I Suck as a Healer

Okay, maybe I am being slightly over critical of my own performance as a healer but over all I still need to learn a lot.  I did three randoms yesterday and they where basically a joke.  A shield and a renew here and there and I could basically tab out the rest of the run.  How exactly am I supposed to learn how to heal this way?

I need to do something, be reactive, throw heals more then once every 15 seconds to renew a shield.  I am not uber geared yet, well, maybe for heroics I am, but I am not about to cake walk through the game at all.  I think I am sitting at 4600 gear score which is not a lot and relatively easy to achieve.  I got my first frost piece yesterday and will keep plugging along but by just doing dungeons I think my learning experience is about done there.

The higher my gear score gets the higher the gear score of the people I am placed with will be which means doing heroics, unless I get a clueless tank, is nothing more then to get some frosts.  There is nothing more I can learn there being I am never tested and never pressured to have to decide on who lives and who dies.

I joined in on Dreamwalker in ICC last night because they wanted to try with a third healer to help some and it was nearly the end of the run so there were only a couple of tries left anyway.  I joined in and was put on raid heal assignment by the lead healer.  As raid leader myself I told everyone the deal, do not attack anything until they get to the middle.  In case you did not know, the mobs will not make any offensive moves until someone makes contact with them.  By letting them get to the middle you are keeping the action in one area making it more controllable and allowing the use of AoE.  It started out fine, everyone was keeping healed and when anything was going to do some AoE like lay waste I got everyone with a shield before hand and no one took any damage from it before the skelly died.

As more mobs started to come out faster things got a little more hectic.  I kept up doing my deal.  Shielding everyone and healing anyone that needed it with a few renews flying around.  All fine and dandy so far.  Thing is, as more started coming out people started to move from the pack in the middle meaning I had to start running around more.  This, in turn, meant that people where occasionally out of range.  The Hunter that was doing the kiting died first each of the two times we tried with me raid healing.  Both times he was out of range.  A lesser geared warrior was usually second to die.  After that it was somewhat okay, but without the Hunter to kite that one guy things turned bad really fast and we wiped each time.

I did what I could but I really need more experience on things and heroics are not going to cut it when it comes to learning more.  I need to get better on picking up where people are.  There were people out of range I was trying to heal where I spent way to much time trying to get to them that someone else that needed attention was not getting it.  With more gear it would be easier and I know based on pure numbers that 4600 is considered well below Dreamwalkers requirements but I can do it, I know I can do it.  That is the mark of being a good player.  Anyone should be able to heal it with a 6,000 gear score.  A good healer should be able to heal it with a 4,600 gear score. 

Just to point something out here.  No matter how good the healer is, if the people around the healer are not helping the situation, there is nothing that can be done.  Case and point, the hunter.  He was always out of range and I could never find him when he needed a heal.  Part my fault for losing raid awareness in knowing where everyone is, I should have known.  Part his fault for getting that far away.

Over all, I could have done much better then I did.  I need to work on my raid awareness for other things that I am not used to.  As a Hunter I only care about 2 things.  Where the mob I am attacking is and where the healer is.  I try to always attack the mob we are working on and I try to always stay in range of the healer.  Try being the operative word there. ;) 

As a healer I need to keep a track of where everyone is and where every mob is.  Not just the ones that are important to me like when I am on my Hunter (even if when I am on my hunter I still see everything around me.  I just do not need to move as much) because they are all important to me as a healer.  Every time I saw the skelly come out I shielded everyone.  Just in case he got the lay waste off.  If he didn't, no big deal, a shield is a good thing either way.  So noticing what mobs are there even if you are not the one fighting them is important.  The main thing I need to work on is noticing where people are.  I think I did a horrible job at finding people.

It was like a game of where is waldo.  I would see someone taking damage, see them out of range, do a 360 around the room looking for them (so much easier when you use a trackball) and when I did not see them I would start running all over the place to find them.  I looked where they "should" be first.  They, of course, where never there.  I will not blame them.  As a DPS main I know sometimes things will drag you away from your expected course.  I am only blaming myself for not finding them sooner.

For now I think that makes me suck as a healer and with heroics being a joke now there is no place I am really going to get to go to learn how to be better at raid awareness. No one does low level raids any more so there is nothing for me to join to get some experience and they look to blow through it.  If I fail in that surrounding I might as well just give up trying to be a healer.  I will be blacklisted as a bad healer forever more.

So the choice is, heal tons of heroics hoping for a bad group to put me to the test or advertise in trade and find myself a group I know will test me.

/2 Disc Healer looking for fresh 80 tank to chain run heroics.

Now that would either teach me how to get better... or make me bald from pulling out my hair.