This post was taken from Archivis at [url=http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19602964-How-to-be-a-Top-Notch-Healer]Broadbandreports.com[/url].  I find a lot of what he has to say interesting, and I figured some guildies might appreciate some of the information he shared in this post.


How to be a Top Notch Healer

Warcraft is a social game, but in some areas, it is a game of skill. It’s when you blur the social aspects with the skill elements of the game is where you usually see the friction. For this segment (which I humbly contribute to those who refresh this site constantly waiting for something new to pop up), I’m talking specifically about healers.

I’m not in a BT-clearing guild, but this guide isn’t for them. I’ve run with several folks at the opposite end of the spectrum, who struggle to heal in heroics, consider them a challenge, and see instances like Karazhan a challenge, even though they know they’re geared for the instance. In the majority of the cases, I’ve found that the healers, despite how talked up they are, don’t have down syndrome, they simply haven’t been trained how to heal.

From level 1 to 70, players have been DPSing their way through levels. They were never really taught how to properly heal. There are very few, if any, serious opportunities to heal yourself to 70, and absolutely no experience given that would benefit in raid healing. I admit, when I started out, I was “middle of the pack” on healing and healer meters. I was vaguely aware of my surroundings, being strung through a guild that geared me up. I was trained and taught how to heal. Being a top-notch healer is not something that just occurs naturally.

With that out of the way, I’ll explain now how to heal, covering every detail I can think of. Before you step foot into an instance, you have to make sure that you’re geared and spec’d appropriately. (For the purpose of this guide, I’m only covering PVE healing, not PVP healing).

First thing first is a bit of knowledge about your class. Your class forums, as well as various other forums on the Internet (Elitist Jerks is a perfect example), have every bit of knowledge about the most optimum spec possible. Spec around what others are spec’ing in your guild. Spec around those in your raid. If you have two holy priests, have one of them spec for spirit, another for circle of healing. Spend hours reading these posts to the point of borderline obsession. When you understand the mechanics and strong points of your class, you’ll understand where you fit into the rest of the raid. Ultimately, when you pick a spec, you better be able to defend against scrutiny from it and be able to justify every talent picked up as well as why you skipped other talents. Blizzard has done a great job with diversity in talents. The top healers in the game spend months debating about the best talent choices, learn from them.

After your talent choices, you need to make sure you’re geared properly. Gear yourself for the instance. You should be aiming for at least 1100 healing unbuffed to get into Karazhan and a good 1500+ to get yourself started into the T5 instancing. Keep in mind that these are starter goals. You want to make sure that your mana can be sustained over a long period of time. Do not sit around and wait for the raids to gear you up. Get crafted gear, get 5-man gear, get heroic gear. (Note: Resto Druids generally want to aim for more spirit and mp5 than +healing)

There’s no reason why you can’t easily hit the healing limits required. Get your gear enchanted and gemmed. All of it. Ultimately, you want the best combo of mana, healing and mana regen, while keeping in mind that you can’t show up to raids with 4k health unbuffed (I’ve had it happen). I don’t need to go in-depth about your gear choices. There are forums for that.

Surprisingly and also unfortunately at the same time, the gear and the talents are one of the largest hurdles to finding decent healers in the game. As a raid leader (who ends up being a stepping stone to larger guilds), I can usually tell the quality of a player simply by seeing their gear, gem, enchanting and talent choices. Know your class first.


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There are three types of healing in raids:

Trash Healing
Raid Healing
Tank Healing

Each of those three require three different “healbot modes”. In some areas, you may cross lines, but each of those modes requires a different type of healing.

Trash Healing:
This is the easiest of them all. You can be careless about your overheal, your choice of spells, your targeting and overall focus. There are some important things to keep an eye on it. Keep the tanks topped off. You need not worry about mana conservation here. If you do, you have innervates/shadowfiends/mana tides/etc available. People act as if they’re on a one-hour cooldown. Don’t be so concerned with your mana pool or about overheal. You want everyone topped off all the time. Someone pulls wrong, runs into a cleave, eats splash damage, etc, and they can go splat if they weren’t topped off. Keeping a raid at maximum health, even if it seems like you’re just tossing your mana down the drain is the best way to ensure that you don’t all wipe to trash. The absolute best way to train and practice this type of healing is in Alterac Valley.

