How Does One "Get Into" Healing?

Community General Discussion
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Hello everyone, I would like to ask healer mains: How exactly do you get into healing? When is it supposed to “click?”

After a break from WoW, I have come to the conclusion that part of the reason I wasn’t having too much fun anymore was the fact that I don’t feel that of my classes are as fun to play as they were “back in the day.” I thought a role change might be the antidote and rekindle a new love for the game, so I settled on healing.

I rolled a Druid, swapped to raid style party frames & turned on the mouseover option for casts, then got to work spamming dungeons. I hit 64 before MOP Remix came out. Now that I’ve earned all the cosmetics, I’m back on my Resto Druid, but I have to say I just don’t get it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not having a bad time, I just don’t feel like I’m learning anything. I only had a very minimal grasp of which buttons did what prior to the remix break & I have retained none of that.

I haven’t let anyone die yet, but I don’t feel like I am getting progressively more competent in the role & since nobody dies no matter what I do, and I never run out of mana no matter how irresponsible I am, I don’t really have a good way to see if I’m making any progress.

For reference, I have played melee DPS my entire time in this game. I have, back when I raided, gotten top 10 Parses on various fights for my spec, & my highest Arena rank in 3s was Duelist. I’m not the best player in the world, but I’m not garbage either. I just find it kind of disheartening that any time I’ve swapped classes (Warrior → DK → DH and back and forth) each one basically feels VERY intuitive. But healing hasn’t really clicked the same way.

I will continue onwards to max level, because I do want to give this a fair shot, I even like the idea of healing, but when should I expect to feel somewhat competent at what I’m doing? Do I literally just have to do a trial by fire and join a raid before I finally get it?

For people who heal, when did you guys feel confident in your role? What recommendations would you guys give here?

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To start, try to find one where the healing feels like it can be an afterthought for you. The more you can automate that process in your mind, the more you can use your utility and weave in some occasional damage.

But I’m no healer main, I just play the odd Resto or Disc on occasion. This is just how I found out the healers I enjoy.

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Why did you settle on Druid healing?

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I’m going to be completely honest here, it has absolutely nothing to do with underlying class mechanics, I just think the general theme & aesthetics are more appealing than any of the other healers.

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You get into healing when you’re tired of dps q’s but want to be lazy and not know routes

You then download a healing addon and wing it in content, fail (i got booted from a heroic rofl back in the day), learn, and get better.

Then you get bored and go back to tank because as a tank you dont die easily and can just eat most mechanics and knowing routes and taunting is super easy.

least thats my experience.

Edit i hate druid healing. Hots are too passive. The other healers do stuff either dmg or spells or utility vs just watching if life bloom fell off. The fact rdruid is always the best is kind of annoying.

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I’d say the trick is finding a healing spec you vibe with. It makes it much better than playing a spec you don’t like.

I have been maining rdruid since s3 this expac since my guild needed healers and I didn’t like the lack of hunter rework. Finally getting the rework in TWW!

I picked rdruid because I like Druid’s, they were my first class I ever played when starting wow back in vanilla but I had never played resto seriously. Rdruid is also mobile which is what I like, it’s why I enjoy bm hunter. It was tricky getting the hang of healing as rdruid since, unlike most healers, rdruid is a hot class so you need to start putting your hots on everyone before big dmg comes out. Need to anticipate things.

It took a lot of practice, and my guild and friends made sure to limit test me lol so eventually I got good! Even got KSH last season as a healer, first time I ever got it! Just stick with it and eventually it should click!

I also read up on pointers, asked my GM for a lot of help, and others who main rdruid, made sure to read the tooltips for the abilities to know what they do, and looked at wowanalyzer after raid to see what I could improve on and what I was doing well. I also didn’t pug at all since I didn’t want that toxicity while trying to learn how to heal. I only played with guildies and friends.

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It clicks when you save your party from certain disaster. Where your cast bar is in a race with the tanks health bar, and you win by a microsecond and save the day.

That’s the one thing that healers can do more so than others – save the day.

Sure, you’re not going anywhere without the boss dead – but the boss is dead because you kept the other toons alive long enough to beat them.

I have not healed in a long time, Wrath? I think?

So, maybe the pace of modern content makes it more off putting, but it wasn’t so bad back in the day.

Oh, and you really have to like the game “Whack-a-mole”, but just realize, that’s not really the game at all.

The game is strategically allocating your finite resource (notably cast time and mana) over the pace of the collapsing health bars in your party.

People cry about running meters, and I mostly agree with them, running a DPS meter is good so that if you have two DPS getting hammered, you can choose which one to sacrifice, or Brez later.

Triage and survival are the real game, it just sometimes feels like Whack-a-mole.

Oh, and bring a thick skin. It’s all your fault. Everything. All of it. On you.

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Just need to get in their and do it.

Can read some guides on cooldown optimization and such.

You’re right that leveling content (and early end game content) is so toothless you can’t really practice or learn much.

