healer-burnout
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Where does the pressure lie in healing?
I used to be a healer, once upon a time. It was in the days of vanilla, when being a healer consisted largely of staring at 40 bars, pressing Flash Heal, and occasionally mixing it up with a bubble or Heal Rank 4 while swigging potions like they were going out of style. It was a very different time, and healing was by and large much less complex than it is today. My guild didn't use Vent, so I did all the healing rotation calls via macros on my keyboard -- that's how easy healing was. I had time to press macro buttons and pay attention to calling things. But at some point that guild fell apart, as guilds are wont to do on occasion. And since server transfers weren't even a possibility at that point in time, I simply rolled another character on another server, vowing to take a break from any and all raiding. It lasted until paid server transfers were added as a feature, at which point my priest was promptly moved to my new server and I began healing again -- this time, in battlegrounds. I helped a lot of friends by healing them while they tried their hardest to get High Warlord in the original honor grind. So what happened? Well ... healing happened.
Healer Psychology
As a healer myself (with two level 60 priests at my disposal), I find this post discussing why so few people have a desire to play healers to be rather interesting. The favored theory, by both the original poster and subsequent responses, is that staring at health bars isn't very exciting and playing whack-a-mole with the health of your party members just isn't very much fun. In my case, I find the importance of the healer role to be the exciting part - your action (or inaction) has a very real impact on whether your party lives or dies. However, perhaps I haven't played the class to the point of burnout yet, which seems to happen to many healers at some point or another.
