OMG heal me!

Healers. Love 'em, hate 'em, you gotta have 'em. I've always enjoyed playing a healer. I'm not sure why, but I think it's the same reason I always enjoyed being the GM in PnP RPGs -- I like the long view. I like to be able to get in there and smash face as much as the next guy, but as a healer, I feel like I have an overview of the entire raid.

But enough about me - A little background on healing is in order. For anyone with any significant healing experience, this will be old hat, but I found it helpful to take a step back.

There are 3 main roles in MMORPG groups involving PvE combat:

1. people that kill things (DPS),
2. people that soak damage (Tanks),
3. people that keep others alive (healers).

In an ideal situation, everyone would be DPS in order to kill things faster. But the monsters fight back, so we need some heavily protected people to absorb the damage so the killers can keep killing. But sometimes, the monsters foil our plans by either hitting the tanks harder than they can handle, or simply damaging (either directly or via the environment) people other than our tanks. This is where the healers come in. They prevent or undo the damage that is done, so the tanks can keep tanking and the dps can keep dpsing.

Healing can be further broken down into three types:

1. Replacing lost health
2. Mitigating damage
3. Transferring damage

Replacing lost health is the most common and straightforward style of healing. It involves direct heals, HoTs, and AoE healing. Basically, someone's health bar goes down the healer uses a spell to make it go back up. Knowing the characteristics of the targets is important in order to cast appropriate-sized heals.

Mitigating damage involves casting spells that prevent or lessen damage. This might be as simple as a magical shield that absorbs/prevents damage or as complex as a buff that increases an opponent's miss percentage or caps the damage per attack. This type of healing requires more knowledge of the source of the damage as well as it's target.

Transferring damage involves moving damage to different targets (and often mitigating it in the process). A healer of this type often ends up with duties not directly related to healing -- usually managing the energy source of those skills as well as some level of direct healing.

Ok, so what's the problem? Well, the problem is that WoW tends to push healers towards #1, punishes and/or limits healers that use #2, and doesn't provide any options for #3 that I'm aware of.

The problem with #2 revolves around the threat mechanic. Ironically, preventing damage, normally a good thing, is generally a problem for 2/3 of the tank classes (druids and warriors). Taking damage generates rage, and rage is how they fuel their abilities. If you prevent that damage, you can limit their ability to tank effectively, but if you allow them to take the damage and then heal it back, it's not an issue. (This is less of a problem at higher level content, but most tanks will continue to object to shielding even when rage capped due to their past experiences). This leaves healers with only one way to heal, and it gets boring fast. Even worse, it means that the majority of healing needs to be reactive -- it consists of just watching green bars (the proverbial whack-a-mole healer), so not only is it boring, it means that different raid instances just aren't that different. The closest thing to being proactive is to throw on a HoT and then have a heal constantly "in the pipe," ready to drop once that damage hits.

So here I am, bored of whack-a-mole, with no alternatives available to my level 70 MH/BT-ready priest. It's a little frustrating. So my alternatives are either to abandon my priest or find another way to play her. Due to all the effort I've been in, I'm leaning towards the latter, but it still means there will be some re-equipping, but of course, the expansion means everyone will be re-equipping.