Beginner's guide to healing add-ons - part 1

Keeping it in the green
As a healer healthbars are just the beginning. You need to be able see who has a debuff you can dispel. You need to know when someone has a debuff that does silly damage and requires spam healing to get through. When working as part of a healing team you need to be aware of who has incoming heals and who is HoTted up. Out of combat you need to see who has lost their buff. That's a lot to keep track of on top of retaining situational awareness and staying out of trouble.

Add-ons != cheating
There are people out there that will argue that using add-ons for healing is tantamount to cheating. I wasn't healing, or even raiding, back pre-TBC, but I have been told that there were add-ons then that pretty much healed for you. You mashed your button and the add-on would pick which target most needed healing and which level of the spell to cast. Yes, that is ridiculous, but even if you wanted to, you couldn't do that now. Blizzard changed things so that kind of automation is no longer possible. Healing add-ons today are purely informational. They take the information that is there already and display it in a way that makes it easier for you to see the things you need to be aware of.

What the future holds
If you heal just fine using just the standard UI and naught else - good for you. Personally, I've used various add-ons before getting to the set-up I use today. I'm quietly pleased with my current UI (though I am constantly ogling UI threads for new ideas), but I also retain a fondness for some add-ons out there that I don't use anymore. So I have decided to do a series over the next few weeks, looking in detail at some add-ons that can be useful for healers. My aim is that it should be easy to follow even if you are new to healing or add-ons (or both). I will look at various add-ons that I currently use, have used or decided weren't quite right for me but that I know are popular - hopefully you might find some add-ons that are right for you.

A post on Grid will be coming this way in the next couple of days.

I'm so excited...

Awesome news, my friends - PlusHeal.com is here!

It is a forum for all healers, read more about it at World of Matticus and ChickGM.

Why, you might ask, am I so excited about a generic healing forum? Wouldn't I rather have something like HolyPriest.com? The answer is a resounding no! I owe all that I know about healing as a holy priest to the fabulous priest bloggers out there (thank you guys, you are amazing), I don't need a forum for that. It is easy to learn to be a good healer as a priest/druid/shaman/paladin through all the fabulous blogs out there, but what happens when you graduate from 5-mans to raids? Even if it is just 2-healering Kara you are no longer healer HolyPaladin and healer RestoShaman - you are the healing TEAM. You can smooth out each other's weaknesses, build on each other's strengths and together be a team that is greater than the sum of its parts. It can be a thing of beauty.

And this is the awesomeness of PlusHeal.com. Not only can you find people to explain and debate specific class issues, but also people to debate the best way for a druid and a priest to heal together.

This is healers not divided by class, but joined by role - the concept of the healing team extending beyond servers, realms and continents to create a community of people passionate about the role that they enjoy.

Big thanks to the founders of PlusHeal.com - Matt, Auzara, Wynthea, Lume, Anna, Pat and Siha - for creating a place for healers to discuss their craft.

Haelz FTW!

Healing as a team

I've had another revelation. The fun - and success - that can be had from healing as a team rather than as individuals.

Going from healing 5-mans to 10-man did require some co-ordination but not a huge amount and not at a very detailed level. We were allocated a tank each and played whack-a-mole with the rest of the raid. Apart from agreeing to try to always keep HoTs on both tanks we pretty much left each other to it. Of course, if you see that the other healer's tank is in trouble and you have the spare capacity - you help out, that goes without saying, I hope.

For certain fights, like Curator, we changed the healing assigments slightly (one healer for tank and bolt-soaker, one healer for all others), but again each healer did their own thing to fulfill their healing assignment. I'm not saying that one should have to tell each healer exactly what spells to use and micro-manage them, but what I did find was how much it can increase your success by discussing the tactics with the other healer and agreeing on how to pool your resources in the best way.

I was healing together with my husband's new alt, a holy priest, and as we sit next to each other we can easily chat about the healing side of things without having to go via in-game voice-chat. We both use Grid with the ability to see incoming heals and tracking each other's HoTs, and that in combination with direct communication just made it so much easier. It was also more enjoyable when you felt more as part of a little sub-team rather than two players with the same role in the larger team.

I doubt it made a huge difference to the outcome of most of the fights, but when we came across Prince it made ALL the difference. It was our first try ever on Prince and since it had been a spontaneous on-the-fly decision to give it a go, most of us didn't know the fight at all - though luckily some people had done it with other chars in other guilds. We managed two credible attempts, but on the first one both healers ran out of mana far too soon and on the second we had an unfortunate encounter with an infernal.

For the third attempt me and my co-healer discussed how we had healed previously and agreed on a specific rotation of flash and greater heals to help our combined mana pool to last longer. There was also a couple of shout-outs to each other in the fight "I've got this for a bit, you stand idle for a short while and regen". And we managed to stay the course, keeping the tank AND the rest of the raid up throughout the encounter. That was such a buzzy feeling - we got the job done and we did it as a team!

I am convinced that this tactical chat before the 3rd encounter made a big difference as we then went in focussing not just on our own mana pools, but how to best keep our joint pool up enough to last the encounter. It almost made me want to do 25-mans, just for the buzz of being part of a proper-sized heal team. :-)

The epiphany

Tufva was started as I had gotten bored with my original main and I had the bright idea that it would be good for the guild to have another healer (at the time we had 1 or 2). At the time I was terrified of instances, so I'm still not sure how I thought that was a good idea. I must have over-dosed on chocolate or something.

I healed groups a couple of times while levelling, but it was hard work, so if anything it had made my instance phobia even worse. Just the thought of it made my palms sweat!

One day I was chatting with a guildie who was also levelling a healy priest alt. He'd instanced a lot as he was levelling his priest and he introduced me to my first piece of the puzzle of that is healing: healing tactics. The tactic he explained to me was that as a healer you sometimes have to let someone die in order to keep someone else alive. Usually in 5-mans this translates into keeping the tank up at the expense of a DPS (who really shouldn't be taking much damage anyway).

Wow - what an epiphany! This one piece of advice changed the way I healed completely - and the results were great. Not only was my healing much better for it but the feeling of actually having a (albeit small one) clue about what I was doing did wonders for my confidence and made me actually start enjoying the whole instance experience. That little nugget of wisdom was the start of the journey that has taken me from instance-phobic palm-sweating 'oh-shit-what-am-I-doing' to thoroughly enjoying healing my guild's romps through Kara. Knowledge is power - and makes instances great fun!