Healing Lesson #26: Healer Burnout
December 28, 2009
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[First of all, this all assumes you're in a raiding guild as a healer. Healer burnout isn't really relevant if you only pug since you get to choose when you play and what you play as]
One of the biggest problem for healers is burnout.
Causes of Healer Burnout:
- Stress from continual concentration.
- Lack of appreciation
- Measurements of success are not accurate. (meters)
- Boredom.
Stress from continual concentration:
It's often caused from constant stress from having to concentrate more than the roles that other play. Not only that, even if you've been a healer for a long time, you're doing way more now than ever before. Managing cooldowns on tanks, moving out of fire, dispelling and not only that, you're responsible for the lives of 24 other raiders.
When you consider most raid nights last 4 hours, that amount of intense focusing can be tiring.
No wonder healers don't listen to instructions inbetween fights.
DPS have it easy compared to healers. If a DPS slacks off for a little bit during an encounter, their DPS goes down a bit. If a healer does it, people die. Raiders tend to notice when they die. They even look up their recount and see how long they went without heals (even if they did stand in the fire for 10 seconds).
So is healing more stressful now than it was? I'd say yes. At least those who are doing everything they can.
Lack of Appreciation:
Healing is often a thankless job. No one notices the healer if they're doing a great job. If someone screws up and there's a death, the healer gets blamed more often than not.
It can easily lose motivation if you only get negative feedback, or more to the point, get no feedback at all.
Measurements of success are not accurate:
Tanking and healing are both difficult to measure success. At least with DPS, it's fairly straight forward.
For instance, Disc Priests always, always suck on the healing meters since they prevent damage, as opposed to heal.
Healing meters don't take your assignment into account when displaying your performance. They also don't take gear, overhealing, sniping from other healers or even your damage prevention into account either.
It doesn't help when Blizzard don't have an accurate way to measure damage prevention.
It's always nice to know if you're doing a good job and the tools aren't there to give an accurate representation. This is part of the reason there's a lack of appreciation for healers.
Boredom:
We all feel it from time to time, especially when we have the current content on farm. You still have to concentrate, since if you don't raiders will die.
Guilds that are in a rut that frequently lose raiders and need to gear up new ones fall into this problem soon enough. Running lower content to constantly gear up newer raiders is both necessary and bad for morale.
Guilds that also run through the content (even hard modes) so fast, also fall victim to boredom, since nothing challenges them anymore.
But isn't it your account? You can play how you want?
While there are people who say, it's your account, you can play what you want, when you want. While this is true to some extent, when you're involved with a raiding guild, it's not quite that easy.
Most decent guilds won't keep you if you continually disappear when you're geared up and bored and only come back when new content makes it interesting again.
Cleaning up your User Interface:
Healers often have lots of information on their screen that they need to process. Not all of it is important. The trick is to eliminate anything on your UI that you don't need.
Taking a break:
Sometimes the easy answer is just to have a short break. Take a couple of weeks off and go spend some time on the beach, go out or whatever you want to do to get away from it.
Reducing your raiding time:
Another option can be to reduce your raiding time. For those who are hardcore, this can mean giving up the extra play time that you do. Don't do heroics, 10 mans or the Auction House for a while.
Switching Roles:
Swapping from healing to DPS is often the choice, but the switch to tanking may also work out well.
Take up some PVP:
Playing some PVP can help, especially when in battlegrounds you can go in as any role you choose. Even if you go in as a healer, you can pretty much do what you want and take it easy.
Playing Alts:
Sometimes playing some alts and/or leveling a toon or two can help.
How to do it:
First thing, you need to talk to the powers that be. It could be your raid leader, your guild master or your class leader or a combination of all three.
The key to all this is communication and patience.
You'll need to explain why you want to change.
If at all possible, let them know when you're starting to feel burnt out. Great guilds will often accomodate great players when they're able to do so.
Be aware that you're probably going to have to continue in your role until there's a replacement (even a temporary one). If your guild has extra healers, you may be able to switch or take a break immediately.
Why take time off?
I read a story on the plusheal.com forum and it's so perfect to finish up with:
A man and his son are both lumberjacks. Being a hotheaded impulsive young man the son challenges his father to a contest (this is in the days before chainsaws etc) whoever could fell the most lumber in a single day, from sunup to sundown, would win bragging rights. On the day of the contest the son is up before dawn, leaving the house to scout out productive stands of trees. The father invites his son to sit down and join him for breakfast but the son refuses, mocking his father for wasting time. The day goes on and both are busy swinging their axes. Noontime comes around and the father spreads his blanket and invites his son to join him for lunch. The son rebukes his father, again mocking him for wasting time, telling him there's no way he will win now. Again, in the late afternoon the father spreads his blanket for a meal and the son chooses to keep working instead of eating. When dusk comes the two men count each other's lumber piles and to the son's horror his father has felled a good deal more trees. He asks his father how this could be, after all he had kept working while his "lazy" father took several breaks throughout the day. The father simply replied: "While I was sitting on my blanket, I was sharpening my axe."
Don't forget that's it's OK to want to sharpen your axe and take some time off!
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