World of Warcraft

At level 80 most dungeons are rather tedious, and if you have some decent gear you can, as the healer, carry almost everyone through.
LFD as a low level character is a whole different story.

I have a level 22 orc shaman, the few talent points she has is in enhancement, but I sign up as a healer for LFD, because I know I can easily heal low level dungeons.
So, I get into stockades, and before we've cleared down the first corridor, we've wiped once, switched tank twice, and dps twice.
So we're a priest, a paladin, a druid, a warrior (tank), and me.

We get the first boss down, then go down the right corridor towards Lord Overheat (yeah, a fire elemental), and the paladin manages to pull half the corridor, ending in a wipe.
We proceed on to lord Overheat, then back to the left corridor towards Hogger - paladin goes ahead and pulls half the corridor, leaving me with a lot of aggro from mobs with a stun. New wipe.

Now *wiping* isn't a problem for me - those things happens, but a) it wasn't the paladin's first retard pull and b) it wasn't the first time the tank completely failed to even TRY to get mobs off me.

Back in, on to Hogger, tank pulls before I'm ready, and the moment I enter the room I pull three mobs off to the right that I had no chance of seeing before I entered. The priest and the druid (whom actually had an IQ that went into three digits), tried to help me, but I hadn't the mana to keep up with the damage from Hogger and the trash.
The tank died, and immediately (while we are all still fighting) says "ress me".
This is when things bubbled over and I became sarcastic, replying with an eloquent "*#@# no".

We wipe, run back in, tank pulls immediately. I let him die. The following conversation occurs:
"Healer"
"Yes?"
"Why not heal me?"
"Because we weren't ready."
"But you didn't say so."
....
And I who thought me being oom, him being on half health, and two people being out of range was, you know, a dead giveaway.

After killing Hogger (finally) he went: "Shaman", and "again"
I ended that train of thought with "No I don't think I can handle it, I can feel my IQ points jumping off cliffs and committing suicide as we speak." and left.

Wait until you get to the new Gnomeregan.

The first boss has to be the worst dungeon design ever, as far as I can tell. You have to jump down, in to combat with the boss and adds who do aoe damage. And inevitably you won't have read the quest that tells you about the parachute...

Yeah, that was my first wipe ever as a healer. Panicked and forgot to heal myself. The rest of the dungeon went OK, though I ended up mostly oom at thermaplug, and I had to let the crazy hunter die who decided for some reason he wanted to pull a whole different pack than the tank was fighting.

Healing on my low lvl priest, so far today ive had tanks that:

wear dresses
no shield
no specc
missing armor pieces
using 2h weapons and staves
Not holding aggro at all

Oh joy...

The new revamped dungeons 81-85 are going to be tough for healers as dps and tanks realise it's not just a zerg rush anymore.

Sadly, Us healers will probably get the blame.

The entire game is being tuned to be a whole lot harder than what people are used to. No longer is it viable to expect the healer to carry everyone. The mind-numbingly low difficulty of the game for the last couple of years has, no surprise, numbed the minds of the players to the point where the average player is dumber than a box full of broken doorknobs.

True, a well-geared (read: Heirloomed up the whazoo) healer/tank team can still blast through up until 80 without much trouble, but it isn't as ridiculously easy as it used to be (no more three-pull dungeons). 80-85 is an entirely different deal.

Healing as a disc priest (my other character) is HARD at 85 (beta), and you end up getting yelled at a lot by moronic tanks who have no patience for CC or mages who are unaware that all-out nuking a random CCed target on which the tank has no aggro might get them killed. You'll have to drink every couple of pulls, and you have to carefully decide which spell to use at any given time since the margins are so slim. A heal/greater heal in place of a flash heal might see your tank dead, and a few too many flash heal will leave you oom. The same is apparently true, albeit to a lesser degree, for most of the other classes.

The only exception is the holy paladin, which is now only loleasy at 85, compared to rofleasy at 80.

Ah yes, the joys of low level healing. I know exactly what you mean. It has scarred me for life and left me with a phobia of joining lfd without one of my friends as a tank.

The question about cata is, how long will it take before the dumber-than-a-full-box-of-broken-doorknobs players realise that when suddenly all of their pugs fail, it might be them, not the healer?

"Heal me"

"Heal me"

anything along the lines of this..

I like it when a DPS runs in to a pack of mobs, dies inside a second, then goes "what happened?" or "no heals?"

Today I decided to try healing, thinking it couldn't be that hard at low levels. Well, that was until I met the "tank". Zoned into Deadmines and saw this druid tank with 398 health. My thoughts immidiately was "omg, this will be challenging". And it indeed was, think tank died 6-7 times. He kept charging on without checking my mana. Didn't even get time to write "mana" or "mb" or anything before he kept on going and ofc he died. From his first death and until last boss, he flamed me the whole time, "Heal ffs", "ebayer stop play and delete your character", "noob healer heal me" and more that I don't want to remember. My Healing Touch were more or less complete heals (360-420), Rejuv ticking for 80, Regrowth ticking for 30, Swiftmend (300ish) and he still managed to die blaming me all the time. And he kept get backup from his feral friend, flaming me too. Though none of the other in the group said a word about it...

