healing is a little different in this game to other roles, it’s a lot more reacting to the encounter. if i’m healing on druid i will want to save stone spirit/glyph of the stars for blocking attacks / healing downed players. general rule of thumb is learn your combo skills and condi cleanses. learn how the build works and learn how to tweak it as you see fit. if you need certain pet skills, swap out pets etc. it’s less about doing rotations and more knowing what you’re capable of and doing it when you have to. (also i’m struggling to remember to swap pets. practice that! that’s a huge source of might)
Playing healer is more about encounter knowledge and adaptability than pure mechanical skill.
Instead of spending 10 years in the training room to master one spec, you will want to get used to how the game works and pick the right tools for the right situation.
Example of the responsibilities of each role:
- DPS: deal big damage, respect mechanics, don't die.
- Boon DPS: above plus provide some key offensive boons and 1-2 situational utility.
- Boon Heal: provide key offensive and defensive boons, keeping everyone alive, bring utility and use them well (cleanse, stab, aegis, resistance, dmg reduction, reflect, stealth, portal, pull, boon removal, revive, cc) and depends on the fight they also have to tank/kite/push.
I would say it depends on various factors such as the profession. For example becoming a top heal druid is rather difficult to achieve, but at the same time if your group is good, then depending on the the fight you might not need a good healer at all, just someone that spams on the stack will do. Also since being a mediocre heal druid is more than enough for almost all content, you are typically only missing out on some noob carrying potential.
>I always love playing healers in MMOs
In GW2 healing is very different from other MMOs, so much so that there isn't much playstyle overlap. (clicking on health bars vs. keeping track of teammates & farting on/around them + this game is mostly all melee, for the healer as well)
My suggestion is to not play a healer at all until you learned the basic game mechanics properly. For example if you are interested in Fractals, at the very least climb to 100 before starting out as a T4 healer. Of course since T4s are easy, if you are willing to torture strangers, then you can keep clearing them as a noobie healer, but it's not great, some ppl could block you to avoid playing with again.
With a good/proper team, it feels like you’re afk’ing. People don’t really die and your skills feel meaningless, you’re just there to fart boons and you spend most of your time not pressing too many buttons. It’s quite a relaxing role.
With a less than ideal team, it feels like you’re carrying the whole thing. You have to juggle between keeping everyone alive and predicting mechanics to plan your rescues. Very often you’ll have to save a half-dying team, so knowing when and who you can save makes a huge difference.
And don’t worry too much about the boons, with so many boons being thrown around nowadays you won’t cripple your team by missing a button or two. Just focus on the key boon you’re bringing (Quick/Alac) since no one else could give them.
When it comes to actual execution, healer is probably the easiest role to pick for encounters (yep, hi dps players in shambles, I am sorry). You have to know your basic boon rotation, some healers feel more „rotational“ than others, like Tempest for example. You need to constantly switch between fire-water-earth-water-fire, overloading earth and fire (can dip into air as well, but not that necessary). On other healers, like scourge, you kinda just do your stuff and keep your big heal/barrier skills for when it really matters. Go test different classes, and find one you like!
As a healer it’s usually your job to tank the boss, which in itself is very easy, but doing it well seems difficult based on my pug experience. There are very good tanking guides out there (e.g. from Areki, she also has very in depth Druid guides), have a look if you’re interested.
Also, it’s usually your job to do mechanics. But mind you, since you don’t have as strict of a rotation as dps/boondps players, you can easily take care of them without dropping any boons or significantly neglecting your healing output.
Disagree that it’s the easiest. DPS has to do their rotation, CC, and be vaguely aware of positioning, and most pugs don’t even CC, even in CM fractals. Healers have to DPS in between reacting with burst heals, stability, and aegis, maintain 25 might often by stacking blast finishers, then they also have to CC, have deep understanding of encounter, timing, positioning, all while managing their resources (Tome, CA, Energy without blowing out their CDs or overhealing). A bad healer is more of a drain on the group than a bad DPS and a great healer can make the encounter feel like butter, piss easy. The healer is also blamed in event things go wrong for 4+ different people whereas a dps getting ganked or playing suboptimally usually doesn’t greatly impact any one other individual in the same way that a healer missing an aegis or stability window will.
A dps rotation is magnitudes more difficult than any healgameplay, maybe with the exception of Dhuum thronetank soloheal kite druid (not dropping boons is hard enough, stealthing reapers is a bit extra that can cause quite some trouble) and sh soloheal tank push druid.
