Hello. Still a really new player, I was just wondering which class/spec would be easiest to learn how to heal with reliably. I had a priest, but didn’t even know the basics and went blindly into the dungeon finder as a healer and got wiped and panicked and left lol.
Restoration Druid.
You won’t be disappointed I promise you!
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Resto Druid is the strongest, but Holy Priest might be a little simpler (although it’s weaker for proper M+ content).
Setting up mouseover macros or using an addon to click-heal makes things a bit easier. Also, having party unitframes somewhere near the middle of your screen.
Druid is an absolute joke to play it’s very easy
I cant say what the easiest healing spec is but let me tell you about resto druid. Resto druid isnt a reactive healer. You have to know the damage is coming, set up your hots, and then burst when the damage hits. To me, it makes resto druid a more difficult spec to play.im sure the other specs are more reactive. Holy paladin seems pretty ez to me. Though all I’ve healed were random bgs and time walking dungeons this week lol.
I don’t think resto Druid is a good place to start healing. You need a lot of understanding about mechanics and form shifting can actually add more complexity when you are trying to learn. Although if you can learn resto and get proficient at it, it’s a lot of fun and very effective.
I would recommend starting with a holy priest and go from there.
Good luck!
It’s fine.
What? No no no…you stand there and mash healing buttons dude, that’s really about it.
Hots up and throw down Tranquility when the smelly stuff hits the fan, it’s really that easy.
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MW Monk is very easy but infuriating as by the time you have your Essence Font rolling a Holy Pally or Disc has already topped the raid.
Blood DK. . . who cares about everybody else, it is their own problem to deal with.
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Mmmmm, I dunno about this.
Holy is a LITTLE more complicated than Resto.
Personally I found it more difficult than Resto Druid AND Resto Shaman.
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Tl;dr because I ramble :
Mistweaver Monk, Holy Priest, or (if you can stand not having too strong of AoE heals, and mainly being a tank healer) Holy Paladin. Do NOT start with Resto Druid unless you feel comfortable with your current level of knowledge in the game, and that you can predict “bursts” of damage well/are willing to work through mistakes as you learn how much damage the group you’re currently with may take in a fight.
The long boi :
It would really depend on where you want to start learning. I have one of each healer except shaman (so I can’t speak about that experience), but it depends on your game sense. I would say there are two types of healers : proactive and reactive. Reactive healers tend to have more of a “O god” button where you can heal damage reliably when it spikes, and proactive healers tend to be a “get all my heals over time/bubbles on people and pray it’s enough and that they don’t stand in fire”. Proactive healing would need a bit more game sense/game knowledge, so it may be out of your comfort zone for now.
In my experience, the most reactive healers are Holy Priests and Mistweaver Monks. Argueably, Holy Paladin is fairly reactive if I were to categorize it, but outside of their major cooldowns/burst window it may be hard for a new player to keep up heals when things get spiky.
Proactive healers (set up heals over time) would be Resto Druid, Discipline Priest, and (if I had to guess, but again I’ve never played them before) Resto Shaman.
Resto Druid:
A lot of people will say do Restoration Druid because it’s easy to keep up heals over time, but I would personally not recommend this spec at ALL to a new player wanting to learn heals. Resto Druids have very little in terms of burst healing/single target healing because of their playstyle of “tag and heal”. Outside of Tree of Life, Tranquility, and Flourish, all very powerful long-ish cooldowns, they don’t have much of the burst healing that’s required for a lot of content I’ve seen. You have like, one solid single target heal, and then that’s it. You gotta let your HoT’s do the work. Resto Druids are very powerful and fun to play, when used right, but perhaps it may be too stressful for a new healer to pick up.
A lot of people, in my opinion, don’t know how to play with a resto druid either, thus making a resto druid healer’s job harder. Aka : when a player is still learning mechanics (or a veteran who doesn’t know how strong a druid’s HoT is) they may take a lot of burst damage that a new resto druid may find hard to heal. Say, if a person is used to the single target healing of a holy priest or mistweaver monk, they may be expecting you, as a resto druid, to magically do the same thing despite it not being in your tool kit. Once your blow your major cooldowns, your single target healing abilities are very weak.
Resto druids will shine in long fights with a lot of constant damage output, since their HoTs will often be enough to keep people up. But for burst damage, which it seems is the favored way blizzard is designing a lot of encounters these days, they may find it a bit harder to keep everyone healed.