Afterwards the wise thoughts said to me that I should've left group immidiately after his first death, but I'm no quitter so I thought it could get better once I can foresee how much dmg that came. I was a fool, didn't get any better. I will try a few more dungeons, but if this continues - I'll respec to balance and go laserchicken until I can dualspec. Simply not worth it taking this crap from people that only are pixels on my screen.

Sounds a lot similar to many occasions where I healed random groups in 85 heroics during Beta. In many cases these random groups were blissfully unaware of how the difficulty level has been brought up. They would often charge right into massive packs that are deadly without CC, then blame me for the resulting deaths with many a Come ooooon is it so hard to heal? and a Healer awake? This made me all too aware that early Cata is going to be a bit of a troublesome time for pugs, it's simply going to take some time for the vast majority of players to catch on to the idea that they actually are going to be forced to improve their game if they want to get anywhere. It's something that needed to happen, honestly, in order to bring the average player quality back up to a reasonable standard, after the dull heroic aoe zerg farm mentality of LK. This time people are going to have to have some intelligence, especially in the beginning.

So yeap, I honestly hope it's something that will help kill off instances like the one mentioned in the OP.

"Heal me"

i am shooting rage lasers right now.

on topic, i appreciate the new, re-tuned dungeons. as a resto shaman, i would refresh earth shield on the tank every other pull and thrash my space button. boring as hell, and don't start with the "you can cast lightning bolt if you have the talent", i don't DO damage dealing when i have the green cross. so these changes are really welcome.

It is indeed a double-edged sword: on one hand I enjoy challenges, but as has been mentioned, us healers are probably going to take all the *!#! that comes out of it.

The entire game is being tuned to be a whole lot harder than what people are used to. No longer is it viable to expect the healer to carry everyone. The mind-numbingly low difficulty of the game for the last couple of years has, no surprise, numbed the minds of the players to the point where the average player is dumber than a box full of broken doorknobs.

True, a well-geared (read: Heirloomed up the whazoo) healer/tank team can still blast through up until 80 without much trouble, but it isn't as ridiculously easy as it used to be (no more three-pull dungeons). 80-85 is an entirely different deal.

Healing as a disc priest (my other character) is HARD at 85 (beta), and you end up getting yelled at a lot by moronic tanks who have no patience for CC or mages who are unaware that all-out nuking a random CCed target on which the tank has no aggro might get them killed. You'll have to drink every couple of pulls, and you have to carefully decide which spell to use at any given time since the margins are so slim. A heal/greater heal in place of a flash heal might see your tank dead, and a few too many flash heal will leave you oom. The same is apparently true, albeit to a lesser degree, for most of the other classes.

The only exception is the holy paladin, which is now only loleasy at 85, compared to rofleasy at 80.

I may be weird but... I am looking a lot forward to that!

us healers are probably going to take all the *!#! that comes out of it.

sadly, its been like this for a long time, and i dont see those vocal pugs changing their attitudes any time soon.
i plan on pugging even less than i do now for the first several months of cata, tbqh i cant be bothered with the flaming.

On topic, having a blood specced tank, with anti-crit talents not using any presence atall and pulling all 3 drakes before keleseth in UK. pure win.

I can't be bothered with verbally abbusive players or tanks that don't stop when I ask for a MB because they think they are so IMBA they don't need a healer.

If they piss me off, I wait for them to pull, start running towards the exit and let them die.
When they are dead I ROFL, put them on ignore and happily work on my tailoring in Stormwind untill they vote kick me.
Put myself in LFG again and within 3 minutes I'm playing with a nice group.

Yeah "MB" or "mana" or "MANA" or just "OOM"

just produces reactions like "????" "Come" or *tank runs off into next (add 2 or 3 more ) group(s)*

I just love it. Sometimes I just sit there and wait to fill my mana most tiems the tank survives though due to their selfhealing abilities... -_-# doh

I hate to think about healing those tanks in Cata dungeons...


Oh yeah wiat there is another one:

Mage constantly pulls before the tank:
I told him to stop aggroing and pulling... He just said "not my problem"
So I thought: Oh yes it is your problem....*left group*

Went to go questing for a while that was soooo great.... ;)

ME: OOM...just one second (not like I need 5 minutes to replenish)

Tank: "dr00d wth!!11!!!!!!" *dies*

DPS:"HEAL HEAL HEAL HEAL MEEHHH!!!!11!!!!!!!"*dies*

Me: *evil laugh*

"HEALER?????"

Sometimes, after some1 dies.

"res me"
"you know, it costs mana" (while drinking from 0 mana after spam heal every1 in group)