Resto druid is my favorite healer, but I also enjoy resto shaman and mistweaver monk.
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My vote is Resto Druid → then Resto Shaman → then Holy Priest
I don’t really care for healing on Paladins or Evokers or Monks.
But honestly, as with just about everything in WoW, to each their own.
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Restos a good choice! I have alot of fun on it
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Evoker and Resto are pretty easy. Resto druid just needs you to slap a few hots and drop an efflo and you’re good to go. I suppose shaman is there too but they havent gotten a lot of love lately.
If you’re looking for a bit of a challenge you got holy, disc and holy paladin. They require a bit of management.
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I have been a healer main for the last 14 years. I highly recommend druid. R druids hot style has a lot of healing output with minimal effort. It’s super easy to learn. What’s also cool with druid is that having forms and multiple types of talents at your disposal now it’ll allow you to do some really cool things outside of healing for harder content. 10/10 recommend. Outside of r druid I’d recommend either holy priest or R sham. Both have fairly simple healing rotations with decent out put. With the remaining healers as far as difficulty in play style goes I’d then recommend them in this order from easiest to more complex. Monk, Holy pally, Disc priest, evoker. Monk heal style is a little different than the others. They are really strong in raid ATM but I haven’t seen too many in keys. Hpal has a unique melee healer style that is a little harder to master. Disc you need a strong knowledge of when damage is about to happen to ramp correctly. This one in my opinion takes one of the longest to master. Evoker is SUPER strong in heals. But it is by far the most situational. There is no real healing rotation. Every situation requires a different approach and it takes a little while to master.
But here is my strongest advice. Play what you find is fun. There are only a handful of healers and essentially they are all viable. If you are enjoying the class you’ll enjoy healing a lot more in general. I have been personally focusing ony my rdruid, evoker, and R sham. I’m a Pve person and I have gotten all 3 of them into higher keys and mythic raiding. I enjoy all 3 of them a ton. I hope you find what healer meshes with your play style and enjoy keeping the citizens of Azeroth alive.
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I appreciate ALL of the comments but this right here is the truth isn’t it.
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Unless something changed recently, you just drop CB on CD. Only time it’s really worth gaming is on fights with predictable damage. Nothing difficult about it.
You will be more than fine with your choice of resto shaman. To make life easier get a addon like vuhdo or healbot and you cane set up all your stuff to cast on clicks via the unit frames.
Learn the fights and when big healing is req and have fun.
Lower keys you may feel like your not very good at healing because people tend to take a lot of avoidable damage don’t use things in their tool kits to mitigate any damage, kicks ect. You will learn when it’s on you vs other players. As you get more comfortable with the healing throw some lighting and meatballs in the mix because quicker mobs die the less you have to stress.
As others have said try leveling via some dung queues so you can get a feel for the healing in something that is very forgiving
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Its gotta be the druid.
Easiest to learn and most forgiving to learn with great utility-soothe, knockbacks, cc things, etc-
I saw a comment saying Evoker i think that its easy cause its powerful but easy as a first time healer no chance imo.
Theres a lot to Evoker healing that ive never dealt with the same way as other healers ive played
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I’ve only tried one healer since returning to the game, but Resto Shaman is real easy and forgiving during levelling. It’s a little difficult when you have a Monk for a tank because of how their stagger works. But I found that jumping back and forth between DPS and healing was quick and easy, and I honestly didn’t even bother targeting specific enemies, just auto-targetting with the TAB key so I could pay attention to rotation and who needed heals.
It’s nice to see that I’m not the only Unholy DK player that struggles with not taking obscene damage in mob fights. Not sure exactly why that’s happening, I thought it was just me being bad, but UH DKs needed more healing than anyone else.
Holy Priest is by far the easiest, it is the last traditional healer, followed by Rdruid in terms of easiness.
Just stay away from hpally and mist monk melee healers are harder to play.
Shammy: it is easy but the heal output is low. For lower keys it is harder as people will take tons of damage.
Disc: not easy as you will need to know the mechanics as well as the class because you will have to mitigate damage and know when to use what.
Evoker: I don’t find it as easy as people say.
Well first piece of advice if you’re trying to learn to heal is to level a new character as a healer. Just jumping into healing can be a bit daunting.
As for what class to play your best bet is holy priest. You can try through it or shaman but those take a little bit more getting used to.
