You shouldn’t have to do this by staring or hyperfocusing in UnitFrames but rather by watching the fight and actively paying attention to the combat cues around you.
I suspect this would take a combination of smart heals, like Power Word: Radiance, and UI element adjustments but I am sure it can be done within the capabilities of the game engine.
You’re a healer.
Players died, it happens.
The responsibility lies somewhere between you and them.
You DO have to pay attention to the combat cues around you…
This is an original, tab-target style MMO. If you want some kind of weird action healing system, there are plenty of options out there. ESO, BDO, New World, etc.
I remember when they tried to make healing “Interesting” back in Cata. It went over like a lead balloon.
First thing i would do is make the healing spec also a dps spec.
Not in the sense of doing damage in the dungeon. But in the sense of having fun out in the world.
If you could quest while playing as a healing spec, you would be able to get used to your abilities naturally. But realistically you have to learn through reseach and on the job.
Questing on a healing spec is awful.
And often the healing class wont have more than 1 dps spec.
I enjoyed healing on my priest.
But not enough to quest as shadow.
So my priest is gone and im now a class thats lots of fun, but sadly cannot heal.
Thats my opinion at least.
Make it so you dont have to be a dedicated healer when you chose a healer class.
I dont believe healing is driving us into hyper-focusing on frames, more so that still-learning healers are probably a bit more aware of their bars.
Most of my attention is on the screen right above my healing frames, which is where my character is, the boss room/platform that I need to know whats going on and where to stand/run/jump/launch off, and always looking up at Raz to see where that damn breath is coming from…
I have played New World, SWTOR, Destiny, OW, etc. There are different healing strategies even within your selections, so its not just one style of healing that works for a game. You have to choose the game based on what style of healing appeals to you. WoW healing is fine (as a whole for this context, not tuning lol).
I don’t like the idea posted. I also don’t understand well how they have their struggles or why DPS are more immersed.
I like healing as is.
Yeah for sure, but I mean for a new player. I remember I was pretty much standing still and casting heals glued to the UI frames the first time I tried healing.
Not that I’m a big fan of modern dance healing either though.
As a main raid healer on Priest, Shaman and Evoker - you are not having fun healing?
Ok, tanks are completely and utterly broken for Normal’s in a ludicrous way making the experience horrible for healers. The self-healing ability is just so dumb, but who cares. Right? The poor dps dying shrugs release why don’t you and run back,
Forcing healers to DPS? Nah. DPS “get good.” Sure, a better healer can DPS, but if that is going to make a break a mythic, still the DPS fault.
If you are not having fun, perhaps healing just is not for you. I prefer it. Tanks are broken, not healers. Fix those and healing will be more gratifying.
I strongly disagree with taking healers away from the UI and I know that a lot of other healers will feel the same way. Having the precision of being able to analyze your entire raid at a glance and micromanage who gets healed is what makes WoW have some of the best healing from any other game. Other games have you doing nothing but aoe heals and there is NO precision to it at all. I don’t find that fun at all.
To have a more complete vision of how healing could be changed in WoW for the better, you must look at several different areas and address them one by one:
In short, we don’t, currently. The expectation is to swap to a dps or tank spec or put up with sub-par dps, which is terribly slow. I have seen lectures given by the original creators of WoW where they mentioned that having players adhere to their class identity was one of the most important goals they had. Having each class be unique and to avoid homogenizing everyone into a world where everyone can do everything is also a goal of theirs. But, when it comes to healers adhering to being healers while questing, we have been put on the back-burner for… 18 years now?
Healers that want to dps will always have the option to. All I’m saying is that healers should have the OPTION to heal to quest. In some form or another, which is for the developers to decide, we get an npc that fights for us, or maybe even a group of them, and we keep them alive.
One of the biggest issues with this is that there is simply nothing to heal. The developers have almost certainly done this as a way to ensure that there is a stupidly easy mode of the dungeons that everyone is able to enjoy, whether you are just a bad player, have a disability, or just want a smooth run where no one dies because that’s what you like. I respect that. On the other hand, I think the lack of damage in normal and heroic modes is severely undertuned in certain dungeons. Sometimes there is just absolutely NO damage going out. We are all familiar with “just dps then” being the counter-argument to this, but turning the knob up on the damage at least a little wouldn’t hurt either. This is also complicated by the fact that you sometimes have grossly over-geared people sometimes doing heroics or normals whose gear simply won’t allow them to take any sizeable amount of damage. There isn’t much that can stop this outside of percentage based attacks or down-grading their ilvls. Again - this is something that the developers would have to come up with an answer for.