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The curve of healing won’t click until you get into higher end content. Folks make mistakes and that’s where you [unfortunately] shine.

If they don’t make mistakes, you job is kind of moot. You put out pathetic damage and get to deal with all of the AoE/non-party-handleable mechanics. There’s not really much a good group composition can’t negate completely so you’re more or less there as a “just in case”.

With pugs though? Holy heck are you going to be working your butt off.

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To be totally honest, I find Resto Druid to be the last healer to “click” with me. In raid it is ok, but it is my least favorite healer for M+.

Holy Priest and Resto Shaman clicked for me very fast. They feel pretty straight-forward, and their heals feel impactful, relying much less on HOTs.

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For me, it was just the default mode for how I play. In like every game I play, if I can help it, I play supportive roles, healers, etc. I enjoy making others do their job better than I do carrying or doing it myself.

My first character was a holy pally. I came into the game wanting to heal, I didn’t have to “click” or “get into it” it was just always what I wanted.

Though maybe that’s not super helpful.

Healing is never super challenging though, even in a raid environment, it’s only as hard as your group is bad. If you have a good group, you basically don’t have to heal, and you spend more time DPSing or just standing around depending on what kinda player you are.

I like fistweaver and holy pally because they do a lot of other stuff while healing, keeps you busy.

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Try shaman, maybe! Once upon a time, resto was the only spec I could get into for the role. Similar theme with some other elements infused.

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One does not simply…walk into Mordor.

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Do LFR first so you aren’t the only healer (and healing requirements are pretty lenient)

Log the lfr run (turn on advanced combat logging in settings then type /combatlog in chat as you start the lfr then upload this to warcraftlogs uploader (can be downloaded on your computer for free))

Then send the log to the class discord of your class, in the channel with the spec you want to play, say I am brand new please help and link the log

You will have some addons to set up, they can probably help with this. Ask what weakauras are helpful for that spec and how to set those up, also how to set up your binds for help/harm macros or clique

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I think the main problem you’re running into is that WoW is too easy for people to regularly die in Normal and even Heroic dungeons. So until you are level 70, doing Mythic or Mythic+, or start raiding, you likely won’t need to do much in the way of healing.

In Mythic dungeons or Mythic+, healing difficulty also scales with how well your group is playing. So you might find that a bad group doing a +4 is much harder to heal than a good group doing a +10.

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you will get a better idea on higher difficulty content like any other aspect of the game . you will have to utilize all your abilities, keep everyone alive (including yourself) , crowd control , buffs, manage your mana , do damage etc. if you do all this and do not find it rewarding then it’s not for you . Usually you will be the unsung hero while you play a whackamole game but in higher difficulty it will be like playing the piano . Also try other healers , each one has different play style . I raided a lot during TBC as a holy priest , the rotation was not complicated but managing your mana , not dying and keeping everyone alive felt amazing . same now with my resto shaman , surviving mechanics while keeping everyone alive, ccing mobs and dpsing at the same time is awesome . at the end of the day every aspect feels great when you are peak performing on high level content

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Resto druid has a lot of weird modifiers that make the hots so much stronger. For example, soul of the forest makes your next wild growth 50% more effective after using swiftmend. Liveliness talent makes all hots 5% faster (which means stronger), adaptive swarm makes all your hots on the player(s) who has/have it 25% stronger. Nature’s swiftness makes the regrowth instant and hot 100% stronger. If you run flourish, that spell makes all of them 25% better for 6 seconds on everybody. Then its mastery means the more hots you have on the target, the stronger each one is.

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You aren’t actually “Healing” until you start doing content where players can and will die without your intervention.

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My unrelenting compulsion to play Whack-A-Mole.

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Practice and experience.

I got into healing because the idea of keeping friends alive was appealing to me. I also loved back in the day when a strong healer could carry a bad group though a ton of mistakes/mispulls. No matter how much my old GM/friend messed up or how bad her arthritis got I always kept her alive. It was good practice/experience when I started. ( although it was a bit frustrating )

Practice and get comfortable with your whole toolkit and the content you are doing. Once you comfortably know what everything does it starts to become second hand and you automatically know what to do when people get damaged. Having a clean set up/UI and quick access to all important abilities is big. Try to find keybinds/addons/playstyles that work for you. Use the log analyzer to see your uptime on certain abilities, or just general tips/info.

You might not see any real “progress” till TWW comes out or you do hard enough content where you can play around with talents/etc to see what fits or not for whatever content.

Get a death log/details/etc, so you know when something is your mistake or not. Sometimes people just die to mechanics that could have been avoided or DR’d, and blame the healer for it when it isnt their fault. You need to have a tough skin sometimes and just calmly point out what killed someone and move on. On the flip make sure you take accountability for your mistakes too. Mistakes are just areas to improve upon. Take note of when you make a mistake, or if something isnt working for you/the content you are doing.

Talk to other healers of the same spec. Learn what they do the same or differently.

Take breaks if you need to. Sometimes pugs just make life hard. Take breaks by healing guildies/friends.

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