I’d suggest you find a good raid/party frames addon with buffs/debuffs to track your hots/shields, it also shows you debuffs on party/raid members. But it isn’t mandatory. I heard somewhere that the creator of Vuhdo addon is going to port it to Classic.
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Great input here! Thanks to all!
Sounds like I’m going to give Priest a try. See you in Classic! I hope to keep some of you alive.
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I wouldn’t describe it as difficult, per se. If your group plays well, it’s probably the easiest role. Healing is really unique in that the better your group is, the easier your job is.
I would, however, describe it as the most engaging role. It’s not something you can mindlessly button mash on and succeed like a DPS or tank. You have to heal the correct targets with the correct rank of the correct spell. Other healers doing their job will actually take away your ability to do yours (you can’t both heal the 1k damage).
Ever since vanilla, healing is the only role I’ve ever had fun playing.
Not really. I like Clique for mouse click healing, though.
Depends on a lot of things.
What class?
Do you consider world PvP, as well?
Do you care about being the best spec for the job?
Generally you can heal dungeons just fine, regardless of talents, as long as you have a second set for healing.
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Been playing a priest in beta. I originally leveled a rogue back in 2004/2005. I put all my points into shadow with the exception of 5 that I put into wands. I’ve had little trouble healing as long as people are smart on pulls. Yes, there has been wipes, but that was because of accidents, like bad pulls or unexpected patrols. When leveling with greens and grays, there was a lot more drinking.
When soloing, it depends on gear. My priest is 30 with half blues and I can kill a 34 with difficulty. I may run out of mana and have to escape. 35s I can get down to half health…maybe. When leveling with greens and grays, I attempted mobs no more than a level above me. It just isn’t efficient.
Healing is doable and fun if the group knows their roles.
Depends on how he intends to level.
Will trio lvl with two dps as priest so have no intention of going shadow like I would if I was solo.
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It’s only difficult to stay awake when healing.
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Healing in 40 man raids was pretty crazy. For the longest time I couldn’t remember how to get anywhere is most raids since I just followed people and watched healthbars. If you want to get into raiding your best chance is to go holy if you are playing a priest. The learning curve isn’t too steep, but I could suggest you read some classic priest healing websites and learn about spell rankings.
The guild you are raiding with my require addons to join the raid.
Changing specs often will be very costly I would spec for leveling then once you start raiding spec specifically for raid healing.
Level as a dps spec until mid-late 50s. If you end up starting dungeon crawls in the late 50s as a healer (vs. solely questing), then you can spec healing – but not before. You’ll heal every dungeon just fine as dps, so long as you grab int/spirit gear (spell power/spell crit is very rare prior to the later 5-man dungeons).
Priests are good all-around. Paladins are good single target healers, but don’t really become much better until they get Blessing of Light / spell power/crit (before that, they are “OK” but not terribly mana efficient or strong heals). Druids are decent, but HoTs worked differently in vanilla in that they didn’t stack in raids, so i am 99.9% sure it was one Rejuv/target, regardless of # of druids in a raid, so you won’t be using your HoTs like you do in Retail - mostly various ranks of healing touch. Shamans are also decent, but excel with gear in raid healing situations (and have the various totems for all that fun jazz)
Most difficult part I found of healing when I did it back in Cataclysm was when I went to sleep, all I saw in my dreams were freaking health bars.
Also, you “miss” the raid often because you are not staring at the action like a tank/dps, but rather at health bars. One reason after one tier of healing I dumped it and went back to tanking/dpsing. Just wasn’t my bag.
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Not necessary since the default 8.x UI that we’re getting already does that. It does basically everything you’d need for a raid UI and can be used in parties as well.
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Easy to do, hard to master
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When you’re new to healing stay in the low level zones for a while and practice healing dungeon runs.
My dps toons just did the dungeons for quests and moved on.
On my priest I hung around in Westfall a bit and did a few dungeon runs.
I used B-o-n-g-o’s unit frames back then and put together a dps set of skill bars and a healing set of skill bars that I switched back and forth.
I did a lot of practicing in Deadmines.
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I didn’t know my way around any raid until I was high enough to solo them due to only following the group and looking at health bars.
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Really all the roles are thankless when it goes right - everyone only gets forensic with meters, performance and start pointing fingers when it goes wrong.
thing with healers is you’re usually the first one in the firing line.
in my experience most of the time things go pear shaped is because enough mechanics get missed or ignored by the tank(s)/dps. as a healer you’ve got a couple emergency options, but there’s a limit to how much you can cover for.
that’s where the difference between the average healers and the good healers show - when everything and everyone is on fire and using every trick/skill available making the right decisions at the right time to keep as many people alive for as long as possible. super satisfying when it works out.
you’d be surprised the sort of situations you can get out of when enough of the right people are determined.
Ah, I see. I stopped playing in 2014, when the default raid frames didn’t have this functionality.
Yea it’s pretty great. If you want mouseover healing you’d obviously have to configure macros or get an addon that already does it. But the default raid frames do pretty much everything else which is nice.
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Difficult for me to explain. I mained a holy priest in classic. In general it isn’t too difficult, the issue is being efficient with your spells. A good healer won’t be using their max rank spells unless the big guns need to come out. It was par for the course at the time to use lower ranked spells to top people off because they cost less mana to cast, and using max rank spells for when someone was super low or when it was expected for a tank to suddenly take a high amount of damage all at once.
I did all of this with few to no addons, the big exception being (before they broke it) was an addon that canceled a healing spell for you if the heal was going to dramatically “over heal” the target. That addon was purely to make mana conservation as easy as possible to keep heals coming as long as possible in raids. When they broke this I had to do this manually.
I do not recommend you level as holy or disc in any shape or form. This will kill your ability to level on your own pretty much utterly. It will not be an uncommon occurrence that you will be running solo out in the world and if you can’t kill mobs on your own then you’re stuck. You should level as shadow until you are max level and then respec into disc or holy. You will be able to heal dungeons and the like sufficiently as shadow as long as people aren’t being pathetically stupid or reckless.
You just play with terrible people it sounds like.
No
No. I’m sure some may help, although I can’t recommend any at the moment, since classic isn’t out yet.
Only at 60 if you have no alt, and need to respec to do any damage. A resto Druid, for example, can probably stay resto and farm just fine with a combo of dots, hots, and bear form.
All the healing-capable classes are good healers. They are all a bit different in utility, however, so it depends on what appeals to you.
Druids, shaman, priests, and Paladins are all healers, and heal completely differently.
If you have experience in any of those classes from retail or vanilla, then try out a heal spec for that class first, as your most familiar with it, unless you just want some completely new thing, of course.
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Oh, retail players are in for a hideous shock.