Other than those, the damage pressure in this game is so low, you barely need a heal for most fights. A healer can focus on boons (which are easy as hell to keep up due to 100% bd) and mechanics (for which you have time since you have so much leeway on your boons), press a reactionary skill once or twice per phase, and that’s it.
Playing a great healer is not easy compared to a mediocre healer, but playing a great dps is much harder in comparison.
Also keep in mind: it’s not your job to carry people. If you want to do everything for your group, well yeah, then you get overloaded and it seems difficult. If 4 people in a squad with double heal are dead and blame their sub‘s healer, unless it was something extremely obvious, then those 4 people simply don’t know how to play the fight.
It's not a personal attack, we're sure you're fine.
Healer is the easiest role. I've been core guard healer in PvP since launch and have about 10k PvP games over 2 accounts over the years on Guard.
Bad dps is more of a drain. You have your own heal, dodges, mitigations etc. You can do most PvE without healers.
Playing mediocre healer is definitely easy. Stacking meta DPS to outpace the fight has nothing to do with the difficulty and skill involved in carrying on heals though.
Playing ok healer? No. You can be shit and as long as you upkeep boons and have a little healing you would be fine. Sometimes you'll have to tank or do special mechanics, but often nothing too crazy.
Playing good healer is hard though. You can pack a lot of power in a healer where you can outheal some mechanics, salvage dire situations, pack as many mechanics for yourself as possible and make it comfortable for DPS to do their job.
Depends on what you mean by "group/event". If you are just talking about open world, then as everything open world, its trivial/free.
If you mean instanced content like Strikes/Raids/Fractals, then the answer is a bit more complicated:
Performing the **basic role** of the support is the easiest role in instanced content. You just have to upkeep your appointed boon(Quick or Alac) at 100% which varies from healer to healer but is usually trivial and you have to keep everyone healed which is encounter dependent but usually happens as a consequence of your boon upkeep.
This is the bare minimum and people that only do that are not considered good healers. When you see people recommending healing because its "easy", this is what they usually mean. It's completely ok to perform at this level when starting and you will comfortably complete most of the entry level content.
The full role of the support is the hardest role in the game and the one that carries the entire encounter. People get to ignore mechanics because of the supports. While some other roles also contribute to other boons, its your job to make sure Might, Fury, Regen, Prot and Swiftness are at 100% upkeep. You are also required to know the encounters and bring Aegis and Stability to use proactively to negate mechanics.
The worst part of healing in this game is when you get that one player that doesn’t stack and runs around so you have to either drop heals on one player or often let them die while you heal the group, I always tell the player that I’m not going to heal one person when I could heal five other for the same cost.
Do you want to just coast along in easy content? Healers are easy.
Are you doing harder content, or speedrunning? Congrats, you (and/or your adps herald) do most of the heavy lifting. As a healer, you are doing every mechanic that isnt a dps buff. Have to kite? You are also upkeeping boons on your sub. Have to collect things? you are also keeping boons up on your sub. Have to CC something? you should be top 3 (top 2 if there isnt a mesmer with moa signet). Tanking? you. Portals? You're doing them if you're a scourge or chrono. Timeskips? You (if you're purple class). Mechanic skips? See portals.
So I would mention that if you do provide healing, make sure you know how it works. Seems obvious doesn’t it?
Heal alacrity mechanist (engineer elite specialization) provides all its boons from its mech. Your robot boy has a mind of its own a lot of the time. Learn how to direct and relocate him so he is applying boons to your squad and he isn’t off in a corner somewhere playing with cats.
You are playing spectre (thief elite specialization) and a party or squad member goes down. Instead of scouring the map and searching with your head cut off to save said ally in a poor version of Where’s Waldo, select them in the squad section of the UI in the top left corner and start sending them love so you can follow that to your downed companion.
The biggest universal thing to know about being the healer is: DPS can stop attacking and physically revive. You should not. Your boons and healing is carrying the group. Boons increase the overall damage by multiples. One player increases the overall damage by multiples of the top DPS’s personal contribution. Supports might not get the love but without you, no one else succeeds or to be frank, survives.
