15 tips for brand new healers
by Bethany Myers 
Jun 9th 2010 at 11:00AM
So you're ready to venture into the thankless realm of healing? It's not for the faint of heart. You will be begged to heal an instance you hate and blamed for deaths that aren't your fault, only to lose gear upgrades to DPS -- all in the same run! On the other hand, healing can be a nice diversion from faceroll macro-mashing, and it's definitely nice to have instant dungeon queues.
Whether you're changing specs at level 80 to help your guild progression, stepping into The Deadmines as a level 18 healer or twinking out a battleground medic -- here are some helpful hints as you prepare to make those health bars greener.
5-man PvE
Regular dungeons, heroics and group quests in which you are the only healer
- The tank is your #1 priority. Your tank is either a bear or the person in plate armor with the highest health. You must keep the tank alive at all costs so that the monsters can hit him or her instead of you. A dead tank almost always means a wipe.
- You are your #2 priority. When the stuff hits the fan, someone might pull aggro and die. Dead DPS shouldn't automatically mean the fight is over; many groups can still win the with the loss of just one DPSer. But a dead healer can't heal the tank, and you can guess where that will probably end.
- Learn and use your bread and butter spells. Every healing class has multiple spells designed for different circumstances. Learn your class' abilities. Different types of spells include HOTs, shields, short- and long-casting direct heals, multiple-target heals, AoE heals and combinations of all of these. Though it will take practice to perfect your timing and use of them, knowing what you've got is half the battle!
- Watch your mana bar. You can't heal without mana, so make sure you always have plenty of drinks in your bag. If you're out of combat and your mana bar isn't full, drink. It could mean the difference between a sloppy pull that wipes your group and one that doesn't.
- Buff. Give the ones you've got, and don't be shy to ask for buffs from your party members. Also remember to ask for a soulstone and healthstone from warlocks and conjured food and water from mages.
Raid PvE
Groups of 10+ in which you must cooperate with other healers
- Talk about healing assignments. If the healers are grouped together, ask in party chat. If you're not in the same group, make a channel for healers to discuss strategy. Each healer should be very clear on his or her specific target(s) and roles during the fight. This helps avoid confusion, mana waste and overlapping cooldowns.
- Use the Set Focus feature. Right click on the main tank or off tank's portrait and select Set Focus. You can switch back to your primary target quickly after throwing a heal on someone else.
- Eat your consumables. Obvious advice is obvious, but you'd be amazed at how many moochers don't want to spend the time and money on consumables. Bring your own if your guild doesn't have an assigned consumable-giver. In PUGs, it's safest to assume that no one else will bring the Fish Feast. At minimum, you should have a food buff and mana potions. For progression content, you will want to add elixirs and/or flasks. Pull your own weight and remember to buff your weakest area -- if you never struggle with mana, better to buff your throughput, and vice versa.
- Run a healing meter. Don't obsess about being at the top. Like your GearScore, the meter is just a tool, not the total measure of a player. It's much more important to perform your assigned role (see above) and keep one person alive than to top the meter.
- Analyze the healing meter. Learn to read it. Pay attention to your playstyle. If you tend to run out of mana before the fight is over, look closely at your overhealing. Figure out where you can improve.
PvP
Healing in arenas and battlegrounds
- If you want to win, use Vent. Arena playstyle depends totally on your team combination, so communicate with your teammates. Likewise, premade battlegrounds benefit enormously from voice communication.
- Don't wander off. Battleground play is a free-for-all. Stick close to your teammates -- not many healing specs in healing gear can last long one on one versus a DPS class. If you go off on your own to cap a flag or whatever, you'll probably die. Remember your support role and bring a DPSer or two with you.
- Get a specialized UI. Special UIs are a requirement in arenas; you need unit frames that will show you critical information about the opposite team. Battlegrounds are the last vestige of 40-man raids -- reason enough to ditch Blizzard's cluttered raid UI. Also, mouseover macros are incredibly helpful.
- Go on the defensive. Use your pre-emptive healing spells (particularly shields and HOTs) to absorb damage at the beginning, rather than waiting until everyone around you is at half health. Be proactive, not reactive.
