I find I have a bad habit that I need to break. I'm hoping some of you have experience on something that worked. The bad habit is that when I heal I suddenly take on every life in the raid as if I'm the only one responsible for them. When someone dies, no matter what the cause, I feel guilty that I couldn't save them. Even with multiple healers in the raid I take every death as a personal failure. Over the course of a night it really affects me even when half the deaths were impossible for healers to prevent.

What do you guys do to help separate yourself from "healer's remorse", as I call it? I'm starting to remember why I swore off healing back in BC but I'd like to be able to fill the role without taking it for more than it is, a game.

Edit for clarity:
It doesn't bother me that a virtual character ceases to live for a brief instant. The loss of a digital life is not worth concern. It's that people dying means the raid wipes and more and more time is wasted. The remorse comes from knowing that if you could have kept that person alive, somehow, that you could have downed the boss and moved on to the next. It's the time lost and the head bashing against the same encounter that is the struggle, not a virtual avatar changing states in a digital world.

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Q u o t e:
I find I have a bad habit that I need to break. I'm hoping some of you have experience on something that worked. The bad habit is that when I heal I suddenly take on every life in the raid as if I'm the only one responsible for them. When someone dies, no matter what the cause, I feel guilty that I couldn't save them. Even with multiple healers in the raid I take every death as a personal failure. Over the course of a night it really affects me even when half the deaths were impossible for healers to prevent.

What do you guys do to help separate yourself from "healer's remorse", as I call it? I'm starting to remember why I swore off healing back in BC but I'd like to be able to fill the role without taking it for more than it is, a game.

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I never considered that before... Now that I think about it, I'm not sure I can live with myself. O.o


Ok, I'm over it. I think I will sleep tonight.

So... you actually let people die? How do you live with yourself? Do you still hear their screams at night when you are trying to sleep?

Maybe you shouldn't heal...

or, learn to forgive yourself, learn from your mistakes & move onto the next boss because it's a video game.

You'd have to have an awfully large ego to think you have that much control over the game.

Don't die before I do.

Hehe, I hear you. Even when people stand in fire and I know they are going to die I do what I can to save them and grumble when I cant.

I guess it is a big ego thing, or at least a control freak thing. I enjoy healing, I have been healing since the early days of Everquest and yes I like having that kind of control, but it does mean I have some responsibility when things go bad too.

Depends on how they died, and if there was something I actually could have done to save them.

Not much I can do when someone gets taken out in one shot possibly because they did something wrong.

We roll for blame in my guild and get over it.

I always look at the death chart of who died. If it was an unreasonable amount of damage (for example, on Gormok when the tank took a 20k melee swing, a 20k impale, and a 5k dot in <1 second) I make sure to try to figure out a way to prevent that (in this case, making sure cooldowns are used better). If it was a fault of my own, I make sure for it not to happen again. Nothing else you can do, really.

omg Neth is here

the QQ is strong here.. save yourself!

When I first started healing raids in WoW (in Kara--I never raided in Vanilla), I would actually get dazed IRL for a couple of seconds anytime somebody died, which would sometimes lead to an additional death ;). I don't remember having that problem in EQ, where I raided as a Cleric for years--not sure what's different, except that very few fights in EQ had raid damage, and DPS death was pretty much their fault 100% of the time.

Happily I have gotten over that. In WoW, it's still very often somebody's own fault when they die, but of course not always. But it's all for fun and death is just part of the game.

It really depends on what caused the death. If someone died because they did something dumb that a healer couldn't prevent that's fine with me.

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Q u o t e:
We roll for blame in my guild and get over it.

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Yeap, and if you cause a wipe, 1-5000 to see how much gold you're putting in the bank. It keeps the raids going smoothly. :).

I've never had healer remorse. I guess I've known since I started raiding that I was there to do a job (my job) and if there is a fault in the system that is set up, it is not my duty to "fix" it. Bring it up with management, maybe... but take it into my own hands? I have seen that cause more problems than it would actually fix.

I guess you just need to realize that you are simply a cog in a well tuned (or not) raiding machine. We aren't there to play god.


To answer the question directly... I guess you just need to realize that it's a team game and outside of personal issues, (i,e, you fell asleep at your keyboard for a split second) you need to consider that the teamwork makes everything run smoothly. Just as I expect the DPS to buff each other and "feed" off of each others strength, I expect the same sort of ideology to come from the healers.

I feel bad when there's a death I should have been able to prevent. I don't feel bad when bob stands in fire. I bonk bob on the head and tell him not to stand in fire next time, durr.

There are always ways to be a better healer. I went from feeling overwhelmed on Twin Valks because people constantly hit the wrong colored balls to feeling bored on twin valks when I realized I could start heals on people that had balls heading towards them and assuming they were too dumb to move. It still isn't my fault they hit balls and if they die for it I don't feel guilty.

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Q u o t e:
I feel bad when there's a death I should have been able to prevent. I don't feel bad when bob stands in fire. I bonk bob on the head and tell him not to stand in fire next time, durr.

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Yeah. Once you have to start yelling "for the nineteenth *-ing time, don't stand in the *-ing fire," you may never feel healer's remorse again. Maybe that's what cured me!