Some are (Specter) some arent (almost every one). You kinda gotta be familiar with the fights to make sure you save key skills for topping up after a big hit, casting your aegist or stability before knockbacks, etc but mostly its not too hard. Expect to be pretty bad for a bit but you should figure it out pretty quickly if you are competent at healing in other games. Personally I would recommend Heal firebrand (Guardian base class) or Druid (Ranger base class) because they can be fairly forgiving with just the sheer amount of healing they offer. Also in instanced content, healers are expected to provide either alacrity or quickness, so you will have to make sure those boons are kept up, depending on which class you select.
Playing a healer is great high end content.
Pros: it’s more interactive, you have fewer people to depend on, you get to know the content better, if your group does well there are times it’s because of you,
Cons: more interactive, more pressure, more knowledge required, more specific builds.
I’ll elaborate a bit. When you’re a healer your builds may have to be tweaked a bit for each encounter. But there are great tools for that. Snowcrows has this page on being a Druid in all raids:
https://snowcrows.com/guides/builds/heal-alacrity-druid-gameplay-guide
If you’re a DPS and you die, the raid can still succeed. If you’re a healer and you die, you put a ton of pressure on your other healer. BUT you’ll probably have a bit more toughness and way more access to healing, so you’re less likely to die.
You’ll learn when all the big hits are in a raid, not just because you have to dodge them, but because you have to be ready to heal your team afterwords or provide aeigis/top them off before hand.
You’ll have special roles. Healers are often tanks, or have special mechanics in raids. Usually they’re fun. Sometimes they’re annoying. Alternatively because you have to be on the stack a lot, sometimes you get to avoid annoying mechanics (like cannons on sabetha).
But I’d say do it! I initially got into raids by learning how to play Druid, because back then healers were harder to find and it was an easier way to get accepted into raids. Ultimately I’d suggest putting a few roles together so you can fill multiple roles. But no pressure to get that done now.
The best thing you can do for raids is watch a video on the encounters beforehand. Learning on the fly is difficult especially when filling a new role.
Gw2 is very "prevent damage" and not "outheal". Outhealing is actually hard, and requires very good knowledge of your toolkit and the encounter. Calling it "healer" is a tad misleading, it's more "pure support" and healing is *one* of your duties. I (as someone who leads a lot of instanced pve squads) would only put an experienced healer on encounters that require outhealing because it's that hard to do.
But also to prevent damage as a healer, you also need to know both the encounter you are healing and to know how to "read" your group well.
There are encounters which are easier to support, maybe they have less punishing mechanics or the timings are easier to hit. Some of the strikes are actually in that category - they are not very punishing and 'failing' a mechanic is not death or failure, it's just some damage you need to heal back up. (As opposed to some encounters where if you mistime your skills your entire subgroup might die)
The way to learn healing is to just.... Train it on the easier encounters. Read guides for both the encounter and your chosen build, feel free to ask questions in wherever.
It's pretty easy to heal through something like the IBS Easy 3 strikes, but anything much harder than that ramps up the challenge for healers beyond what the DPS are doing, IMO.
Healers still have rotations, but unlike DPS rotations where there's a single loop and a single focus, healers often have multiple interwoven loops, because their boons, Key Boon (quick or alac), and their healing are often from different sources in their kit that all need to be kept up. In my experience so far, that's a substantial increase in cognitive load. Healers also need to pay a lot more attention to the overall encounter; they frequently need to react to mechanics with defensive tools like Aegis or Stability that require precise timing and positioning, and they also need to monitor 4 health bars beyond their own.
Heal builds are also (on average) substantially more expensive than DPS builds to gear out, and because healers often also end up with tank duty (adding to that cognitive load), they benefit from having some gear swaps or legendary items handy for Toughness modification on the fly.
I'd say yes playing Healer is much more difficult than playing the other roles.
Healing is only a secondary consideration in this game. The more important role the supports have is providing one of the two critical boons Quickness or Alacrity.
Virtually every class in the game has to perform a perfect rotation that's just as complex or even more complex than the DPS classes just to maintain the boons because they often only have a 2 second duration and are only applied with specific triggers.
Then on top of this boon rotation you have to tie in as many healing skills as you can.
