After capping my rogue

[Bolty]

I can spend insane amounts of time commited to raid duty to rack up DKP, so I can bid on heal bot equip to make me a better healer, so DPS classes can get their fancy damage boosts in form of new weapons, attack or spellpower boosts, that they can use out of raid for better farming and more fun in PvP, while my healing gear does #$%& out side of raids except for perhaps some stamina and resistance enhancement.[right][snapback]104000[/snapback][/right]

If you play a pure healer as a main, you must play a DPS class as an alt or you'll go insane.

Now, I find that I don't really need to raid with any DPS class; I just need to log on as a mage, warlock, rogue, whatever from time to time and just BEAT THE LIVING HELL OUT OF THINGS as a change of pace. I capitalize in the previous sentence to point out what a gigantic difference in gameplay it is between a disc/holy raiding Priest and a DPS class.

When "farming," soloing, or PvP'ing, playing a raid-healing Priest is like watching paint dry. Sure, I kill things with no real chance of me ever dying, but it takes me three to four times as long to kill something as an equivalently-geared rogue. Farmers in greens outpace me - I know this just from trying to farm Essence of Water for my +healing power enchant on my Benediction. It's sad.

Maybe the only joy I have is seeing people's reactions when they:

1) Claim that disc/holy Priests can't PvP, and I should spec shadow, and
2) Watch as I WTFPWN them in duels outside Ironforge. Victory through superior survival!

As you said, all the UBER LEWTS you pick up only serve one purpose - to help you heal better in raids. Which means, ironically, that the more decked-out you get, the worse you become at farming: the damage you take from mob hits costs you more and more gold to repair, yet your killing speed never changes. You still kill the same number of mobs per unit of time, but the cost of doing so goes up and up. When I first started realizing this, I was very glad that the first thing I did when I turned 60 was go for my epic mount - because I'd never get a chance to do it now. Mere farming costs too much money and takes too long.

So you sit there and watch as every other class picks up loot that will help them completely own mobs and other players faster and better, while you score another +50 healing! WOO HOO! NOW those mobs are gonna get it! Yeah!

Get a DPS class to 60 and use it to farm when you need to. Or just to burn off steam.

It does sound to me though that one of your sources of burnout is that you are/feel forced to play your healer as a pure healbot. I see it all the time when guilds are recruiting - "Looking for Dwarf Priests with disc/holy and Resto-speced Druids with Innervate." These kinds of guilds expect you to be their healing b**** and would yell at you for ever taking anything with +damage/healing, for instance. Nothing can burn a healer out faster than being told they're not allowed to roll on something because they're a healer.

I'm lucky in that I belong to a guild that doesn't force me to play a certain way. If I WANTED to turn into a shadow priest, I wouldn't get kicked out of the guild, and just KNOWING that makes a huge difference. I don't feel used. I hear stories of Priests getting kicked out of guilds for rolling on a +damage/healing item, and I just shake my head. Meanwhile, nobody thinks twice about warriors spending lots of points on Uber Epic Weapon of Doom. There's a reason why healing classes have such high turnover...

1) People only generally notice you when you make a mistake, and a healer's mistake is 10 times more obvious to everyone than a DPS class' mistake.
2) As mentioned, "gearing up" as a healer helps you not a whim anywhere but raids. If you actually want to gear up to let you do more damage, people think you're a loot whore and you're screwing over the DPS classes.
3) You never, ever hear people cry "where was the tanking!?!?!" You will always hear "where was the healing!?!?!"
4) God forbid you want to play another class when someone's looking for a healer to join them.
5) E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E E-L-S-E thinks they can play your class better than you, especially "tunnel-vision" players (usually DPS) that only notice one thing during a raid encounter: they, individually, were taking damage and you didn't heal them. Never mind that the entire raid was getting blasted, especially the tanks, and if the tanks died it would mean a wipe.

Again, I don't belong to a guild that goes through much of this - just occasionally, it does, but I'm in a pretty cool group of players who either understand the above points or else pretend to. :) So it helps. The only recommendation I can ever make to healer players is that if they find themselves being treated this way in a guild, LEAVE. Find a guild that respects its healer players. You'll have a lot more fun.

-Bolty