to the point you seem to be trying to make. tanking and dps failure are JUST as apparent and glaring and crucial to people who know how to analyze encounters beyond "I died, must be healer's fault"

I can handle the heal pressure just fine, but the tank role is by far the most complicated and delicate of the 3, one has to know the battles beforehand, and lead on every frigging fight, and I'm not godd at leadership lol.

 

And about healers, well, we can't do miracles, we can heal though stupidity, but only to a point. If you insist on standing in cademimu's last boss fire time, and time again, don't expect a H2F any soon.

 

The first tanking run through new content is always a fox trot on egg shells. I find knowing my class and how to use cooldowns / interrupts is more than half the battle for any flashpoint. Running away from things also helps.

 

As for healing it comes down to a matter of the limitations, mechanics, gearing and skill of the healer. Some healers can provision for certain degrees of "special" that others cannot.

 

I'm still trying to find a less clunky medium on my commando healer. I was thrown into Czerka labs with a dps that excelled at killing himself. The tank was pretty damn good and I felt bad that I let him die because I was too busy trying to heal the dps standing in the electro-charged water of doom. But hey, I hit the cooldown and gear limitations of my commando and reality came crashing down.

 

In other words, I really should have stopped after I blew everything I had and just switched to the tank.

Edited October 7, 2013 by Lord_of_Mu

I can't heal through stupid.

It's nice to know that it's not just me being a "bad" at (Merc-)healing.

 

Granted, I am still very new to this sort of thing, and quite probably need a lot of l2p-time (any advice here would be appreciated by the way --soloing with a geared Blizz just isn't the same, although he can be quite the little beast once you gear him up), but:

 

I am a hard-caster-healer:

 

I have neither the GCDs nor the cast-times --and in the Merc's case, the heat-- to spare spam-healing your stupid Sorc-DPS arse, and never being able to take my eyes off the tank for even a second because you refuse to kill adds, this after five/six encounters when you pulled first, kept pulling off the taunt, and then didn't even try to scrape the mobs off me when I drew aggro for....you know, healing.

 

Just repeat the mantra, though: It's always the healer's fault.

 

Yeah, I think I'll stick to R/DPS in group-content for now, thanks.

EVE online?

 

The wonderful, wonderful exception to so many rules <3 <3

 

Thank God I'll always have that.

 

But there is, after a fashion "healing" (It's called "Remote-repair/Logistics") in that game too, it's just not "trinity"-based.

This seems to be a common problem these days when it comes to operations. Finding good healers is more of a challenge then it should be. I have had to call off countless op's in the past because the healers couldn't do there job well.

 

In flashpoints too but those are teh joys og pugging.

I always love people who stand in crap then complain that the healers can heal fast enough. I also love it when I am the healer and tanking most of the adds and DPS complain when they die.

 

^^ This.

 

Having rolled an operative healer as my latest character and run a lot of flashpoints (just got her to level 50) I have a new found respect for all the healers that I've played with before and how well I play my tank character. Most of the tanks I've seen recently are god awful. They don't seem to know what a taunt is, don't notice when all the adds are chasing me round the area and insist on standing in the aoe crap. Add to that dps who pull mobs first, ignore the adds chasing me and also stand in the crap and healing a pug fp is a tough job.

 

A good healer may be hard to find but someone who actually knows how to tank and half decent dps are the rarest beasts on my server.

Edited October 25, 2013 by Irongut

It's usually the healers who complain and for good reason. Simply put they can't do their job unless everyone else does theirs. Tanks need to draw agro and manage the flow of battle away from the healer. Dps need to be mindful of where the healer is placed and protect them. It's only when healers are not in combat or healing themselves that they can heal us. If you are still having problems go into Biochem and use resuables. You can only heal once a battle but once is more than enough for most Flashpoints.

 

My only complaint with healers, and this has only happened a couple of times, is when someone signs in as a healer but acts as a pure dps character. I understand not wanting to wait for a Flashpoint to pop but you have to fill the role you signed up for.

 

A good healer may be hard to find but someone who actually knows how to tank and half decent dps are the rarest beasts on my server.

 

As someone who mains a dps, this has been my experience as well, at least at level 55.

 

In PUGs, of the three roles, healers seem to be the most consistently competent; finding healers that are legitimately bad is rare. Most tanks are at least decent, but there are still some derpy ones who have no concept of threat generation or holding agro on more than one target; there also seems to be a bigger issue with dps queuing as tanks compared to healers. And of course DPS is just a total crapshoot - whenever I get into a FP, it seems like there is a 50/50 chance of the other dps slot being taken by somebody who has absolutely no clue what they are doing.

 

This might be due to the fact that bad dps can be carried by other dps, while bad tanks can be carried (to an extent) by good healers, but good tanks can't really compensate for bad healers as well. So if a healer is simply bad, they probably end up not doing group content because they never complete it.