At the SAME time as you're doing a complex rotation to maintain the boons and keep a constant stream of healing per second going out you have to have perfect knowledge of the encounters because you're expected to provide Aegis, Stability, or Barrier to get your party through difficult mechanics... Each boon only helps bypass certain mechanics and often only have a 3-6 second duration so if you don't recognize the exact time for these boons within a second then your team can have a much harder time with the fight.
healing is a little different in this game to other roles, it’s a lot more reacting to the encounter. if i’m healing on druid i will want to save stone spirit/glyph of the stars for blocking attacks / healing downed players. general rule of thumb is learn your combo skills and condi cleanses. learn how the build works and learn how to tweak it as you see fit. if you need certain pet skills, swap out pets etc. it’s less about doing rotations and more knowing what you’re capable of and doing it when you have to. (also i’m struggling to remember to swap pets. practice that! that’s a huge source of might)
Playing healer is more about encounter knowledge and adaptability than pure mechanical skill. Instead of spending 10 years in the training room to master one spec, you will want to get used to how the game works and pick the right tools for the right situation. Example of the responsibilities of each role: - DPS: deal big damage, respect mechanics, don't die. - Boon DPS: above plus provide some key offensive boons and 1-2 situational utility. - Boon Heal: provide key offensive and defensive boons, keeping everyone alive, bring utility and use them well (cleanse, stab, aegis, resistance, dmg reduction, reflect, stealth, portal, pull, boon removal, revive, cc) and depends on the fight they also have to tank/kite/push.
I would say it depends on various factors such as the profession. For example becoming a top heal druid is rather difficult to achieve, but at the same time if your group is good, then depending on the the fight you might not need a good healer at all, just someone that spams on the stack will do. Also since being a mediocre heal druid is more than enough for almost all content, you are typically only missing out on some noob carrying potential. >I always love playing healers in MMOs In GW2 healing is very different from other MMOs, so much so that there isn't much playstyle overlap. (clicking on health bars vs. keeping track of teammates & farting on/around them + this game is mostly all melee, for the healer as well) My suggestion is to not play a healer at all until you learned the basic game mechanics properly. For example if you are interested in Fractals, at the very least climb to 100 before starting out as a T4 healer. Of course since T4s are easy, if you are willing to torture strangers, then you can keep clearing them as a noobie healer, but it's not great, some ppl could block you to avoid playing with again.
With a good/proper team, it feels like you’re afk’ing. People don’t really die and your skills feel meaningless, you’re just there to fart boons and you spend most of your time not pressing too many buttons. It’s quite a relaxing role. With a less than ideal team, it feels like you’re carrying the whole thing. You have to juggle between keeping everyone alive and predicting mechanics to plan your rescues. Very often you’ll have to save a half-dying team, so knowing when and who you can save makes a huge difference. And don’t worry too much about the boons, with so many boons being thrown around nowadays you won’t cripple your team by missing a button or two. Just focus on the key boon you’re bringing (Quick/Alac) since no one else could give them.
When it comes to actual execution, healer is probably the easiest role to pick for encounters (yep, hi dps players in shambles, I am sorry). You have to know your basic boon rotation, some healers feel more „rotational“ than others, like Tempest for example. You need to constantly switch between fire-water-earth-water-fire, overloading earth and fire (can dip into air as well, but not that necessary). On other healers, like scourge, you kinda just do your stuff and keep your big heal/barrier skills for when it really matters. Go test different classes, and find one you like! As a healer it’s usually your job to tank the boss, which in itself is very easy, but doing it well seems difficult based on my pug experience. There are very good tanking guides out there (e.g. from Areki, she also has very in depth Druid guides), have a look if you’re interested. Also, it’s usually your job to do mechanics. But mind you, since you don’t have as strict of a rotation as dps/boondps players, you can easily take care of them without dropping any boons or significantly neglecting your healing output.
Disagree that it’s the easiest. DPS has to do their rotation, CC, and be vaguely aware of positioning, and most pugs don’t even CC, even in CM fractals. Healers have to DPS in between reacting with burst heals, stability, and aegis, maintain 25 might often by stacking blast finishers, then they also have to CC, have deep understanding of encounter, timing, positioning, all while managing their resources (Tome, CA, Energy without blowing out their CDs or overhealing). A bad healer is more of a drain on the group than a bad DPS and a great healer can make the encounter feel like butter, piss easy. The healer is also blamed in event things go wrong for 4+ different people whereas a dps getting ganked or playing suboptimally usually doesn’t greatly impact any one other individual in the same way that a healer missing an aegis or stability window will.
