Well, you know, when you are sick of healing idiots, you are sick of WoW.
And I'm not saying that because WoW is full of idiots (though it might seem like it at times).
Basically, if you have a dungeon full of people who aren't obsessed with the game, who don't treat it like a part time job, then "idiocy" (aka mistakes) will happen with some frequency. That's not to mention the genuine idiots. The best healers, IMO, are the ones who put the success of the group/raid over petty dislike of individual players. As far as I'm concerned, "idiots" aren't the ones who are bad for the game. The ones who are bad for the game, the ones who really drive players away, are the abusive ones with no tolerance for anything less than close to perfect game play.
The good healers are the ones who relish a challenging dungeon where the players are not at their best. When facing a new boss, this is the default, and it is where the healers can shine. Face it, once the strategy has been mastered by the group, the healers can usually more or less sit back and relax (and poke fun at the mage who pulled aggro again with invis on cooldown and is now a smudge on the floor).
I became annoyed at the emphasis on AoE healing, but not for the same reasons as stated above. There was a time when raid healers had definite roles, and it was those roles that made life interesting. You had your efficient, single-target throughput healer, usually on a tank. You had your burst output healers, sometimes on a tank, sometimes on a specific role, sometimes on random targets. You had your aoe healers, you had your random raid healers. They were all needed, they all had their strengths, and they played to them. When everything clicked, healing was a joy. When people got obsessed with numbers on the hps chart, that caused problems, because some roles didn't necessarily have high numbers, even though they kept the people alive they were supposed to. So they would heal randomly in an effort to boost their numbers, and people died as a result. This, as a heal leader, was endlessly frustrating.
Now, possibly in an effort to attract the dps/hps junkies, they have homogenised the healing classes, made the damage much more raid-wide and less spikey, and changed the game such that there is a genuine need for simple aoe throughput placed on all healers. Maybe it made healing more interesting for people who watch the metres, but it made healing much less interesting for me.
I think part of the reason is that, while I like healers with different roles, I don't think that they really got it right in Wrath. The idea of holy priests being good in 5-man dungeons and holy paladins being good in raids didn't make sense. I was actually assigned to healing Valithria Dreamwalker in ICC, FSM knows why. The difference between my output and the holy paladin's was ridiculous. We killed the boss, so I didn't really care, but I think there's a balance to be struck there somewhere, and I wonder if it will ever be achieved.
As a side note, the tolerance levels for mistakes vary based on what class you're playing. I have made stupid mistakes as a healer and been told "nah, don't sweat it." I've made stupid mistakes as a tank and had mixed responses. And I've made stupid responses as a huntard, and had vitriol hurled at me that you would barely believe (if you weren't a veteran WoW player).