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It’s important to note that “easy” in terms of healers can mean different things. Shamans are by far and away the easiest healers to pick up and do well with, with resto Druids being just behind them to start.
If you’re better at doing DPS while healing, then Paladin/Monk start to shine.
If you’re very adamant on your DPS rotations, Disc priest starts to shine.
Your relative skill when starting is often going to find the range of healing specs easier or harder based on the above items to start.
But as you get more comfortable doing damage or managing resources, you start to approach using overall kits more. Resto druid and Evoker, in the hands of a great player, will really forgive misplays more at lower levels of the group.
If you cant play a healer except in it’s lane, then that makes Resto druid/priest/Evoker stronger for you, as the current tier is a proactive tier.
If you can think proactively and adjust the reactive healers to be proactive, you’ll have an easier time on them than most players
If you’re entirely new to MMO healing altogether, start on a Holy Priest. They aren’t as forgiving as other healers in higher content, but they are so mind numbingly simple to play well enough to start that you can basically just play whackamole for most content.
That said, if you think you may heal long-term, you are going to get better return on just picking a healer spec and just sticking with it until mastery.
A player who is on a disc priest, one of the lesser represented healers currently, but plays that Disc priest proficiently and utilized their kit fully will still outperform basically any player picking a healer they think is good based on spec alone
Healing is about being a support player and adapting to situations on the fly. Druids are STRONG in this lane IF you can DPS and heal AND use their utility, comfortably…but the less you can do these things, the less you get out of the spec.
Pick what sounds interesting or fun, master that first, THEN visit another spec once you have a better frame of reference
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here’s another vote for holy priest. high powered spells, some situational, over all good and easy to “get”. its not my personal favorite but it is effective.
r-druid is also easy to pick up but sometimes i wish we had more spells or more interesting cooldowns. nice thing about druid is mobility and the option to go dps or tank if you decide healing sucks.
Druid, because it has so much more going for it that you’ll find a use for it even if you decide healing isn’t your thing.
- It’s probably the best battleground healer, with great survivability.
- Unrivaled as a gatherer of herbs and minerals.
- Has DPS and tanking specs that are always viable in groups, or solo.
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I’m having a blast healing, Resto Sham mazing Resto Druid and disc priest absolutely love them.
I started off at level 10 on all of them and I picked Cataclysm time because I know what to expect in each dungeon (Classic)
Its been interesting to say the least to watch the different tanking styles, some are group minded while others treat each instance like its a M+18 timed.
The healers ive been really happiest with are those that have some form of speed boost like Ghostwolf or Dash, at least I can stay in range of those crazy tanks lol
Im gonna try Tanking next and see which one I like best, its been a fun experiment
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Holy priest is the most complicated of all. You need to understand like 5 layer interactions to do anything even remotely close to a usable HPS. The simplest healing spec is holy paladin. Being near melee does no increase complexity, every healer need to be where hpal has to stand or they are wasting their mana and making their tank’s life hell. Hpal makes it simple by forcing it. Hpal has no complex interactions or combos, just a priority list and a very limited number of spells.
Holy is especially hard this patch because they can’t heal with a prevoker unless they have an extremely specific build. Prevoker cancels out the most standard holy builds to the point where they are just a holy fire spamming DPS. Mending does literally nothing if there is someone casting echo. If I am healing with a prevoker I do a hard almost 0% grey parse because my spells do nothing at all, it’s like I didn’t cast them. With prevoker and mending build I’ll be doing like 5k HPS, without prevoker same build 60k HPS. They just cancel hpriest’s strongest build. Have to switch to a pure ripple build to get in a weak 25k HPS to play with a prevoker xD
My hot take is pres is actually super intuitive and feels good with its insane HPS. Also very few major cds to manage
The hardest part i found was being within living flame/disintegrate range of the enemy. Otherwise super satisfying to see huge heal numbers and huge damage numbers
Caster mw is also insanely easy and laid back but folks will get upset if you don’t fistweave
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H priest by a long long long mile.
See bars move you react.
You have CDs for almost anything and you are always pressing something.
(2k+ io on 4 healers rest at 1.5k+ exp here for reference)
rdruid is quite easy to pick up (i started playing it from scratch in january) but to play it really well you need to know when damage spikes are coming so the group has hots going into it. also playing your cds well, but thats not unique to druid.
hpriest is super straightforward