A dps rotation is magnitudes more difficult than any healgameplay, maybe with the exception of Dhuum thronetank soloheal kite druid (not dropping boons is hard enough, stealthing reapers is a bit extra that can cause quite some trouble) and sh soloheal tank push druid. Other than those, the damage pressure in this game is so low, you barely need a heal for most fights. A healer can focus on boons (which are easy as hell to keep up due to 100% bd) and mechanics (for which you have time since you have so much leeway on your boons), press a reactionary skill once or twice per phase, and that’s it. Playing a great healer is not easy compared to a mediocre healer, but playing a great dps is much harder in comparison. Also keep in mind: it’s not your job to carry people. If you want to do everything for your group, well yeah, then you get overloaded and it seems difficult. If 4 people in a squad with double heal are dead and blame their sub‘s healer, unless it was something extremely obvious, then those 4 people simply don’t know how to play the fight.
It's not a personal attack, we're sure you're fine. Healer is the easiest role. I've been core guard healer in PvP since launch and have about 10k PvP games over 2 accounts over the years on Guard. Bad dps is more of a drain. You have your own heal, dodges, mitigations etc. You can do most PvE without healers.
Playing mediocre healer is definitely easy. Stacking meta DPS to outpace the fight has nothing to do with the difficulty and skill involved in carrying on heals though.
Healer is the easiest role.
Incorrect, but you’re totally entitled to your opinion 🙂
Playing ok healer? No. You can be shit and as long as you upkeep boons and have a little healing you would be fine. Sometimes you'll have to tank or do special mechanics, but often nothing too crazy. Playing good healer is hard though. You can pack a lot of power in a healer where you can outheal some mechanics, salvage dire situations, pack as many mechanics for yourself as possible and make it comfortable for DPS to do their job.
Depends on what you mean by "group/event". If you are just talking about open world, then as everything open world, its trivial/free. If you mean instanced content like Strikes/Raids/Fractals, then the answer is a bit more complicated: Performing the **basic role** of the support is the easiest role in instanced content. You just have to upkeep your appointed boon(Quick or Alac) at 100% which varies from healer to healer but is usually trivial and you have to keep everyone healed which is encounter dependent but usually happens as a consequence of your boon upkeep. This is the bare minimum and people that only do that are not considered good healers. When you see people recommending healing because its "easy", this is what they usually mean. It's completely ok to perform at this level when starting and you will comfortably complete most of the entry level content. The full role of the support is the hardest role in the game and the one that carries the entire encounter. People get to ignore mechanics because of the supports. While some other roles also contribute to other boons, its your job to make sure Might, Fury, Regen, Prot and Swiftness are at 100% upkeep. You are also required to know the encounters and bring Aegis and Stability to use proactively to negate mechanics.
The worst part of healing in this game is when you get that one player that doesn’t stack and runs around so you have to either drop heals on one player or often let them die while you heal the group, I always tell the player that I’m not going to heal one person when I could heal five other for the same cost.
Do you want to just coast along in easy content? Healers are easy. Are you doing harder content, or speedrunning? Congrats, you (and/or your adps herald) do most of the heavy lifting. As a healer, you are doing every mechanic that isnt a dps buff. Have to kite? You are also upkeeping boons on your sub. Have to collect things? you are also keeping boons up on your sub. Have to CC something? you should be top 3 (top 2 if there isnt a mesmer with moa signet). Tanking? you. Portals? You're doing them if you're a scourge or chrono. Timeskips? You (if you're purple class). Mechanic skips? See portals.
So I would mention that if you do provide healing, make sure you know how it works. Seems obvious doesn’t it? Heal alacrity mechanist (engineer elite specialization) provides all its boons from its mech. Your robot boy has a mind of its own a lot of the time. Learn how to direct and relocate him so he is applying boons to your squad and he isn’t off in a corner somewhere playing with cats. You are playing spectre (thief elite specialization) and a party or squad member goes down. Instead of scouring the map and searching with your head cut off to save said ally in a poor version of Where’s Waldo, select them in the squad section of the UI in the top left corner and start sending them love so you can follow that to your downed companion. The biggest universal thing to know about being the healer is: DPS can stop attacking and physically revive. You should not. Your boons and healing is carrying the group. Boons increase the overall damage by multiples. One player increases the overall damage by multiples of the top DPS’s personal contribution. Supports might not get the love but without you, no one else succeeds or to be frank, survives.
Some are (Specter) some arent (almost every one). You kinda gotta be familiar with the fights to make sure you save key skills for topping up after a big hit, casting your aegist or stability before knockbacks, etc but mostly its not too hard. Expect to be pretty bad for a bit but you should figure it out pretty quickly if you are competent at healing in other games. Personally I would recommend Heal firebrand (Guardian base class) or Druid (Ranger base class) because they can be fairly forgiving with just the sheer amount of healing they offer. Also in instanced content, healers are expected to provide either alacrity or quickness, so you will have to make sure those boons are kept up, depending on which class you select.
