MMO Weekly: The Healer

27 Oct 2009 at 11:32:51 by Jeff Hollis

Hello there, MMO-heads, and welcome to this week's edition of MMO Weekly.  In this week's issue, we're going to talk about the role of the healer in many MMO games, and the (sometimes) reluctant role that healing classes are forced into. 

I'm not referring, in this discussion, to dedicated, full time healers.  Those folks fully embrace their roles.  They want to be the group healer, and they know the ups and downs of their profession.  They get group invites with a snap of the fingers, they are (usually) the only person to roll on heal-oriented loot drops, they are a much-needed part of groups, raids, and guilds.  Of course, there is little glory in healing, and they suuuuuuuuck at solo PvP encounters.  They also tend to get blamed, a lot, if there is a wipe or disaster of some sort – I mean, there is a down side to everything.  :)

No, the folks I'm referring to are the part-time healers.  These are players that chose a class because they enjoy a non-healing aspect of the class, but somehow find themselves repeatedly thrown into the healing role.  One of my WoW characters – an enhancement shaman – is a phenomenal DPSer.  He's in a full set of PvP gear, in fact.  Yet, despite this, I have had the experience of *repeatedly* being called upon to heal.  Mind you, I have virtually zero gear for that purpose, my mana pool is the size of a mouse's bladder, and I have no skill as a healer.  Yet, because my class has been gifted with healing spells, my guildmates have expected me to heal.  I completely suck at it, but sometimes I'm all that's available.

This phenomena really struck me last night, as I played WoW with some scattered family members.  We were a group that consisted of two hunters, two death knights, and cousin Gina the feral druid.  Gina picked the druid class because she likes cat form.  She doesn't like bear form, tree form, whatever the hell a moonkin is supposed to be, or anything else.  She wants to be a cat, sneak up on things, and DPS the crap out of them. 

Her gear supports her feral instincts.  She's great at DPS.  She enjoys it.  And whenever she groups with us, 75% of the time we end up asking her to heal.  She hates healing.  We even twisted her arm, gave her guild funds to dual spec, and forced her to be a tree for us last night.  As you can probably imagine, she really loved that.

Fun, huh?  Yeah, Gina is having a great time, playing a game, doing something she doesn't enjoy because we can't regularly find another available healer.  Yuppers, that makes perfect sense. 

And, just last night, I kept hearing this:  “Need healer for HH and good to go!  PST”, or “NewGuild is recruiting healers.  We raid 6 yo 9 server time, so apply at NewGuild.com!”  or “Need heals for 10/25 VoA!”  Mind you, I did hear shouts for tanks and DPSers but, more than anything else, people were requesting healers. 

And this, friends, is playing World of Warcraft.  WoW has more healing classes than any other MMO in recent memory.  Druid, priest, paladin, shaman – that's 40% of the classes in the game that can heal and, apparently, there is *still* a shortage of willing healers. 

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