It's usually the healers who complain and for good reason. Simply put they can't do their job unless everyone else does theirs. Tanks need to draw agro and manage the flow of battle away from the healer. Dps need to be mindful of where the healer is placed and protect them. It's only when healers are not in combat or healing themselves that they can heal us.

 

That's not true. Healers can make up for a lot of the mistakes of the raid group. That's part of the fun of healing (at least for me), to be able to take a bad situation of poor play and turn it into success. It makes it challenging and interesting and unpredictable. I don't need everything to go perfect, I don't need my tank to tank everything, I don't need my dps to avoid stuff 100% of the time, because finding ways to overcome those obstacles is part of the job of healing. If someone dies, there's a chance it was because they made a mistake and weren't playing well, but lots of bad play can be overcome with healing.

 

If I let someone die, even if it was kind of their fault, I always think to myself if there was something I could have done better myself, as a healer, to change the outcome. Group content is a team effort, so play as a team. It's not just on the dps and tanks to do that. You can heal through a lot more than you think if you don't write off too many situations as unhealable.

Healers can make up for a lot of mistakes, and that certainly is fun, but it's a double-edged sword since you can make your groups too reliant on you to clean up their messes. I've seen that plenty in MMOs. When you finally come to a fight where you are just not able to deal with all the mistakes being made, suddenly people will need to learn how to play all over again.

 

I don't mind helping people who make mistakes. We all do, and I am extremely patient with people who are trying their best. I just don't want to carry people who aren't even trying to avoid standing in fire or aren't bothering to gear their characters properly. Especially the last point bothers me. People are very quick to judge especially tanks that are undergeared, but I see so many DPS who don't even augment their gear. If you don't do the bare minimum to pull your own weight, you shouldn't be raiding at all.

 

Of course there are genuinely bad healers as well. I don't think they last very long though!

A side effect of allowing us to purchase Treek is that I will never roll as a healer. If other people feel like me, if they get rid of Treek a lot more people will roll as healers since it can be a long wait before your class gets one and more healers mean a lot less wait time for Flashpoints, Operations etc.

 

Just pointing this out, I love my teddy bear and will throw a tantrum worthy of any little kid that gets their best friend/stuffed animal taken away.

Form/join a guild with capable players. Reroll a healer. Screen your healers for experience/gear before inviting them. Complain on the forums about your inability to do the previous three. When those all fail, /uninstall.

5th option - Bioware makes addon API and more people reroll healers because it will get easier and more fun.

Is it weird that I find healing one of the easier roles? We usually have the least mechanics, in SM most mistakes are easy to outheal and overall the healing required is relatively low. 16man is even beyond ridicilous, sometimes I feel I might aswell not be there since straight after my heal hit I see another 5% being cleared by another big heal from one of the others. It would really suprise me if you can get 1 group where all healers can't pull their weight.

 

That being said I possibly overestimate DPS, I find it important to be on the right target at all times and maximizing my DPS even if we're not near any enrage timer. Tank isn't too complicated either, but has little room for errors and well, sadly it's very difficult to do your job properly with a taunt-it-all buddy that forgot to stack any mitigation because his epeen needs HP to feel good. To be fair unless the tanks are beyond saving I've never failed a PuG-operation. Which is rather sad considering I've not yet came around a mitigation-heavy tank.

 

In FPs I have come around some really bad healers (if you kick a healer and Treek can keep your team up you will want to cry.) But I also get around quite ridicilous DPS or simply plain rude DPS that rush in, not pop a single cooldown and don't care at all that their pug-tank might new to tanking, whilst I get aggro of everything he ignores and have to heal my *** off, sad part is that it's possible without any wipes, not does it push me to use consumeables, except on squishy Sorcerer/Sage.

 

5th option - Bioware makes addon API and more people reroll healers because it will get easier and more fun.

 

Google failed me, could you explain (in easy terms) what that is? (PM if it's very off-tpic, I would really appreciate it!)

Edited October 27, 2013 by KittyCheshire

I'm just an mediocre healer. Well, the worst thing is to play with a group on a planet (happened 2 times in the recent days in H4s) and being the one with the lowest level - at least 3 levels below everyone else - and the mobs notice this ... As a result I was pulling more than I wanted to, but the group was quite forgiving, I was really glad about that. But on the other hand it's sad that they can go past mobs in narrow alleys (mobs to the left & the right) and I can't, because I would pull the mobs otherwise ... But when they do their job, then I'm able to do some good healing. Not great, but sufficient. (Sage healer here, level 36 now.) Edited October 27, 2013 by AlrikFassbauer

Is it weird that I find healing one of the easier roles? We usually have the least mechanics, in SM most mistakes are easy to outheal and overall the healing required is relatively low. 16man is even beyond ridicilous, sometimes I feel I might aswell not be there since straight after my heal hit I see another 5% being cleared by another big heal from one of the others. It would really suprise me if you can get 1 group where all healers can't pull their weight.

