Preface - This post isn't intended as a slam against people who appreciate paladin heals and constantly find themselves in groups with no clear healer, or LFM for a healer for two hours before they can go to an instance and find themselves wishing that just a few more Cats/Boomkin/Ret Pallies/Enhancement Shamans were specced to heal or at least kept a set of healing gear. It's an indictment of the attitude that the other players are there primarily to increase one's own pleasure.
I really despise the 'shut up and heal' attitude that many players (I'm assuming mostly non-healers) have towards hybrid classes. Now, in instance groups I actually do just heal, and for better or for worse I also tend to shut up because I'm still leveling my first character and tend to be slightly less familiar with instances than most of the group, so I tend to have less to contribute. (Though I always do my homework on WoWWiki, and I try to be friendly toward the group.)
I dislike the 'shut up and heal' attitude (SUAH from here on) because what it sounds like to me is, 'I consider you to be more or less a tool, a necessary evil so that I can have fun.' Since SUAH is normally directed at my Ret and Prot brothers and sisters, who are presumably specced and geared how they are because that's the role they like, SUAH is basically saying, 'The way you have chosen to play to increase your enjoyment of the game is crimping my enjoyment of the game.' Everyone has a right to play the game how they like, provided that they're not doing something egregious like intentionally wiping the group or spamming the chat channels, where their enjoyment is coming primarily from the fact that they are annoying others. (Of course, people also have to deal with the natural (not player-imposed) consequences of their choices; I didn't get to go to Scholo last night because we didn't have a tank, a consequence of my choosing not to spec prot.)
I don't know where SUAHers got their sense of entitlement from; I understand that a guild leader has to make choices about raid composition in order to maximize a raid's success, and if the guild has tons of DPS and not much healing, a hybrid that can spec for either has a better chance of being included if they opt to heal, even if they're every bit as good at DPSing as a pure DPS class. That doesn't mean that your sorry DPS butt is magically entitled to treat every hybrid like the world's biggest Healing Stream Totem.
I really despise the 'shut up and heal' attitude that many players (I'm assuming mostly non-healers) have towards hybrid classes. Now, in instance groups I actually do just heal, and for better or for worse I also tend to shut up because I'm still leveling my first character and tend to be slightly less familiar with instances than most of the group, so I tend to have less to contribute. (Though I always do my homework on WoWWiki, and I try to be friendly toward the group.)
I dislike the 'shut up and heal' attitude (SUAH from here on) because what it sounds like to me is, 'I consider you to be more or less a tool, a necessary evil so that I can have fun.' Since SUAH is normally directed at my Ret and Prot brothers and sisters, who are presumably specced and geared how they are because that's the role they like, SUAH is basically saying, 'The way you have chosen to play to increase your enjoyment of the game is crimping my enjoyment of the game.' Everyone has a right to play the game how they like, provided that they're not doing something egregious like intentionally wiping the group or spamming the chat channels, where their enjoyment is coming primarily from the fact that they are annoying others. (Of course, people also have to deal with the natural (not player-imposed) consequences of their choices; I didn't get to go to Scholo last night because we didn't have a tank, a consequence of my choosing not to spec prot.)
I don't know where SUAHers got their sense of entitlement from; I understand that a guild leader has to make choices about raid composition in order to maximize a raid's success, and if the guild has tons of DPS and not much healing, a hybrid that can spec for either has a better chance of being included if they opt to heal, even if they're every bit as good at DPSing as a pure DPS class. That doesn't mean that your sorry DPS butt is magically entitled to treat every hybrid like the world's biggest Healing Stream Totem.
1 comment:
It's my belief, that if you should perform an ability, that you should gear for it. I facepalm all the time when I see a Shaman passing on epic mail that's going to be disenchanted because 'He doesn't heal'. Dude, some day you might be needed to heal just so that you can complete a quest or do a dungeon simply because your needed. It's just like the Warriors who carry NO shields on them and only use two-handers. I say to them "Shut Up and Tank". hehe
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