Karma needs YOU for help with healing :)

[VelkynKarma]

So! I'm going to give this healing thing another shot.

The problem I've had in the past with trying to switch a dps character to healing is that suddenly I have half a dozen or more buttons that I don't really know how to use and when, so I figure if I start from the beginning I can gradually ease my way into it. To that end I've rolled myself a new baby priest, who is currently level 8. I'm sure I'll hit 10 tomorrow, and that's when the talents start, SO.

Help me out guys! I'm a total NEWB when it comes to healing. What spec should I take? I plan to mostly level via dungeons. What stats do I focus on? I'm fairly sure it's Int and Spirit, but which one do I want to focus on more? Any special strategies I should have in mind for healing? Any good guides to link me to? Any addons you guys swear by?

I'm all ears (eyes?) and ready to learn.

~VelkynKarma

[Nevar]

Well I'd think you'd need to anwser one simple question to start out with.. do you want to mainly be a MT healer..or an all around healer. Disc priests are AMAZING for Mt healers and holy priests for raid wide hals. I have tried both myself and I really think both of them are fun to do

[Tygamoon]

When it comes to learning a new spec or play style then starting at the beginning is the way to go!

As for a baby priest you might consider Holy. Dics is very nice (I much rather heal with this spec) and mana conservative but it's juicy healing talents are lower down in the tree. I'd do some holy at the start and then go for disc a bit later on if you felt like it. Experiment a little and have fun!

Stats that you will want are Intel and Spirit for sure, but don't leave out stamina too much. As to what stat you want to stack I personally would go with what felt right at the time. Finding a balance is fairly easy. The lower levels are pretty forgiving on that angle.

As to healing mods I personally like HealBot. A lot of people swear by Grid too. I tried Grid and it was too damn colorful and configuring it was clunky to me so I went back to Healbot and am still satisfied with it. You can use the basic UI to heal with but it begins to become uncomfortable later on (around 65 for me) when you have more spells and more things going on with the group. I hear a lot of people use mouse over macros to heal with too. Just like a HealBot but you have to add in a lot of macros (and keybinds?) as far as I can tell. The standard UI is fine if you are a purest with that sort of thing but it does lack a certain level of awareness that a mod can give you. If you do decide you want a mod later on after you get your first few healing spells and know kinda how to use them head on over to Curse and browse the add-ons for healing. Pick a few at a time to work with and don't be afraid to dump something if it feels too clumsy. The thing here is to find what you like to look at. How does it feel to use? Are the controls and configuration interesting or confusing?

Early on game play should be fun for you. If you don't like the priest play style then try out another class. Some people might give suggestions, take those with a grain of salt because what works for some might not work for you. Don't worry too much about the roll you will want to fill at end game, ideas change as you level. Basically just have fun learning, take it easy and always remember...people WILL die and some may even blame you for it and most importantly...Ignore the jerks!

[Saturo]

I agree with everything Tyga said. I personally enjoy druids more, and find them a bit easier, while some people swear by paladins. Which class fits which player varies wildly.

One addon you should look into, other than Healbot, is XPerl. It will alter the unitframes to show incoming damage and healing, and overall make you a much faster healer. Another good addon is DrDamage. It's a theorycrafting addon that calculates the damage, and healing, of your spells. It's really helpful in learning which spell heals for what so you know when to use that particular one.

[Ryno]

Priest is the hardest healing class from my experience...

I had to go disc for healing, I just couldn't perform well enough with holy.

Disc priests are AMAZING for Mt healers and holy priests for raid wide hals.

Actually according to a lot of Elitist Jerks posts, Disc is no longer a good MT healer, and both specs are good for raid wide heals.

Not saying you can't MT heal, but if you get into 25 man ICC Heroic, the leader may ask you to raid head instead.

[Mockingbird]

Disc priest: Spend a lot more time avoiding damage with shields, rather than healing it. Really fun spec. Later on you get Pennance, which is basically a healing plasma cannon and makes me grin when I use it.

Holy: The most traditional healer class/spec in WoW. Able to cope with anything, but needs to be well fed with mana. Take drinks!

For levelling, either is good.

I would suggest if you plan to do ANY solo content/questing that you dip into shadow for Soul Tap.

[Anansi]

Can't comment on healing as a Priest, I heal with a Shaman.
For addons though, I've tried Healbot, Grid plus Clique and VuhDo, and I absolutely love VuhDo. The configuration system is unique but it works very well, and there's so much you can do with the addon. It's extremely configurable to pretty much any format you could possibly want and has the capacity for displaying all sorts of important data.

