Everybody loves healing

It's true! Comments to an earlier post suggest that a large number of you really get a kick out of keeping your fellow gamers alive. Blizzard's well-equipped you for this, with priests, druids, paladins, and shamans standing ready as class options. Personally, I've been the main healer for a group with all four of those classes, and can understand the satisfaction one gets from keeping a group going and not letting anyone die when a pull goes wrong.

So if everyone loves healing so much, and with almost half the classes able to heal a 5-man or 10-man group as main healer, why is it that we still see the LFG channel inundated with "LF1M Healer for [instance here]. Will pay 5g! Will walk your dog! Will buy you flowers!" ?

Is it just that healers are so loved that there's always something for them to do, and not enough to go around? Or is it perhaps that in any PUG, even if no-one else is doing their job it's the healer that gets blamed for a wipe? While I'd love to believe it's the former, experience has led me to believe that it's the latter.

Time after time I've joined a group, expecting to have some fun ripping through Scholomance or Strat Live and earning some faction or cash only to be let down or even frustrated at the expectations of a group. It's as though the group sees my paltry 6k mana and says "ooh, how fast can we make him burn through it?" before pulling an entire room or two. Then, once the over-aggroing DPS starts getting themselves killed, the whining begins. "Why didn't you keep me up?" "Heal more, noob!" "OMG, you suck!" At first, I really thought I was a sucky healer. I tried to keep everyone up, but they'd keep going down (especially AOE'ing mages). I read forum postings, guides, asked guildies for healing advice, installed mods. At the end of the day, I just had to realize that some PUGs are better than others. I turned to guild groups instead of PUGs for any kind of instance, and even now when I see the pleas for healers on the LFG channel, I tend to shy away.

What say you, healers? Are you just so busy with guild groups when you login that you have no time for PUGs, or are you gunshy from bad experiences? Would you really rather level alone than hit ZF or ST with some potential new friends?

Do you think the recent changes to the LFG system are making it easier to be a healer in a group, or to find a healer, or is it going to be more of the same? What could Blizzard change to make the role even more appealing? What could the community on your server do to entice more people to play healers and join groups? Sound off below!