 

That being said I possibly overestimate DPS, I find it important to be on the right target at all times and maximizing my DPS even if we're not near any enrage timer. Tank isn't too complicated either, but has little room for errors and well, sadly it's very difficult to do your job properly with a taunt-it-all buddy that forgot to stack any mitigation because his epeen needs HP to feel good. To be fair unless the tanks are beyond saving I've never failed a PuG-operation. Which is rather sad considering I've not yet came around a mitigation-heavy tank.

 

In FPs I have come around some really bad healers (if you kick a healer and Treek can keep your team up you will want to cry.) But I also get around quite ridicilous DPS or simply plain rude DPS that rush in, not pop a single cooldown and don't care at all that their pug-tank might new to tanking, whilst I get aggro of everything he ignores and have to heal my *** off, sad part is that it's possible without any wipes, not does it push me to use consumeables, except on squishy Sorcerer/Sage.

 

 

 

Google failed me, could you explain (in easy terms) what that is? (PM if it's very off-tpic, I would really appreciate it!)

 

They give the community the possibilities to create addons for the game.

They give the community the possibilities to create addons for the game.

 

Thanks! I looked into it too deep thinking it was a specific kind of addon.

Is it weird that I find healing one of the easier roles?

 

Healing in SWTOR mostly consists of pushing red bars. Occassional cleanse to break the monotony and off you go pushing red bars again. Which is really sad because healers can be a very proactive class that actually requires some forethought.

Healing in SWTOR mostly consists of pushing red bars. Occassional cleanse to break the monotony and off you go pushing red bars again. Which is really sad because healers can be a very proactive class that actually requires some forethought.

 

While flashpoints and even HM operations are relatively easy to heal, there are some truly intense healing challenges in the game most people have never even experienced. For instance, the first minute or two of NiM Warlords in S&V is extremely serious. Especially the first time you encounter it.

 

People can argue all day long about which roles take the most skills to execute, but the bottom line is for top tier content - especially in smaller groups of 8m - everyone has to be good. Every single person has to pull their weight for a group to be successful.

 

The most important thing is to have good players. Most of the best players I know have multiple toons and are capable of playing them all at a high level.

I just don't like healing. I always fear that I might be doing something wrong.

The pressure to be a "good" healer is high, nowadays.

 

Well - let me help you with that a bit. You *are* going to screw up on occasion as a healer. And when it happens, likely there will be some 'leet skillz knucklehead' who is going to give you a ration of crap about it. It is going to happen, and likely more than once. Ignore them. Pay attention to the helpful ones who will give you some good tips.

 

So - figure out what you did wrong, and try not to do it the same way twice is all !

 

I play a Sage healer most times. Some fights are easy, especially if you have a good tank / dps crew. Some are just a 'healer battle' - and those are your chance to shine.

 

So, maybe a good healer is hard to find, but A good healer / tank combo makes for a fun smooth run.

 

p.s. - just got a Shadow tank to 50. Huge respect to those who can tank well. Am learning.

Healing in SWTOR mostly consists of pushing red bars. Occassional cleanse to break the monotony and off you go pushing red bars again. Which is really sad because healers can be a very proactive class that actually requires some forethought.

 

are we talking about the same game here?

 

or maybe you are not as good of a healer a you think you are.

 

whenever i heal, I'm always proactive. anticipating damage, regaining energy (actively not just standing there, waiting for a bar to fill up), watching adjusting, ccing if needed. sometimes even adding a bit of dps as needed.

 

the beauty of healing in tor is resource (and to some degree cooldown) management. it is the most proactive healing mechanics that I've experienced and if I time it right, I can continue to heal indefinitely.

 

but if you are going to simplify it down to "pushing red bars" well.. I have news for you. this is what healing is about in EVERY. SINGLE. TRINITY. BASED. GAME. playing wackamole with health bars.

the beauty of healing in tor is resource (and to some degree cooldown) management. it is the most proactive healing mechanics that I've experienced and if I time it right, I can continue to heal indefinitely.

 

but if you are going to simplify it down to "pushing red bars" well.. I have news for you. this is what healing is about in EVERY. SINGLE. TRINITY. BASED. GAME. playing wackamole with health bars.

 

You could have just said "I haven't played Guild Wars" and be done with it. SWTOR healing is a breeze compared to that ancient game.

Edited October 29, 2013 by slafko

You could have just said "I haven't played Guild Wars" and be done with it. SWTOR healing is a breeze compared to that ancient game.

 

I have played Guild Wars, and I prefer a game in which you don't have to wait 2 hours just to find a healer, and most likely it won't even be a good one.

 

As for playing one yourself: I enjoy healing with dps'ing during breaks more than just "buy the right skills for the right content and equip 'em".

I understand how having all skills readily available coupled with an inexhaustable resource pool will be appealling to the majority of players.