For a beginning healer I would recommend Mistweaver Monk or Holy Priest (but it doesn’t sound like you liked this much?) as a starting spec. This is because both are pretty reactive, give immediate visual feedback on single-target healing, and are relatively easy to keep people topped off. (Although, once you are comfortable with it, you should be trying to learn how to conserve mana by keeping everyone alive, and not necessarily topped off. If everyone gets out of a fight at like 35% hp, but is alive, you can top people off after or let a heal over time heal them up instead of constantly overhealing with a powerful single target heal. HP bar % doesn’t matter if you are expecting x amount of damage, or there are no enemies to fight between point A and point B. Just keep everyone alive. 
)
Holy Priest:
A lot of their single target heals are strong and on relatively short cooldowns. They can be used to heal tanks efficiently and, once you have your AoEs spells at higher levels, they are fairly well-rounded group healers. The average wow player is probably used to playing with priests, so they may know a bit more of your tool kit and how much a single holy priest heal can do. You have Leap of Faith too, which is good in case someone is doing something utterly dumb. Are they in the fire and if they just took a TINY bit less damage you can ensure they stay alive long enough for your big heal to hit them? Yank that fella. They might get mad, but hey, they alive. A big con is that they don’t have many spells they can use to heal while on the move. You’re going to be standing around waiting for cast times and screaming a lot of the time.
Mistweaver Monk:
I was very surprised when I started mistweaver healing. Mana management may be a bit harder/scarier to pick up than if you played a holy priest, but DAMN are they bursty. Their single target healing is really strong (I was surprised!), as well as their group healing. They have pretty strong cooldowns, but outside of those cooldowns you will likely find that their basic rotation gives good visual feedback/numbers on health bars. They can heal on the move, have a lot of mobility, and bring good utility by placing a debuff on enemies with some of their damage spells that makes them take slightly more physical damage. With melee classes being very popular, I (assume, but I don’t play DPS lmao) think this means that they’ll do more damage. They like damage. Mistweavers are so mobile, you may find other specs slow or hard to keep up with a tank that’s going ham after you’ve played a bit of Mistweaver.
If you didn’t like holy priest, I would recommend trying out mistweaver monk. If you don’t like that, then I would say tentatively dip your feet into Resto Druid (maybe Holy Paladin) and don’t feel bad if you mess up a few times.
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If you go mistweaver, definitely get mouseover macros (probably applies to all healers). Renewing Mist is your friend always keep them up
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Resto Druid
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Druid was easiest for me. Paladin was hardest. Healing is something you gotta try the classes to see what you like because you might shine to something more than whatever others think is easiest. When your having fun as heals, you are doing it right 
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Absolutely true.
Mouseovers for my Resto spec were a life saver. Literally!
This is simply NOT true at all. Holy cow people, why make things so complicated for a new player?
You do not need to predict damage with a resto druid, hots are up already dude, when the group takes a big hit then mash Tranquility, that’s not very hard to do. If it’s on CD then you’ll be learning to heal with your single target spells also.
I hate this kind of misinformation that simply scares off potential players.
You make some great points, but you buried it all in masses of overbearing blocks of text.
I think you just need to be mindful of the mastery while healing. Some people see their tank take a lot of damage and just spam Regrowth, when you really need to have Rejuv, Lifebloom, and ideally Efflo (Spring Blossoms) on the tank before going to Regrowth. Same goes with Wild Growth; it’s fine on its own, but if you pre-hot Rejuvs and then WG for heavy damage phases, you’ll get more healing done since WG does a lot of its healing early on and you benefit a lot from the mastery bonus for that.
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I don’t know about easiest, but i wonder if shaman is harest; most of the PUGs I run (which is tons) most of the time wipes are caused by Shaman healers. The others seem to be just fine. I’d chalk it up to just bad luck, but I’ve been tracking it, and in my experience, Shaman healers are absolute worst, so i’m just guessing it’s the bad class mechanics.
Both Priest and Druid are good choices:
Priest -
Holy is probably the most basic and easiest healer to pick-up and play, the kit is very straight forward and completely reactive. Once you have more experience you can start dabbling into Disc which is much harder.
Druid -
The reason there’s a lot of controversy for Resto Druid is because it’s very easy to play at a base level and do well enough (low skill floor), a new player who is just learning and want to focus only on keeping the group topped off will not have too much trouble with this.
However there’s a lot of room to improve and get better (high skill ceiling)… The spec is at it’s best when played proactively but that’s mostly done at higher difficulties, for more casual content Resto Druids usually just keep hots on the tank and play reactive with the rest, and that’s good enough for non super hardcore content, then there’s cat weaving for extra DPS which is an extra layer of skill.
HPal in its current form is just spamming holy shocks. Pretty easy.
Restro druid is a nice place to start.