I want to try my hand at being a healer, but it’s not something I’ve ever done before. Is there a specific spec or overall class that would be easiest for a beginner to master? Or is there one I should definitely stay away from as a beginner?
Any advice is welcome!
Resto Druid. The strongest healing spec. There’s nothing they can’t do. And it’s pretty straight forward.
since you’re already a Shaman i’d just go Resto with that character and see if you even like healing.
If not, Priest is the definitive Healer class so you could level one of those.
Resto for leveling is fairly strait forward and pretty strong. Druid while it is awesome endgame starting out can be very weak to deal with an oh crap moment. Also learn to write your own mouse over macros. That way you’re not dependent on an addon breaking on patch days, etc.
Here’s a base example of what I use:
#showtooltip Spell Name
/use [@mouseover,help][] Spell Name
Replace “Spell Name” with the name of the spell as it is spelled in game case sensitive, spaces, and punctuation.
Holy Priest is very straight forward and basic and can put out some good healing. You cant get anymore basic than Holy Priest.
My two recommendations are Priest and Druid:
Priest - Holy is probably the easiest healer to play and great to get started and learn the basics of healing, Disc is way harder but usually stronger at challenging content. You can start with Holy and slowly learn Disc too.
Druid - It has a low skill floor and high skill ceiling imo, meaning that just healing as resto druid at a base level and doing “fine” is pretty easy, but there’s a lot of room to grow and improve like adding DPS trough cat weaving or playing more proactively in general.
Two thoughts here:
Holy Priest has a very complete kit. It can handle group healing well, it can handle single target healing well, and it tends to have solid throughput. It’s one of the more basic healer playstyles, but it’s a real solid healer. You also have Disc, which has been the stronger spec in raids and M+ in patch 8.3; Disc plays a very unique playstyle however.
Resto Druid is the strongest 5 man dungeon healer, and is a reasonable raid healer, so if it’s a good choice based on power alone. It has a HoT based playstyle which can take some getting used to for players who expect to immediately heal up damaged allies. It will continue to be the strongest 5 man healer in the next expansion. It also (imo) has better non-healing specs than Priest does.
So I’m seeing a lot of holy priest and resto druid. I’ll probably go with one of those! It’ll probably take a lot of practice and hard work, but I hope I’ll make a good healer someday!!
Thanks for all the input everyone!! And if anyone else has any more advice or opinions, I’ll gladly take them!!
Resto druid
You don’t even need to target anyone most of the time
Resto druids require a lot of dots though… Priests are a bit easier …
They’re all pretty easy OP. Disp takes a different approach in the healing ideology, but it’s not really difficult either.
Like all specs, you just got to get in the groove of your rotation 
Im not sure if its still a thing, cause i stopped healing a while back, but addons like Healbot and other similar things can help new healers a fair amount, if you can figure out how to use it heh.
Resto shaman with macros…
RESTORATION SHAMAN MACROS
#showtooltip
/use [@mouseover,nodead,help] CHAIN HEAL; CHAIN LIGHTNING
#showtooltip
/use [@mouseover,nodead,help] HEALING SURGE; LAVA BURST
#showtooltip
/use [@mouseover,nodead,help] HEALING WAVE; LIGHTNING BOLT
#showtooltip
/use [@mouseover,nodead,help] RIPTIDE; FLAME SHOCK
My first toon was a resto druid, it’s simple and love the dot heals. My second healer a holy priest is fun too. Try both to see which play style you like and enjoy.
I would actually say play Resto Shaman. It’s an easy to play healer, and can introduce you to healing as a whole. And if you don’t like it, just go back to your dps spec, having lost no time leveling.
I found Holy Priests to be the easiest healer in most situations. It has a little bit of everything, where other healers seem to specialize a bit more in different aspects.
It’s not the most mobile (like Druid and Monk), but you do have big strong heals, short quick heals, aoe and interesting things like becoming a Spirit Healer after death, allowing you to still throw out heals for a short time.
One of the things that makes it a little tough is just getting a max level Priest. I personally found the class as a while, including shadow and discipline, hard to solo with in the outside world. That may just be me, though, and you could end up having a great experience!
Holy Priest was the one I learned healing on. It was overall very straightforward and felt like it had a tool for every situation. From Holy, I branched off into trying all the healers. I’d say Holy Paladin is the most similar to priest. But Druid and Monk ended up becoming my ultimate favorites.
For addons, I always used VuhDo. They aren’t necessary but can make your experience better if you want to try. Hope you have fun and enjoy healing.
EDIT: Just wanted to add, Resto Druid to me is a very “easy” healer, but I struggled with it when I was first learning the basic healer role. The proactive nature of DoTs was hard for me to keep up with at first. I found healing much easier to soak in and learn with a reactive class…That said, there were certain situations I felt more vulnerable in with other reactive healers (shaman, Paladin)…Hence Holy Priest!
Trust me play resto druid, it’s also got the added befit of looking to be the best healer going into Shadowlands as well with some of the legendary effects etc…
I’m terrible at healers but recently leveled a mistweaver and found it pretty easy.
If you want to do m+ play a restro, they’re fairly straightforward imo
Also I don’t get why people are saying holy is so great?
We’re the worst st healers and worst in m+, and have a huge lack of utility/ dps
But yes we can heal, that’s about it though
I have these my Q,E,R keys for when I don’t want to click on vuhdo, but I prefer using vuhdo. But man, are they convenient!
My resto druid is all mouse over macros tho, I find it easier on druids
Also op I find shaman with their utility really fun to play!