Tips for new healers

[Marqo]

As we've had a few new healers lately, I thought it might be a good idea to start a thread where the more experienced among us can provide the others with tips and advice. Even the more experienced among us healers might learn some new stuff. This would also be a place for healers to ask questions if needed. Having all that information consolidated into 1 thread will, I believe, be quite helpful.

I'll start off with a simple but crucial thing first: be sure you know what you need to do before any bossfight or involved trash group. If you don't, /havenheal is usually the place to go, although healing assignments are sometimes done in /raid or on teamspeak as well.

 

[Angelic]

There are little to no universal tips that span all the healing capable classes, so I'd suggest people talk individually to those that play the same class. You know who you are most comfortable talking to and who plays "your" class

In general...back in TBC I would've suggested you pre-cast (e.g. start casting the heal before the tank actually takes damage and cancel it shortly before it lands if he doesn't get hit), but that doesn't really work nowadays - heals are too fast, even the big ones.

So learn about all your abilities, take some time to realize what each does and when to use it.

Frankly, knowing the fights isn't crucial to a healer, definitely much less than a tank. I usually just run around people and heal anything that gets damaged ^^

I'm getting too chatty - talk to one of the more experienced healers in the same class. Fullstop.

 

[Zooggy]

Ahey,

Naturally, learning the fight itself has its importance.

To my mind, however, more important is learn about your group fares in each fight. Learn how and when the tanks take damage, know what types of AoE damage are more likely to put people in actual jeopardy, etc...

Also, learn how the other healers in your group play and learn how to fit your playstyle in with them.

Naturally, this takes practice and lots of team play, but these are the things you should be looking for when you're fighting.

One other thing: until you are comfortable playing with any given group, leave the healing meters for the chats after the raid. Meters and damage counters have their uses, but if you use them so you "maximize your output", you're looking at the wrong thing.

For healers, healing meters are good for one thing and one thing only, and that's learning how to be mana-efficient by keeping an eye in your heal-to-overheal ratio. There's just too much circumstancial context for a useful comparison between the healing outputs of different healers.

Hope that's helpful.

Cheers,
J.

 

[Youn]

Just started healing with my shaman and things are going smooth.

I'm just wondering what add-ons our healers are using to make things easier.

I have x-perl installed, the raid interface works fine for 10-man raids but i think it will get messy for 25-mans.

What do you guys recommend?

 

[Marqo]

I use Xperl as well, and I find it works fine for 25-mans as well. In fact, I'm having trouble healing 5mans these days as I'm too used to the raid health bars. Other addons I use are Pallypower (doh), decursive and IceHud, along with Bartender.

 

[Angelic]

Addons! Yeah, gotta love those

Until recently I only used X-Perl Raid Frames and Quartz to check my latency and time my heals properly. That gets the job done for most.

But as clicking on a character's frame to target him and only THEN hitting the button of the actual heal is often too slow, I adopted new combination of addons to help me:

(Grid)
Clique
Pitbull Unit Frames / any other unit frames + Quartz

Let me explain what each does.
Grid - basically advanced raid frames, optimizable to show various debuffs on people, incoming heals as yellow dots on the person's frame, buffs, health, mana and stuff like that. Give it a shot.
Clique - the ownage, non-target casting. Basically you assign key+click combinations to various spells and when you key+click a unit's frame you'll cast this spell on given unit without losing your target/focus. E.g. I have Shift+Left Click bound to Flash Heal, so when I see on Grid that someone needs like 5k healing I'll press Shift, left click the person's unit frame and that will set off a cast of Flash Heal on that person without me changing my target. Very handy and makes your heals extremely quick!
Pitbull Unit Frames - I'm using these, because they show casting bars next to the actual person/target/focus/target's target/focus' target etc AND SHOW LATENCY in these too. Few unit frames do that (Xperl doesn't, neither do ag_unitframes). If you want to use one of those + Quartz that shows the latency as well, go ahead. Knowing the latency is especially good if you chain-cast things with longer cast time (GHeals, ChainHeals, HolyLights etc).

I gotta go tend to a sprained ankle now (I'm a nurse on a summer camp full of kids), but ask if you want more info