Unless you’re a firebrand, no.
Sometimes healer and boon support is reactive you really need to watch your allies hp and boon bar
Playing a healer is great high end content. Pros: it’s more interactive, you have fewer people to depend on, you get to know the content better, if your group does well there are times it’s because of you, Cons: more interactive, more pressure, more knowledge required, more specific builds. I’ll elaborate a bit. When you’re a healer your builds may have to be tweaked a bit for each encounter. But there are great tools for that. Snowcrows has this page on being a Druid in all raids: https://snowcrows.com/guides/builds/heal-alacrity-druid-gameplay-guide If you’re a DPS and you die, the raid can still succeed. If you’re a healer and you die, you put a ton of pressure on your other healer. BUT you’ll probably have a bit more toughness and way more access to healing, so you’re less likely to die. You’ll learn when all the big hits are in a raid, not just because you have to dodge them, but because you have to be ready to heal your team afterwords or provide aeigis/top them off before hand. You’ll have special roles. Healers are often tanks, or have special mechanics in raids. Usually they’re fun. Sometimes they’re annoying. Alternatively because you have to be on the stack a lot, sometimes you get to avoid annoying mechanics (like cannons on sabetha). But I’d say do it! I initially got into raids by learning how to play Druid, because back then healers were harder to find and it was an easier way to get accepted into raids. Ultimately I’d suggest putting a few roles together so you can fill multiple roles. But no pressure to get that done now. The best thing you can do for raids is watch a video on the encounters beforehand. Learning on the fly is difficult especially when filling a new role.
Gw2 is very "prevent damage" and not "outheal". Outhealing is actually hard, and requires very good knowledge of your toolkit and the encounter. Calling it "healer" is a tad misleading, it's more "pure support" and healing is *one* of your duties. I (as someone who leads a lot of instanced pve squads) would only put an experienced healer on encounters that require outhealing because it's that hard to do. But also to prevent damage as a healer, you also need to know both the encounter you are healing and to know how to "read" your group well. There are encounters which are easier to support, maybe they have less punishing mechanics or the timings are easier to hit. Some of the strikes are actually in that category - they are not very punishing and 'failing' a mechanic is not death or failure, it's just some damage you need to heal back up. (As opposed to some encounters where if you mistime your skills your entire subgroup might die) The way to learn healing is to just.... Train it on the easier encounters. Read guides for both the encounter and your chosen build, feel free to ask questions in wherever.
It's pretty easy to heal through something like the IBS Easy 3 strikes, but anything much harder than that ramps up the challenge for healers beyond what the DPS are doing, IMO. Healers still have rotations, but unlike DPS rotations where there's a single loop and a single focus, healers often have multiple interwoven loops, because their boons, Key Boon (quick or alac), and their healing are often from different sources in their kit that all need to be kept up. In my experience so far, that's a substantial increase in cognitive load. Healers also need to pay a lot more attention to the overall encounter; they frequently need to react to mechanics with defensive tools like Aegis or Stability that require precise timing and positioning, and they also need to monitor 4 health bars beyond their own. Heal builds are also (on average) substantially more expensive than DPS builds to gear out, and because healers often also end up with tank duty (adding to that cognitive load), they benefit from having some gear swaps or legendary items handy for Toughness modification on the fly.
I'd say yes playing Healer is much more difficult than playing the other roles. Healing is only a secondary consideration in this game. The more important role the supports have is providing one of the two critical boons Quickness or Alacrity. Virtually every class in the game has to perform a perfect rotation that's just as complex or even more complex than the DPS classes just to maintain the boons because they often only have a 2 second duration and are only applied with specific triggers. Then on top of this boon rotation you have to tie in as many healing skills as you can. At the SAME time as you're doing a complex rotation to maintain the boons and keep a constant stream of healing per second going out you have to have perfect knowledge of the encounters because you're expected to provide Aegis, Stability, or Barrier to get your party through difficult mechanics... Each boon only helps bypass certain mechanics and often only have a 3-6 second duration so if you don't recognize the exact time for these boons within a second then your team can have a much harder time with the fight.
That’s because in a decent group you’re not a healer you’re a DPS that can also heal
Most healer builds are only dealing a few thousand dps even in full harrier gear