I think this is mostly fine. I would like to see some interesting things like having the raid get blasted for 90% of their health as soon as you aggro a boss, but having the only way they could possibly die is if they stand in fire, so even though that looks extreme at first glance, it really is non-threatening but just jarring, and at the same time have it be impractical to heal that up with a CD because you would have to save it for a later point in the fight, so that leaves healers to resort to just using regular spells to heal people up. Something strategic and interesting like that would change things up some I think.
This is for the PvPers to answer, not me.
Better tuning for all healer classes. Currently the developers seem to just flat out not care about certain ones. Better tuning on the damage that is dished out (the ring around Ruby Life Pools is still just ridiculous). And, I have made multiple posts about changing the incoming damage profile, for the sake of healers, in other topics. If the developers have been listening and reading the forums, they will surely have read it by now, so I’m not going to exasperate myself typing all of that out again.
Another thing that I think is slightly lacking is incoming damage that is telegraphed. It is satisfying to see a dot on someone and throw a Rejuvination on them or a debuff that does delayed spike damage, to be able to throw a shield on that person and know that your shield was very effective at preventing the damage. I simply wish that there was a bit more of it. It doesn’t have to be everything. Just a bit more.
This only benifits possitional healing.
Otherwise you dont care how the damage hits your allies. Only that it does and when it happens.
We already pay attention to enemies to know when something is gonna happen or if extra damage is going to come from a directional attack.
And smart healing does not lend to action style combat. Opposite really.
Because it’s a terrible idea. The best part of WoW is its ability to be a completely customizable experience for whatever flavor a player wants.
Healing is fun. The patients suck.
they make healing fun by adding different flavors of it across different classes…otherwise, be prepared for a role that can get stressful at times 
I wouldn’t say its the best part. I used to love that wow had addon support, but when playing other MMOs (just swtor and ff14) I tend to appreciate the simplicity. you know its gotta make the devs jobs much easier in closed games
I am a healer. I have been main healing on this very toon since Cata. Since that time, I also level all healers and specs to max level, and play some form of end game on them.
I heal. A lot. And have done so on many, many alts on over six accounts at various times.
When I say I heal a lot, I mean that in ways that most folks can’t understand.
That being said - I like healing for the sake of healing. All of this nonsense with dps added in and such - NO, that is not what healing is about.
Healers are there to asses the group comp from the beginning, making note of things like, “This tank knows how to use their cd’s”, “This warlock is poorly geared, doesn’t seem to know it and likes to stand in bad” or “The dps DH is pulling ahead of the tank, so he’s on the triage no heals list for now until he learn to play properly.”
That is all in addition to knowing when to patch things up with a slower heal, when to go into crunch time and spam fast heals, when to mitigate with a bubble or aura mastery, when to go full Monty OH SHIZ mode and bust out the wings - or when to just be watching and throwing some hammers down.
The “healers” who were really just dps tryna get quick queues, have a reality check to come to grips with. Healing is not tossing up a renew and then dps’ing. Healing is much, much more than that.
The veteran healers know this.
(ETA - There are prolly some grammar errors n such here. I got stitches in my finger today and things aren’t working quite right yet lol. Meh.)
I find healing fun, only thing i’d change is the amount of instant point and click cc or give them longer cds, and dampening as a concept feels bad
Idm fear/poly and melee ranged things like hoj and traps that require landing and ring of frost that has placement involved and incap totem etc
But blanket silence/spriest stun/stormbolt/dh incap are just so annoying to me
Also dampening sucks, part of why i like unrated so much more. 120k flash of light feel amazing in battlegrounds and then they do nothing in damp arena with mortal wounds 
Idm if people disagree with my take, that’s just how i feel towards healing annoyances
Maybe you should see a…healer
Oh, I did. We talked shop, actually lol.
I have zero issues with the UI, what I have issue with is how much of the dungeon has been taken out of my control. There debuffs I can’t dispel not because they are a poison/curse because I have a stupid CD on an ability that should be spammable that exists for no reason beyond bad pvp design.
Mana management used to be something I actively did constantly through-out an encounter, as well as customize my gear choices around to find the balance between mana and healing output. Now its just a CD or 2 I, or another class, use when available and mostly forget about because there really isn’t anything else I can do to manage it, and gear choices are basically all based around output, both healing and DPS with zero consideration towards mana regen.
It is clear healers in this game haven’t been designed by people who actually play healers and instead by DPS who try to make the healing game resemble DPS-lite as much as they can and completely miss the point.