Most classes, when they hit level 80 and start to gather gear, are rewarded with a direct, visible improvement in their performance.   A Rogue with no gear is the squishiest target imaginable – however they blow their cooldowns against my Druid they invariably Thorns themselves to death.  Come back to that same rogue a few months later and he’s a wrecking machine.

Most DPS classes are the same – decking their character out in full pvp gear rewards them with increased survivability, increased damage, and the ability to tear people up instead of being slaughtered in seconds.

But healers are different.  Building up our gear increases our effectiveness and our ability to survive.  Unlike DPS, however, our own gear is only half the equation.  If the people we are healing have no resilience gear, it doesn’t matter how much healing you pour into them, they will die, and then we will die.

Furthermore, burst DPS has reached vastly higher levels in Wrath than what it was in TBC – I’m sure most people in the pvp scene were familiar with the sheer invincibility of resto druids, even above the amazing endurance of the other healing classes.  This is no longer the case – healers, while still very durable, are much squishier than they used to be.  What this means is that instead of tunnel-vision DPSing the first person they see, it’s important that the DPS keep an eye on us, which invariably they never do.  The other healers always defend me, but the dps almost never do.

Which brings me to my point.  It’s easy to get frustrated while grinding battlegrounds.  Undergeared teammates and those with no pvp experience make it an irritating endeavor (not to mention the asshats who sit there in bg chat and verbally abuse their own faction), so I recommend finding a buddy.  Either a buddy on your own server that you can learn and grow with, or failing that….

Find the person in the starting area with the current season’s weapons and follow them around for a while.  They are used to playing on a team and will be more likely to keep an eye on you.  Usually you’ll find them heading off alone to backcap stuff away from the main body of the enemy, and the only thing more powerful than a really well-geared dps is a really well-geared dps with a healer.

But battlegrounds are a game of numbers.  The side with the most overwhelming force will generally win in a given battle (though relatively few Arena-geared players can beat a larger force if played well enough), and as fun as it is to help a single player smash faces, you can make a bigger contribution to the fight by keeping a larger group healthy.

Now, some tips for not being gibbed embarrassingly:

• Keep your own defenses up.  For druids, this means keeping hots on yourself as your mana pool allows.  Priests could keep themselves bubbled, shamans have earth shield and passive totems, paladins have a lot of armor and sacred shield… my point being that you can’t always see what’s coming over the hill, and a rogue + feral druid chomping on your behind will ruin your day before you can say “You can’t do that while stunned” unless you have some defenses raised to survive it.
• Use all of your abilities.  Cyclone the enemy’s best DPS and Root their melee to take pressure off the person you are healing.  Fear bomb those 3 rogues making whoopie on your friend over there.  Hammer anybody who looks at you funny.  Mana Burn the enemy healers!
• Consider engineering.  Rogues and Death Knights have abilities that prevent you from using your normal crowd control on them, but it doesn’t protect them from a nice hefty Cobalt Frag Bomb.  They aren’t usable in Arena, but that’s okay, because anything you can’t do to them can’t be done to you either.
• Keep an eye on the world.  It’s really, really easy to lose yourself in the raid frames (GRID!  Get Grid.  Oh my, yes), clicking and healing the people losing health, only to look up and realize that it’s you and a ret pally with his Argent Lance still equipped against the slavering masses of The Enemy.  If possible, position yourself near cover – breaking LOS is really helpful to stop people bursting you.  If not that, stand behind a tree or something to make it harder to be Death Gripped.  Death Grip is responsible for more of my deaths than any other single ability.  There stands the Enemy, minding their business, when allofasudden “OH HAI2U RED-NAMED TREE DIRUD!!!” and BLAM I have 50 debuffs that mysteriously morph into a single buff titled “Waiting to Resurrect”.

Most of all, don’t let dying get you down, and whatever you do don’t listen to the local /bg naysayer.  His mother probably didn’t love him.