Article:
Personal Experiences: Healing in World of Warcraft

Why on earth would anyone want to play a healer? It is the most abysmally thankless job in MMORPG game play. Unfortunately, more than any other job in the game, it is obvious when a player is no good at what they're doing and this in turn lowers the reputation of all healers. Dungeon groups flame you when they pull the boss and die, raiders flame you when you can't heal 20 people all at once, battleground players flame you for being the first to die and arena partners flame you for being out of line of sight, yet for other worldly reasons - I love it.

Add-ons have forced my style of healing (manual) to not only battle with other arch-types (tanks and DPS) but also with my fellow healers. There are modifications such as Clique and Heal-bot which have been in World of Warcraft for a very long time, but are still used widely amongst the healing community. To give you a quick run-down, these add-ons help you heal by turning your mouse into a set of macros which combines targeting a raid frame and healing at the same time. As a practical example, if you're a holy paladin your left click may be holy light whilst your right click is flash of light.

I am sure this does not sound like a great difference but it's all about the maths. If it saves you even 1/16th of a second, the average raid fight lasts 8 minutes and you cast 30 times per minute - that gives you up to an extra 7 casts per fight compared to manually targeting and clicking heals. This statistic makes it seem as if there's no incentive to play manually, but of course it is a calculation only in perfect conditions and does not account for player skill.

It makes it feel all the more rewarding when you reach the top of the healing meters and perform the best on a regular basis. After all, if you can beat them without the help of add-ons you can conclude that if you used them, you would be able to heal even more than you already are.

It's a game and it's all about the rush, in a heated 8 minute fight all types of healers are pushed to the limit - it keeps you coming back for more.

I first started healing in player versus player zones during the first expansion, the Burning Crusade. At the time, I was tired of playing a mage (mainly because I was asked to portal someone to a city every 5 minutes) so I re-rolled a druid, a perfect healer for PvP running and healing. Of course, playing on both a PvE server and that the Alliance are poor at PvP, I decided to start my own guild. We were very successful yet the pressure was always on to keep yourself alive as well as keeping everyone else up.