[Sarayana]

Tyga said everything I wanted to say... I just want to add that while it's true that disc isn't that fancy at first, you'll still have no prob healing dungeons as disc, and the mana conservation talents from the disc tree means less down-time in dungeons (except in Mana Tombs. That place can bite me.). I was holy for a day and have been disc since, and my priest is 65 now.

I looooooove healbot, in fact it's gotten to the point that I miss it when I'm not on my healers, so I have to create a dps version now. Also, someone recommended binding misdirect to healbot on the hunter, so that when you, say, left-click a portrait you'll MD to that person. Nifty, no?

[Tygamoon]

Hehe I use HealBot on my paladin tank for Righteous Defense and on my hunters for MD as well. I've tried a few tanking mods for taunts but they just clutter up my screen. With HB party units can be invisible till someone takes aggro.

[VelkynKarma]

Awesome, good feedback all around. Let's see...

When it comes to learning a new spec or play style then starting at the beginning is the way to go!

As for a baby priest you might consider Holy. Dics is very nice (I much rather heal with this spec) and mana conservative but it's juicy healing talents are lower down in the tree. I'd do some holy at the start and then go for disc a bit later on if you felt like it. Experiment a little and have fun!

Stats that you will want are Intel and Spirit for sure, but don't leave out stamina too much. As to what stat you want to stack I personally would go with what felt right at the time. Finding a balance is fairly easy. The lower levels are pretty forgiving on that angle.

As to healing mods I personally like HealBot. A lot of people swear by Grid too. I tried Grid and it was too damn colorful and configuring it was clunky to me so I went back to Healbot and am still satisfied with it. You can use the basic UI to heal with but it begins to become uncomfortable later on (around 65 for me) when you have more spells and more things going on with the group. I hear a lot of people use mouse over macros to heal with too. Just like a HealBot but you have to add in a lot of macros (and keybinds?) as far as I can tell. The standard UI is fine if you are a purest with that sort of thing but it does lack a certain level of awareness that a mod can give you. If you do decide you want a mod later on after you get your first few healing spells and know kinda how to use them head on over to Curse and browse the add-ons for healing. Pick a few at a time to work with and don't be afraid to dump something if it feels too clumsy. The thing here is to find what you like to look at. How does it feel to use? Are the controls and configuration interesting or confusing?

Early on game play should be fun for you. If you don't like the priest play style then try out another class. Some people might give suggestions, take those with a grain of salt because what works for some might not work for you. Don't worry too much about the roll you will want to fill at end game, ideas change as you level. Basically just have fun learning, take it easy and always remember...people WILL die and some may even blame you for it and most importantly...Ignore the jerks!

SUPER helpful, Tyga! I'm definitely willing to play with both the Disc and Holy trees, I just had no idea where to start. Since I've never healed I didn't really know the difference between the two, lol.

I've used Grid in the past (when I tried to switch hybrid classes over to healing) and it was quite colorful. I'll give a few others a shot. I've heard of addons that let you do mouseover healing too, but that'll take a bit of research on my part since I'm not very macro-savvy

And I'm starting with a priest for a reason. I've gotten a lot of people telling me druid is easiest, but I already have a mid-twenties druid on the Nesingwary server. I'd rather not delete her if I can avoid it, but it comes down to the same problem as before--switching over is not easy for me. So, a priest, from the beginning! I'll give it a shot though, and if I don't like how it goes, I'll try something else.

One addon you should look into, other than Healbot, is XPerl. It will alter the unitframes to show incoming damage and healing, and overall make you a much faster healer. Another good addon is DrDamage. It's a theorycrafting addon that calculates the damage, and healing, of your spells. It's really helpful in learning which spell heals for what so you know when to use that particular one.

Ooh, DrDamage sounds useful. That's certainly one of the things I need to learn, what spells to use where and how to not OVERheal

Disc priest: Spend a lot more time avoiding damage with shields, rather than healing it. Really fun spec. Later on you get Pennance, which is basically a healing plasma cannon and makes me grin when I use it.

Holy: The most traditional healer class/spec in WoW. Able to cope with anything, but needs to be well fed with mana. Take drinks!

For levelling, either is good.

I would suggest if you plan to do ANY solo content/questing that you dip into shadow for Soul Tap.

Thanks for the breakdown, very helpful I'll also keep in mind that Shadow tip. I definitely want to level this guy mostly by dungeons, but some days I might just not feel like it, and having some extra edge would be nice.