Raid Healing:
If you’re assigned to healing the raid, that generally means that your focus is not on the tanks but on the players around you. Because of this, it is important that you understand what type of damage you expect the raid to receive. In same cases, you simply only need to keep a player above a certain health level. Keeping them topped off is a great goal, but once they’re above a certain percentage, you can look for another person to heal instead. In some cases, you’ll need to keep them at maximum health. In here, you want to take advantage of your mana regen. If you understand the type of damage (if it’s predictable… like say the Prince’s shadow novas), you can conserve mana simply by not casting. In the example above, if you’re hurting on mana, you can generally let the players eat two novas before healing them back to full allowing you to spend a significant amount of your time regenerating mana.

As well as that, you’ll want to alleviate any stress that would be on the tank healers. If you’re finding yourself doing fine on raid healing, chip in on tank healing. If your mana can afford it, put up some passive healing abilities on the tank. Earth shield, Renews, prayer of mendings, HoT’s, etc. Let them tick away on the main tank and forget about him while you keep up the rest of the raid.

Main Tank Healing:
This is generally where you want to focus solely on the tank and in some end-game encounters, ignore other players completely, or trust someone to take care of you or others. It may be possible for you to heal yourself, but in the majority of cases, healing yourself means not healing the tank and if someone is assigned to raid healing, you’ll want to trust them to keep you up so you can keep the tank up. The Curator is a perfect example. You could be healing the tank, but eat a ton of damage from two flares in a row. Healing yourself could mean that you could leave the tank abandoned long enough to take an unlucky string of hits. Stick to your assignment and if someone is assigned to keep you up, you have to trust them to do it. If they can’t, then point them to this guide.

Also, when you’re healing the main tank, you always want to be casting a healing spell. There should never be a time where you’re simply standing still “waiting for damage”. This is one of the single biggest healer flaws that I see, is the reactive healing. The healer sees damage, the healer heals damage. There are some fights where your 2+ second cast is simply too long for a heal to go off. Get yourself an intuitive casting bar like “Quartz”. When you cast a spell, watch the tank’s health and watch your cast. If you’ve gone through 50-75% of your cast and the tank is at full health, cancel your cast. The popular method of canceling a cast is to nudge yourself. Move slightly in one direction to cancel your cast. As soon as you’re done canceling, immediately begin recasting. The spirit 5-second rule only applies when you’ve successfully cast a spell, not while you’re casting.

If a tank is at full health when you start casting your large heal and then takes a nasty series of hits in under a second, your cast is already half done and you’re the first to land a heal, ensuring that when the next hit lands, it’s not the one that wipes your raid.

Always, always keep your passive healing methods on cooldowns. Your trinkets should be bound to your healing keys so that you don’t forget about them. Your heals over time should always be on the tank. Earthshield should never fall off. Prayer of mending always on cooldown and every druid HoT always ticking. Just make sure that when you re-apply, that you don’t do it too early. Get yourself a HoT timer or other cooldown monitor. Don’t waste mana and overwrite something too early.

Main Tank healing is where mana conservation is the most important. You and your fellow healers want to watch your overheal as much as possible, as this determines how much wasteful healing (and in turn mana) you’ve caused.


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Now that you’ve got the methods out of the way, you need an easy way to carry out the above methods without overwhelming yourself or being inefficient at it. You should be able to hop into any raid at any point and be able to heal anything and everything. No, you don’t have to be a super spaz to do this, you simply need the right UI. The posters below me will be certain to mention the addons that are beneficial to them, but I’ll include the two addons that are utterly critical for me. Before that, here are the concepts that I’ll list that you’ll need if you do decide to go with a different addon.

Range Finder – In same areas, you’re assigned to heal “that side of the room”, being that you’ll be too far away from a significant chunk of the raid. How are you supposed to who is over there with you? What if someone has to swap? Are you going to drag each individual’s raid frame out so you can keep an eye on them? Having an addon with a range finder lets you easily see who is in range by graying out meters of others who may be on the other side of the room, or zone. As mentioned earlier, Alterac Valley is a perfect training ground for raid healing and the range finder.

Mouse-bound, single click healing: If you have to select a target and press a heal button, then you’re simply not going to be able to keep up with the healing demands that are put on you. Bind your healing keys using an addon or by using mouseover commands. You should never have to “select” anyone to heal them, with the exception of your primary heal target (like the main tank).

