I don't buy it.

I heal because I like healing. I've DPSed my fair share, and I get bored with it very quickly.

I think the real reason that Healing and Tanking both differentiate from DPSing is that they require more real time priority decisions and coordination with your team. Its a different head space to get into because there is rarely a routine pattern you can follow, whereas once a DPSer learns their role in a fight it doesn't change very much from one pull to the next. For a tank and healer on challenging content, every pull is unique.

I don't buy this post.

Good healers (which may very well not include Anon's healer guild mates) love healing and don't think of it as a job. I've been healing on my resto shammy main since I made her when BC released and have never once felt extreme stress or pressure while healing (akin to a job, not the normal pressure you feel to win a fight). To me, it's exciting to get into these very challenging fights and pull it off.

I've tried to DPS and even rolled a DPS toon, but she spent 1 day as DPS at 80 until I switched her to healing since DPS was so dull to me.

Dps is a science. Healing is an art. Some people prefer art to science.

I heal because I enjoy it. I enjoyed it so much I leveled a paladin to have two healers. You're right; new content is fun when you're doing it right, or at least making good attempts, and that's a big part of the reason I heal. (The other is that we'd never get a raid going otherwise.)

However, Orion's very correct in that healer burnout is a problem. Very few of the tanks i've run with in randoms have done more than take the healer for granted. I've seen the tank pull half the dungeon and then say "Why would I need to use cooldowns to get through that? That's what you're for."

In progression, it feels good when you do things right, (I would quote GC about "feeling smart when you mix the right problem with the right answer"). A lot of the stress falls to healers when other people screw up, and you're expected to just pick up the slack. Healing through damage that will kill someone in the blink of an eye is not fun when you've wiped seven times that night, you're running a fever, you want to go to sleep, and the DPS are pushing the tanks to keep going. I have friends who raid at least four times a week, and I personally have no idea how they do it, because a lot of their time is spent wiping.

TL;DR - Healing is fun until people turn it from a game into something serious.

For those that do not buy my post, all I can say is its true for me. I like to heal, I really do. I have 3 max level healers (full t9)-shammy, tree and pally (with an alt pally @70 with healing spec as main since lfd). I am just burned out and have heard the same from many other healers.
I am just tired of seeing tanks lose 45k in 2.4 seconds from Festergut and the raid wiping. Miss a heal (or cast a heal somewhere else) and they die.
The reward healers get for improving? Sit one of you (lowest performer) and bring an extra dps and you are back to more stress.
I don't only heal to make raids happen, I leveled a bear in BC so he could tank kara on my second progression with new guild. He also is 80 and full tier 9. My 80 pally is prot/holy. I cant stand to see a raid not happen when I know I can do the job and have someone who can. But I am getting the point to where I hate getting phone calls saying if you don't make the raid, we are going back to ToC tonight since we need our healer.

I healed most of the expansion but because of some roster changes I dps and heal about half and half these days. I like doing both, but I find dpsing significantly more stressful.

Sure in healing there are various moments where if you don't play just right for a few seconds then someone dies and you lose the fight, but when you are dpsing you have to do everything perfectly all the time. There is no down time when things are easy. Any small mistake made at any time affects the performance of the raid. Sure, if I'm dumb and I clip a Vampiric Touch tick then the couple thousand damage it costs us probably doesn't cause the raid to wipe, but *I* will know I've messed up and not played my best.

I'm sure a lot of people find healing more stressful, and feel there is a lot more resting on their shoulders, but it's just a matter of opinion. I think the majority of people healing raids are doing so because they like healing, not because they are forced to.

As a healer priest (my only 80 toon) I agree that the burnout is real.
after almost 2 months of been almost forced by RL to stay away from raiding, when I got back, it was hell.
People excepts you to be like a machine, to make no mistakes, and they insult you.
And as this is just a game, I don't want to be abused be some random guy over a random and stupid raid.
If I'm not enjoying it, I'm leaving. Easy as that.
Now I'm happy leveling a mage, in a different server. And it has been like a new game.
love that :)
Hate raiding >.<
And I was guild officer last year, too. I got burnout.

As someone who has FOUR healers (yes, every class that is capable of healing IS a healer on my account), I have to heartily disagree. I love healing or else I'd be doing something else.

That doesn't mean I don't enjoy DPSing now and again, but I honestly feel much more stress when DPSing than when I'm healing. I nitpick every time I miss a cooldown, knowing it's costing me precious dps and potentially a kill on a boss. I worry so much about not being terrible at dps, that I end up glossing over things that would make me not terrible at dps.

I heal because I love healing and I don't feel that kind of stress. Yes it sucks when someone dies in a fight because I might have been able to save them, but I don't beat myself up when it happens (anymore). Heck, half the time someone has died to avoidable damage and I remind myself, "I can't heal through stupid." So far, the only time that I've felt really stressed was making sure I dispelled the Necrotic Plague on the Lich King fight at the right time so I didn't let that person die, but so it jumped to the shamblers instead of another raid member.

Healing is a thankless job, it really is. (A few healers in my guild were surprised when our raid leader actually praised us on Velithria25, but it was mostly mock surprise.) However that doesn't mean we don't enjoy healing. Just thank us once and a while. :)

There are places where there are problems with spike damage and healing really sucks for that. For instance, when a death and decay is dropped on a melee group burning down adds on Lady Deathwhisper, they usually take 2 ticks of DnD before moving, at 4k/tick. Not bad when they have 30k hp. They make take a 15k cleave from one of the melee adds while the tank is positioning them, again not bad when they have 25-30k hp. They may also take a shadow bolt from Deathwhisper at 8K, again not bad. What is bad is that these things can and do happen all at the same time. With 35k damage coming in over 1 second, players are effectively one-shot and there is nothing the healer can do about it. Even when it takes 2 seconds to die instead of 1, it is still too quick, you might be waiting for GCD when they first take damage and before a heal can actually finish being cast, they are dead.

Suarfang used to be really tough with the amount of damage a marked target would take too, that's been toned down a lot but there is still a heavy burst of damage sometimes between mark, blood nova, and blood boil all at the same time. On Marrowgar, we've had a cold flame go out over a spiked hunter, meaning that melee either has to stop dps on the bone spike or stand in the fire to kill the spike and hope the healer can keep everyone up.

It wouldn't be too difficult for Blizzard to put just a little thought into preventing these kind of spikes. I like healing when there is a lot going on, it feels like my HoTs are useful, and there is stuff to heal. It is annoying when the huge damage spikes go out and people are killed and there is nothing you can do about it. It is also annoying when if you blink or misclick, someone will die because the damage is coming in that fast.

I for one am looking forward to seeing what cataclysm brings for healing. More hp, and more time to heal strategically rather than who can twitch the fastest.

I like tanking and dps, but at this point in ICC healing just gives me a headache.