I looooooove healbot, in fact it's gotten to the point that I miss it when I'm not on my healers, so I have to create a dps version now. Also, someone recommended binding misdirect to healbot on the hunter, so that when you, say, left-click a portrait you'll MD to that person. Nifty, no?

Haha, I love that misdirect idea I'll have to give Healbot a shot (if it works). I know I tried downloading it before, but for some reason it wouldn't show up...it was very odd O_o. But that was also like a year ago, so maybe updates since then will make it easier to use. XD

~VelkynKarma

[Sarayana]

Mmm they've made big improvements to Healbot. I tried it about a year ago and didn't like it one bit, so I bit the bullet and spent a day programming Grid + all the extras. Well, WoW swallowed up all my configurations one day (about two-three months ago, I think?) and there was no way I was going to do that again. I tried Vuhdo (which a lot of raiders swear by!!) and really didn't like it. I get that during a raid you might want some things automated, but it just did too much and didn't leave much decision-making or gameplay up to me... so my buddy recommended healbot, and I haven't looked back.

I love how easy it is for me to see if someone gets aggro so I can toss a rejuv or bubble on them preemptively (in case the tank doesn't grab the mob in time) and it clearly shows me all the essential info, including who is out of range of my heals, who has a debuff that I can't dispell but need to heal through, and so on.

[Magyck]

I could probably talk forever on healing.

I've got a priest, who's now level 77. Leveled entirely from level 15 through dungeons as holy spec. I love love love it. A lot of good advice has already been given, but I'll add a couple of things.

If you're going holy spec, it's worth your while to put your first 13 points into the disc tree in order to get meditation. Holy is very mana intensive, and meditation goes a long way towards helping that.

As far as addons go, I use Pitbull and Deadly Boss Mods. I assume Pitbull is similar to some of the other unit frame editing addons. It takes a bit to set up, but I find it incredibly useful; particularly since you can set it up to make it obvious when someone else grabs aggro, incoming heals (it makes it easy to see when someone has renew, for instance), when someone is out of your healing range, etc. Deadly Boss Mods is great for giving you a hard to ignore heads up about incoming damage. With respect to overhealing, it's probably impossible to NEVER overheal, but addons like Pitbull go a long way towards making you aware of exactly how much you're overhealing when you're casting specific spells. I don't use Recount, but I know that will also tell you how much you're overhealing but more in an after-the-fact kind of way (I think, I could be wrong on how Recount works).

I don't know if you've mentioned anywhere whether you're a clicker or a keybinder, but I clicked on my hunter (shame on me), and when I started my priest I used keybinds from the beginning. That makes a big difference in terms of your reaction time, which is pretty essential in a healing role. It's also way easier to start from the beginning with keybinds when you only have a couple of heals than it is to try and switch later after you've built up an impressive arsenal of spells.

For stats, you're looking for int, spirit, and spellpower mostly. At later levels you start finding gear with haste, which is also nice. There are lots of good guides out there on stats and priest healing in particular, such as the ones on elitistjerks (they tend to go pretty far into the mathematics of healing for me, but they have spec/stat recommendations and the like and overall it's a very good resource).

Lastly, remember that sometimes it's just not possible to prevent a wipe or to prevent someone from dying no matter how uber you are. When the squishy rogue gets pummeled to death in short order by running around a corner, out of your line of sight, and into a pile of mobs while only THINKING he was stealthed it's not your fault, even though said rogue might blame you for it. Healing is very rewarding but requires a bit of a thick skin since people will blame the healer when things go wrong.

[VelkynKarma]

If you're going holy spec, it's worth your while to put your first 13 points into the disc tree in order to get meditation. Holy is very mana intensive, and meditation goes a long way towards helping that.

Sounds like either way I'd be starting Disc then, and just switch over to focusing on Holy once I get a specific talent. I'll play with it, see what happens.

I don't know if you've mentioned anywhere whether you're a clicker or a keybinder, but I clicked on my hunter (shame on me), and when I started my priest I used keybinds from the beginning. That makes a big difference in terms of your reaction time, which is pretty essential in a healing role. It's also way easier to start from the beginning with keybinds when you only have a couple of heals than it is to try and switch later after you've built up an impressive arsenal of spells.