Decurse Detection: Some people use decursive to take care of this, but you need a very quick and convenient way to detect and remove poisons, curses, diseases, magics, etc. There are many instances in which leaving a debuff on a player for more than 1-2 seconds can be fatal. (Maiden’s holy fire in Kara, Lynx’s flame shock in ZA, etc).

Efficient Information: Blizzard’s raid healing bars are terrible by default and very uninformative. You want to easily see every bit of information about every player without overwhelming your screen. You’ll eventually want to get an efficient raid frame that’ll let you see a player’s health and mana status. For example, in healer mode, I don’t want to see what a player’s percentage of health is. A priest at 50% is a lot different than a tank at 50%. A tank at 50% could mean that they’re missing 10k health, where a priest might only be missing 3500 or 4000 health. In my meters, I use a health deficit meter. It shows me how much health a player is lacking. In a perfect happy world, all I see are 0’s on my screen. I have no idea what their full health is unless I select them. I simply care about how much health they’re missing. This let’s me gauge what type of heal I’m going to use and shows me approximately what kind of damage that player is taking without me having to do mental math.

Other addons are personal pereference, but ultimately, those are what you’re looking for. I’ll cover the addons I prefer later.


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Know your role as a healer. There’s a reason why you bring a diversity of healing classes, because each healing class has their strengths. Here are a list of classes and their strengths and weaknesses below.

Paladins: Aside from the blessings, their flash heals are great for keeping that tank at full health rather than just slightly below it. Their efficient flash heals allow them to go on almost indefinitely (when geared). This is the bread and butter of their class. When a paladin has to start casting their longer casts, it’s when they become the most vulnerable to running out of mana. Paladins make for great raid healers and tank healers, especially when multiple paladins are used. As a paladin, you should only use your larger heal in emergencies.

Shamans: The ultimate raid healer. Their chain heal is unmatched in raid healing ability. They do, however, have a severe problem with single target (tank) healing. Their single heals leave them with little to no mana pool. As a shaman, your healing leader should be assigning you to the raid before assigning any other healer to take care of it. If it’s not certain who you need to keep Earthshield on, keep it on the tank (unless another shaman has one on him already). Downrank your heals if you do need to heal the tank.

Druids: HoT’s are the key to success. These hots are great for keeping a tank topped off and to get those heals going inbetween the other classes larger heals. Save your instant cast heals for when the tank gets low, trusting that the other heal classes are going to get their heals off if the tank is at half health or so. Anything below that and use your instant casts to get that tank topped off. In some situations, you may need to use a heal with a cast time. Try to be efficient with it or risk running yourself out of mana.

Priests: Your goal is to pump out the large heals and to keep the rest of your stuff on cooldown. Prayer of mending and renew should always be up on your target. When raid healing, renews are enough to take care of a player in most situations unless raid damage is frequent and unpredictable. You should almost never cast flash heal. You should be spamming Greater Heal on the tank. This class, more important than all other classes, has to take advantage of the canceling of casts mentioned earlier in this post.


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Addons:

Aside from the usual addons like Omen, boss mods, etc, the two addons I use that apply specifically to healing are Xperl and Clique.

Clique: »www.wowinterface.com/downloads/i···que.html

Xperl: »wow.curse.com/downloads/details/3416/

Xperl has the range finder and every piece of information possible. It is very overwhelming at first. I sincerely ask that you don’t give up on this addon as soon as you load it up. It will appear to have “messed everything up” as it changes your screen signficaintly, but I promise it is customizable to your liking. If need be, we can start a new thread on Xperl and I can post screenshots and walkthroughs for customizing.

The only thing Xperl lacks is the ability to bind heals to your mouse. That’s what Clique is for. Clique is self-explanatory. Once installed, simply open up your spellbook and click on the rabbit icon. You should be able to figure it out from there.


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Meters: Meters are somewhat efficient in determining how well you heal. I sincerely recommend that you or someone in your raid get WWS. See how you compare to others. If someone does better than you, talk to them. To be honest, there’s a lot of terrible healers or simply untrained healers so you really should have no problems getting yourself to the top. Use WWS to gauge your progress.