- Heal yourself first. If the other team is paying attention, they will try to interrupt your casting and focus fire you. Don't let them. The longer you can keep yourself alive through their attack, the longer your teammates can DPS the people targeting you.
Of course, these tips don't even begin to cover the complicated world of WoW healing. There is a wealth of information out there. When you have a question about your healer's spec, gear, abilities or a particular fight -- do your research. The best tip I can give you is to take advantage of the WoW community's extensive resources. Know your class. Guilds and PUGs alike will be impressed, and you will gain a reputation for being a pro healer. Keeping your friends alive is a very rewarding job. You might even start to love it!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
deluded spider Jun 9th 2010 11:02AM
Healing meters, huh. Are those still useless for disc priests?
Zuckerdachs Jun 9th 2010 11:07AM
There are plug-ins to include mitigation in their calculations. =)
Valorous Jun 9th 2010 11:09AM
World of logs catches it if I'm not mistaken.
Anzor Jun 9th 2010 11:14AM
Skada solved that long ago. Tracks absorbs.
Fun fact - Skada, Recount, and raid parses are close enough that the trends they show are the same. The exact numbers may be different but meters should be used to track trends and individual performance.
AKA Get over being at the top of the chart. Recount says you haven't met a snobold, so I'm gonna introduce you to a boot.
SunGod228 Jun 9th 2010 12:18PM
Just to be clear. Skada and the recount plug-in are estimating the absorbs.
Still better than nothing.
crschmidt Jun 9th 2010 12:23PM
Depending on the number of sources of absorbs you have, there isn't much 'estimating' to be done; when you finish a heal or a character takes damage, the amount of absorption left on the target is included in the combat logs. The key thing that's 'hard' is tracking who that absorb came from -- not the most difficult thing ever in the common cases. They can tell what the absorb was when it got put on someone, and who put it there; they can tell (when damage is absorbed) from their 'stack' of absorbs which one did the absorbing, based on the same rules that WoW itself uses.
The only thing special here is that when damage is absorbed, the combat log doesn't say "30% of damage absorbed from the leftover DA bubble, and another 10% from the remaining shield." -- nor is it any different if you've got multiple sources of absorbs, so sometimes these 'guesses' won't be perfect. (Lag, for example, might have the combat log showing an order of events differently than the server.) Still, with a small number of absorb sources -- like in a 10-man raid, where you'll usually only have one disc priest -- the numbers are likely to be highly accurate, and in any environment, the *total* absorb is likely to be accurate; the attribution to healers ma be slightly off.
Squatstopee Jun 9th 2010 1:08PM
Can a disco ever get a good measure of absorbs healing a bear tank with all th SD procs?
MrJackSauce Jun 9th 2010 3:36PM
@Squatstopee. I'm pretty sure it can separate them. They are 2 different spell ID's/Name etc so (i'm guessing here) they can probably define which absorb came from where by checking that first. I dunno how it works but that's my idea! :P
Anuillae Jun 9th 2010 11:08AM
Thanks for that :D
Never had any experience with healing, but I'm lvling a druid to start healing dungeons (for a break from the 45min DPS queues), and I am in need of tips. I've never had a WHOLE five man party relying on me to keep them alive before!
On another topic altogether (please forgive me), has anyone else had a message saying that the beta of the remote AH is over? Because it popped up early this morning, but I was then able to make my full 25 transactions over the next hour. ?_?
Faith Trust Jun 9th 2010 11:20AM
I think you can buy it now for 3usd a month, I remember well there was a blog post in here about that yesterday.
Kylenne Jun 9th 2010 11:28AM
Lowbie 5 man healing really is ridiculously simple as any class, especially if you've got heirlooms. I've done it on every healing class but a druid now, and mostly you can do it while watching stuff on YouTube. The only time you really run into problems is when you run into low level tanks that think they're on their T10-geared 80s and try to pull like it's a heroic faceroll contest.