I tend to click more than keybind, but since I started this baby priest I've been forcing myself to play almost exclusively with keybinds. My only exceptions are the attacking skills like smite since I won't be using it much when healing, but every time I pop a heal or a shield on myself I make myself use keys instead so I get some practice in. Hopefully I'll have it down by the time I hit 15

Lastly, remember that sometimes it's just not possible to prevent a wipe or to prevent someone from dying no matter how uber you are. When the squishy rogue gets pummeled to death in short order by running around a corner, out of your line of sight, and into a pile of mobs while only THINKING he was stealthed it's not your fault, even though said rogue might blame you for it. Healing is very rewarding but requires a bit of a thick skin since people will blame the healer when things go wrong.

THIS will probably be the toughest thing for me. When I dps at least I have a habit of immediately blaming myself for messups even if it really wasn't my fault Of course, I can also recognize stupidity when I see it (your aforementioned rogue there) but ugh. Well, I'm still patient, and I'll be starting with Baby's First Instance, so hopefully I'll get used to it.

~VelkynKarma

[Magyck]

I tend to click more than keybind, but since I started this baby priest I've been forcing myself to play almost exclusively with keybinds. My only exceptions are the attacking skills like smite since I won't be using it much when healing, but every time I pop a heal or a shield on myself I make myself use keys instead so I get some practice in. Hopefully I'll have it down by the time I hit 15

That sounds like what I do. Anything I use often has a keybind. I mostly use 1 - 7 and alt + 1 - 5, as I find those the easiest to reach with my left hand while I target with the mouse by clicking on unit frames. Anything I don't need to use in a pinch, I click (e.g. it's not going to be a life or death situation whether I get that prayer of fortitude off half a second faster).

THIS will probably be the toughest thing for me. When I dps at least I have a habit of immediately blaming myself for messups even if it really wasn't my fault Of course, I can also recognize stupidity when I see it (your aforementioned rogue there) but ugh. Well, I'm still patient, and I'll be starting with Baby's First Instance, so hopefully I'll get used to it.

~VelkynKarma

Sometimes it's pure stupidity on their part, in which case it's not too difficult to tell them to pay attention more to their surroundings and they'll die less. Just wait until you get high enough to come across bosses who have fire for them to stand in! Pools of fire/poison/death seem like a magnet for dps.

It's more of a confidence breaker if you can't really pick out the reason that the group is failing. Sometimes there's not enough dps so it's taking too long to kill mobs and you're going out of mana. Sometimes the tank just takes so much spike damage it's impossible to keep him up. When the reason for the wipe or death isn't completely obvious as idiocy on someone else's part, is when you get "where were the heals?" even if you were breaking your heal buttons and dumping mana into them in order to try and keep them up. Those are the times you need the thick skin, and unfortunately there will probably be a lot of them in PUGs.

As an example, I was in violet hold where we got the Xevozz as the first boss. No one knew the fight mechanics. In order to avoid massive AoE and spike damage from that boss, you need to kite him away from the spheres that spawn. The tank did not kite him, we took massive damage, I dumped literally 20k mana into the tank trying to keep him up - and when we died, I got "WTF heals" from the tank and party members, and the tank attempted to votekick me. I honestly didn't know the fight mechanics either, having never done that boss, so I wasn't completely sure that it wasn't my fault that we wiped. It's never fun to be in that position as the healer. Fortunately I tried it again with a tank who did kite it, and it was infinitely easier to heal

Fortunately you shouldn't run into those kind of mechanics for quite some time, until you're much more comfortable in your role. And those kind of groups are bumps in the road, but healing is still something I really enjoy and wouldn't give up no matter how many crabby groups I ran into.

[Sarayana]

If you want to get more into the keybinds, you can do what I did: I created mouseover macros for all my spells (that can be cast on others) - single-target buffs, heals, dispells, all that.

This is the format:
#showtooltip [insert spell here]
/cast [target=mouseover,exists,help,nodead][target=target,nodead,exists,help][target=targettarget,nodead,exists,help][target=player,help] [insert spell here]

Basically, with this you can run with the mouse and pound the insta-heal button to heal yourself on the move (shield+renew as a priest, it's my "ohcrapistoodinthebadstuff" course of action ), you can hover over your actual target (I mean the toon) and heal that way, hover over their nameplate (built-in or addon) and heal that way, or select your target and heal that way.

I like it because it allows me to target the baddies so that I can quickly see how it goes (and dispell buffs or interrupt casts if I'm on my shammy!) and keep my healing focus on the healbot frames.

The first thing I do when I roll a character that can heal, even one I intend to dps only on, is to set up all healing spells like this. It makes keybind healing a helluva lot easier.