Hey guys so I was thinking of picking up healing for the first time and was wondering what healer would be good to learn that isn’t difficult and doesn’t have much button bloat?
for first time learning i would go holy paladin
or a priest
Because of its terrible AoE, I would not recommend Holy Paladin for a first time player.
Holy Priest is excellent. It has a lot of buttons, but you can ignore most of them and still be quite competent until you get into the later part of the game.
Holy Pally is melee healing.
Holy Priest is quite a lot of buttons. I don’t recommend as first time healer.
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Resto shaman.
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Easiest to hardest
- Disc Priest
- Resto shaman
- Holy Priest
- Druid
- Monk
- Evoker
- Paladin
Since the rework, disc priest is by far the easiest healer to play. The downside is, you have high peaks and low troughs. But for learning, its 3 button rotation is fabulous. Probably best bet if you want emptier bars.
Resto Shaman and Holy priest are the most straightforward. See damage => do healing. Both have a fairly large amount of buttons though.
Druid is the start of what I call the “setup” healers. You have to know when the damage is coming and start your combo early. Druid is the lowest difficulty here because while you’re learning, there’s no penalty to just keeping your hots going all the time. No major CDs means you can relax and learn the fights.
Monk and Evoker both have simple, powerful combos. You place your pieces, then cash them in when the damage hits. Voila.
Then there paladins. Lots of trickle healing, from melee range. You have mana and holy combo points. You have setups galore for healing and you have to really lean into your full spell book to make the most of it. The hpal combos just don’t slap as hard.
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Resto shamans got a good reactive kit and If youre planning to pug having an answer to everything is preferable and shaman has utility in droves.
Best healer interrupt, decent dispell, aoe stun, good cooldowns, slows, knock backs.
They can have some mana problems but theyre workable with gear or hero talent selection.
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Resto Druid is my vote.
And no, that’s not because I’m a druid.
That’s because I’ve played every healer class since Cata, and Resto druid imo is the easiest to pick up.
Shaman or Evoker
Shaman, especially if you’re pugging. Best kick in the game, strong CD’s, probably the best “oh crap” healing button in the game in spirit link, and you bring lust so it will help getting into groups.
You could also go the route of priest so you have access to 2 different healing specs to choose from, but you won’t have a kick. I guess the up side is that you aren’t at all culpable when things don’t get kicked, but that also means you will be staring at casts that you know should be interrupted while not being able to do anything about it.
Sorry healers have buttons out the wazoo rn
If you want few buttons you should play ret paladin, it’s also fun and good
I like rsham but its got huge button bloat
Probably holy priest?
Its not really a dmg healer and doesnt have the bloat of rdruid
Im doing mw rn and its not much bloat but just heals by doing dmg which apparently is a insurmountable difficulty to ppl playing heals
Most of resto shaman’s extra buttons are utility…that you can get away with not pressing as a newbie. Their basic healing kit is very straightforward, kinda like holy priest. Both are good picks for someone just starting the role.
2 popular choices but…
Holy Priest has no interrupt.
Resto Shaman has more buttons than a coat factory.
But ultimately one of those is what you are looking for.
What content are you healing? Disc for dungeons is fun, disc for raid is misery. Pres for dungeons is misery, pres for raid is fun enough. Other healers aren’t drastically different between the two forms of content, and I’d leave it to preference there.
As a precaution, I’ve found Preservation Evoker hard. It has a lot of buttons, some of them build on each other but lots of them don’t. You’re a bit dependent on RNG a couple things (essence-based heals at no essence cost). I’m still trying to figure out the right buttons to push in busy situations.
Years ago, I found Druid easy, because it was a matter of being diligent – keeping your HoTs rolling and saving your few big direct heals for when they’re needed. But, then again, a few years ago (Shadowlands), I found Disc really hard to get big enough numbers and I see lots of comments here saying Disc is easy now. Things change a lot.
ETA: Pres has a couple directional AoE heals and absorbs (cone and line, respectively) and so you’re dependent for group heals on people not being off in crazy directions. Fat chance of that, lol. Pres also has pretty short ranges, which exacerbates the directional issues.
Also, question for people who actually know what they’re doing: Reversion seems like it ought to be really important, but I find it very underwhelming. Are there any tricks? It seems dependent on tight timing. If you’re too late to the button, it’s pretty much insignificant.