Breakfast Topic: Is there an upside to healing in LFG dungeons?

The Legion Alpha has me excited for both the class changes and the Artifacts, not to mention the Class Halls. But since I’m not in Alpha, I’ve had to funnel my excitement into leveling alts that I want at 100 come expansion launch time. But, oh boy, LFG dungeon shenanigans…

First I started with my 46 Hunter and had a great time, especially after he got Chimera Shot. Ranged damage dealers with instacast abilities have it the easiest, given how quickly mobs die due to heirloom gear and stat squish. He’s sitting at 72 now with just a week’s investment in running random dungeons. So then I turned my attention to my forgotten 56 Shaman. I’ve always been a fan of healing, which is why I main a Druid. I thought I would go healing on my Shaman to get into groups faster, and to reacquaint myself with the Shaman healing rotation. So far it’s been an absolute disaster.

Players understandably want to finish the dungeon run as quickly as possible to queue up for another one, since you get a huge exp boost for completing them. That, plus how overpowered alts are these days, leads to tanks just running through the dungeons barely stopping. Ten or twenty mobs later they may halt long enough to let the damage dealers drop the mobs in a big AOE burst. That’s all well and good — but as a mid-50s Shaman, all my heals have a cast time except for one piddly heal with a HOT, and I can’t land any of them on the run. So tanks die because of their Superman complex and I get yelled at for not healing.

And it’s not just tanks. There’s also damage dealers who decide not to wait for the tank and pull packs of mobs themselves. They end up dead because I don’t have the toolkit to keep them and the runaway tank healed at the same time. So after three back-to-back disastrous LFG dungeon groups I specced back to Elemental ranged damage and washed my hands of healing until the expansion. Has your healing experience been any different in LFG?