Power gaming guild buying up the healers

[Bolty]

My priest got annoyed round about level 50 due to the lack of willingness of higher-level guildmates wanting to waste time helping me complete instances of that level; nobody wanted to do sunken temple, nobody wanted to do blackrock depths despite trying to organise a group for about a week - until the day when a capped guildmate was supposed to be going to Molten Core, but hadn't done the attunement quest.  There were no shortage of whispers asking - begging - me to join his group to heal him then.[right][snapback]82581[/snapback][/right]

No, this is pretty much cross-server and applies to all guilds. Boltress was under the same scenario in the Lurkers guild during her 50's as a leveling Priest. Our guild had a squad of 60's already, along with a few 50's who, as far as I know, were not joined by the already 60's-squad in instances until we were level 58-59. This was despite getting requests by some of the 60's to "hurry up" and get to 60 faster so I could heal end-game instances. It kind of led to my lack of desire to run such instances when I capped, and why, even though she's retired, she's come out to do the occasional BRD run for those in their 50's but still hasn't set foot in Scholomance, LBRS, UBRS, etc. But I digress, and I don't want to hijack the thread with my whining.

During my 50's I wound up doing lots of pickup groups for places like Maraudon and Sunken Temple, and in *every one* of those groups I was asked to leave my guild and join another. Nobody ever offered me bribes though, but I do remember seeing in IF general chat once that a group was willing to pay a priest 10 gold just for running them through Maraudon. Yikes. But I still have members of two guilds on Stormrage who ask me from time to time if I've changed my mind about switching. This Dusk guild is very aggressive and will likely implode. It's the inevitable result of populating a guild full of people who will abandon their guilds they've leveled up in so they can get "uber lewtz" from the "l337 g4merz" who don't realize there's more to the game than having the Sword of Uberness +7 instead of the Sword of Uberness +6. Damn, there I go again on a rant. :) Anyhow, the law of averages or whatever-you-call-it will likely lead to Dusk breaking up into 2 or more guilds eventually because of differences of opinion, or simply because if 75% of the healers on the server are in the guild, there's less loot for those healers than if they joined another guild where they'd be one of the few there. After all, these are players who hopped guilds for loot, so they'd do it again!

I'm still not sure why people don't like to play healers - it can be very fun and demanding, and perhaps the myth that all they do is stare at health bars turns people away. I've read in general forums that people say they tried playing a Priest and found it too stressful. Or, there's the stigma that a healer is somehow the "b**ch" of the party and lives to serve them - that is, until you annoy them and they leave the group and the group is screwed.

-Bolty