Dear Heroic Healer (who used to be dps)...

Dear Heroic Healer (who used to be dps),

I know, it's a hard world out there for you. You'd like to do heroics, you like being shadow, or ret, or moonkin, or elemental, because you lawlpwn and know how to play it -- but with the current shortage of healers at level 80, you'll never get into a group if you don't respec and heal. Now, I commend you for your sacrifice. I really do. It's a thankless job, made even more difficult nowadays with mages and warlocks and moonkins wanting to roll on your gear, and warrior tanks scoffing off the idea of CC because they need the rage, or death knights insisting that they can tank but that never use cooldowns and consequently stand there and get two shotted.

But seriously, if you haven't healed since vanilla WoW, and you're still rolling in your Burning Crusade dps epics (with the dps gems still in there, no less), and you don't even know how to spec a healer anymore, you just went through and picked all the talents that said "increase healing" on them...please, don't try to heal a heroic and pretend that it'll all be fine. It won't. Don't act like this instance is impossible just because you can't do it. It's not. Every healing class changed a lot, even over the course of the last few patches. Even people who have been healers for all of Burning Crusade got new talents and spells to play with -- and they, at least, knew that a talent called "pushback protection on healing spells" might well be a useful thing for a healer to have. You are going to walk into that heroic with your 1600 spellpower and 100 mana regen and probably get owned on the first boss. And you're going to find out that it's probably not as simple as you imagined.

My priest lead for MC used to simply tell people to "push the heal button." Unfortunately it's not that one-dimensional anymore (it never was, but if you were a real healer, you would have known that already). There are a lot of things besides pushing the healing button that you have to consider, such as: how do you manage your mana? How do you know when you must keep the individual topped off, or when it is ok to move first or dispel first or HoT them instead? How do you deal with group damage in a situation where you have to move around a lot? When you get silenced a lot? When two or more people are near death, one of which is yourself, in what order do you heal them? Which healing spell do you push so that you get the most bang for your buck? When the crap hits the fan? Will they be the same thing? What happens when you've got an add on you and the tank is preoccupied for the next few minutes with 10 other adds and a boss?

It might be the tank's fault, if he's not defense capped. Or it might be the dps's fault if they really are just not cutting it. But if the tank is dying while you're solo healing him, or the group dies because of unavoidable AOE damage, it's probably not their faults. It's yours.

So yes, former shadow priest still wearing the dps badge legs from the SSO island, who insists that he used Circle of Healing even though Recount shows not a single instance of that spell (are you sure you're not confusing it with Prayer of Healing?), or resto druid with hit gear who doesn't know how to heal more than one target at a time, you should probably run the normal level 80 dungeons and get some actual healing gear. Or at least try to research a good spec first. Because as it is, you're just wasting everyone's time.

With love,
Grim