Also, as a rule lowbie groups in vanilla content tend to not want to let the tank to hir job (as I've discovered on my pally) and a lot of times pulls will turn into free-for-alls. Especially when there's a huntard in the group, which seems to be inevitable. In those cases, don't be afraid to let stupid DPS die. I'm not necessarily advocating the "letting them die as an object lesson" approach, though I've certainly been known to do that after one polite "please let the tank pull" warning. What I'm saying is you might run into genuine newbies that may not understand threat management or get what that red ring around their toon's portrait is about, so try to toss them a heal when you can--but ultimately, focus on the tank, and yourself. It's also the safer route to go anyway, because if you're trying to keep some trigger happy huntard alive chances are you'll probably be pulling healing aggro at some point and end up going splat yourself. It gets a lot better in BC groups (particularly by then you'll probably have the majority of your tools as a healer, and ditto the tanks), but only once you get past the 58-60 range, which seriously put the "hell" in Hellfire thanks to the legion of mouthbreathing DKs fresh out of Acherus ready to death grip everything in sight and argue with you about being in Frost Presence because they're Blood/Unholy. /sigh
Kylenne Jun 9th 2010 11:37AM
Also: get Healbot. Healbot is your friend.
I realize this is where the VuhDo and the Grid/Clique crowds will come out with torches and pitchforks, but Healbot shines for new/lowbie healers because unlike the others it's usable right out of the box, and requires way less fiddling with than is reasonable for running old 5 mans while you level. Those other addons tend to be overkill for that level of content, anyway.
Later on, try experimenting with other add-ons, or mouseover macros, to see if you like them more. But get SOMETHING, is my real point here. Because learning how to heal with the standard interface is an exercise in serious masochism. Yes, you can do it--people do it all the time--but in my experience, getting a decent multi-button mouse and some decent raid frames to click on really helped me a lot.
feniks9174 Jun 9th 2010 11:49AM
5's are very easy to heal if you have a half-decent group. Until you get out of Vanilla it'll be rare to find anything in a dungeon that can truly do deadly damage to a clothie (ie One Shot them) and the tank even less so.
It's like playing Whack-a-Mole . . Except it usually pops up in the same place and doesn't move particularly fast.
Jackwraith Jun 9th 2010 12:23PM
45 minutes?! Wow. I've never waited longer than about 15 minutes on 3 different servers (Blackhand, Spirestone, Turalyon) and battlegroups. Granted, waiting 30 seconds as a healer is nice, which is a small part of why my shaman is dual-specced, but the main part is just to enjoy the game from a different angle.
Cliff Jun 9th 2010 2:32PM
Kylenne hit all the right points on this topic. I've leveled a Druid healer (pre-Dungeon Finder) and a Priest this way.
Pulls will often turn into a scrum, simply because some folks don't know what they're doing yet, the tanks don't have all their tools yet or someone is overeager(why is this disproportionately the hunter?). Just keep your cool and have the tank as your focus target and you should be fine.
MichaelBerean Jul 19th 2010 8:03PM
I strongly agree with the Healbot recommendation. No setup is required. To figure out what spells occur with which key you can just cast on yourself before the instance starts. An alternative is to click on options at the bottom of the healbot frame, go to the spells tab and click on the radio buttons to see what each mouse button casts.
Also, don’t be afraid to ask your raiding healer guildie friends some questions. I have learned tons this way. Most healers are very happy to try to help people.
Anuillae Jun 10th 2010 8:55AM
obviously not jsut for shorter queues :P But its true that the DPS queues can reach 45 mins on my server
McRaider Jun 10th 2010 10:26AM
My current record with queue time on my resto shaman (now 65, leveled almost purely with dungeons) is about 1h 5 min. Normally I have to wait about 5-15 min to get a group, but that time it happened to be a lot longer.
Of course the best part of that is that right after we're in, the tank says that there's too many plate-users and leaves...
theuberpea Jun 10th 2010 11:59PM
@Cliff
It is disproportionately hunters because DKs start at level 55.
Grokknar Jun 9th 2010 11:13AM
"If you want to win, use Vent.... benefit enormously from voice communication."
I don't use Vent, but I do use voice communication. Does that make me a rubbish healer?