Srs Bznz - Healer's Blacklist

I finally managed to wander my way over to Righteous Orbs today - and what a treat it was! Amusing, articulate, both snarky and self depricatingly self aware, I expect to be digging through Tamarind's archives for quite some time.

One of the posts I read reminded me of the Healer's Blacklist. And thus I decided to cobble together my own thoughts on the subject.

Most MMO players understand what a Blacklist is. Most MMOs involving healers as a class or profession (medic, witch doctor, whatever) will have players who understand what the Healer's Blacklist is: those poor souls who make it upon a healer's blacklist are doomed to be left unhealed by the healer in question. I suppose there are those who completely ignore those on their blacklist, and those who make judgement calls as to when to let the other character hit the floor, or when to toss a snarled heal at them

I don't personally have a Blacklist. Part of it is laziness - I'm not entirely certain how to remove specific characters from the part of my UI that shows me peoples' happy health bars, so I can't excise them from view. This being the case, considering the raid UI I use, I can't actually make out the names of the people behind the health bars, since the place where their names would usually be have been replaced with numbers beginning with the symbol - .  That's a minus symbol. As in, not full health. As in, they need a heal of a critical percentage of their health (I dunno, mebbe it's like 20%). I'm not very good at memorizing who is where in which group, and it becomes even more problematic when groups get shifted around for specific encounters.

The other reason I don't practice this is that I'm not fond of the whole, "cutting off your nose to spite your face" behavior. Mind you, I will behave that way in other instances, but as a healer in a group of more than me, I don't make a habit of it. I'm not doing anyone a favor by letting the best DPS die due to their lag spike, I'm not helping my own repair bill by letting an astonishingly rude tank die, I'm not making my own job any easier by letting another healer in the raid kick the bucket. Yes, it would be ridiculously satisfying to just watch them inch closer and closer to death, hover on the brink, and then finally topple into the abyss.

But I'd wind up wracked with guilt, and that's something I can't stand. I let things bother me far longer than is healthy. I still hold grudges 3/4 of my life old. Lunch ladies in pre-school were nice, but the girls who handed out sandwiches I'm deathly allergic to, refusing to believe me when I said, "I can't have peanut butter?" Yeah. They're on my shitlist for life. Would I let them walk into oncoming traffic? Not so much.

I raided with a pair of siblings a while back, I guess they were in their late teens. One was regularly rude, and one was relatively low key with occasional rude outbursts. It's been so long now that I actually don't recall all of the specifics, but what remains with me two years later is that I simply couldn't bring myself to like them. I joked with my significant other (Holy specced Pally at the time) that I wasn't going to heal them anymore. I think I held to that for maybe one trash pull, and then my instincts kicked in. "Must heal all characters with sizable chunks of health missing!"

Even making a point of memorizing where those two were in my UI didn't help. It just wasn't worth the mental gymnastics for me to second guess my healing.

...I'm mature enough to admit that when they DID die (besides during wipes), I giggled a little bit.

So the subject at hand: the Healer's Blacklist. We've heard of it. Have we experienced it? I've heard tales of healers who have honest to God blacklists that they adhere to. For some of them it may simply mean that they refuse to even group with those on their blacklist, thus sparing them (and their groups) from watching the same guy die over and over until someone pipes up, asking whether there's any particular reason that one person isn't being healed. For others, they may be in a raiding guild and rather than forego a raid with persons they deem unworthy, they instead simply never bother healing those select few.

Coincidentally, I heard last night about someone's suspicions that one of their guild's healers was refusing to heal certain people, ever, during raids. I don't know whether the person who mentioned it was one of the lucky few, or whether they were friends with those doomed souls, or simply had heard the concern voiced from a fellow guild mate to a guild officer.

Healer's Blacklist: healer's prerogative, asshole behavior, or necessary evil? Acceptable practice, or beyond the pale?