Healing: A damaged mans game.

People that don't heal ask healers why they do it. I will be the first to admit, that all healers are damaged goods. We are masochists. We play a thankless game, we are the people that keep everyone alive through the stupid.We are the ones blamed when a wipe occurs, and we are never thanked when we spam heals to keep some idiots alive. So why do we do it? Well obviously someone has too, but why us? Why do certain people pick healing over others. Well, it's my thinking that most healers pick to heal because it is a thinking mans game. I can't just stand in one spot and spam heals to win, I have to think about what I'm doing, and more importantly what other people are doing so that I can keep them up. Healing requires you to pay attention, to be raid aware, and be quick to re-act. Even with that, healing is not all that different from dps or tanking, instead of bringing an enemies bar to 0%, we make sure that all our raid members live, reverse dps. However, I think healers get a stigma for one reason, and one only, most dps don't pay attention to the raid, and don't know that the healer are doing anything. People think, oh healing is easy, just keep me up so I can smack the boss. Sure healing might be easy sometimes, but in complicated fights or ones with a lot of damage going out, your healers are doing more than people think. I think this is part of the the problem, we get over worked and overwhelmed. Dps look at their damage, threat and if they are standing in the right place. As a healer, I look at 10 peoples health, if I'm standing in the right place, and making sure I have mana to heal. you hear about healer tunnel vision, because our job is to keep you little bar in our healing mod at full. None of that really explains why healing is a damaged mans game though does it? Well here's my opinion on that, healing is for masochists. We enjoy feeling like shit when we wipe, like we could have stopped it, we push ourselves to heal more, and we yell at ourselves more than anyone else when we die. I know that for myself, I'm constantly checking numbers to see what I can improve, keep track of when people take more damage then they should, or less healing because of something I may have done. I analyze, nit-pick and fuss to make myself better, not because I need to top the meters, but because it is my obligation to keep people up, and if someone dies then I'm not doing my job. That's really the meat of it, I have an obligation to keep people alive.Sometimes it isn't even your fault, sometimes someone stood in something bad, but when they die, I still feel like it's my fault. Ask any healer, as anyone that leads a raid, when you talk to your healers about what went wrong, the most common answer is I didn't heal enough when it might have something we had no control over. Healers have a messiah complex, we need to heal everyone. It's why we do it, and it's why we have so many problems. So go tell your healer thanks, and to do something less stressful for once.