-Use your CDs
This is a mistake that a lot of healers make. Especially when you are new to healing you have a tendency to hold on to them far too long. At lower levels you can heal anything with your basic healing abilities, but using your CDs will make it easier and there will come a point where your group will simply wipe if you don’t use them.
-UI
Having a good UI is extremely important for healers. Your eyes are going to spend a lot of time looking at player frames so you don’t want to have to look all over your screen to look at your CDs and then your frames. Weak auras are very helpful at making important CDs easily seen.
-Have a plan for AOE healing
Any ape can whack-a-mole single target heal, but good healers will set themselves apart when it’s time for big AOE healing. Have a plan ahead of time. If you are a new healer and are trying to AOE heal on the fly you likely won’t make the best decisions. Much of the time this requires some preparation. You don’t want to be caught with your pants down and take your first healing action as the shard or mask is thrashing, you want to be setting up and getting ready before the aoe happens. Perhaps it’s different on certain healers, but the healers that I play require some set up to optimally heal AOE.
-You need to fail before you improve
One thing about healing is it changes a lot as you get to higher and higher keys. You will find that the way you healed lower keys stop working. You will notice damage that suddenly “appears” out of nowhere that you never noticed before. Sometimes you just have to die/wipe to something before you learn to deal with it. Often times this requires a little bit of thought to figure out what you did wrong or what you could have done differently.
-Slowly build your knowledge
One of the most important skills of a healer is simply knowing when big damage is coming. There is no fast way to learn this. You just have to slowly accumulate more and more knowledge…but you have to put in the effort. After you do a run think if there was a moment or pack that people died or it was hard to heal. Make note of these places so you can better prepare yourself and your CDs for these times.
I’ll give you somewhat recent example. I was having difficulty healing one of the platforms in ToP in the kelth section, the one with the portal guardian and 2 adds. I had reached a level where the way I was healing wasn’t working and people were dying. I asked around various discords for help and learned that I needed to dispel the magic debuff over the curse. They overlap with the portal guardian AOE and you can’t dispel everything if you don’t have someone who can decurse. Don’t be afraid to ask around for help. Whether you are doing +5s, +15s, or +25s, you can always know more and just because you’re 3500 io doesn’t mean you know everything.
-Focus on improvement / have a good attitude
This can be difficult if your group is blaming you for a wipe, but don’t worry about it. Everyone who is good was once bad and even good players mess up. When someone dies or the group wipes it’s easy to look around at the lack of interrupts, no defensive/immunity use, and other suboptimal play, but it does no good to focus on it. It’s good to have that information, but it’s better to think about and focus on what you as a healer could have done better.
A strong healer can heal through a lot of suboptimal play well into the 20s. Yes, sometimes there’s nothing you could have done but most of the time we could have done better. Do you want to be the healer that can heal a group of decent/strong players or do you want to be the healer that is strong enough that can carry suboptimal play? You want to be the healer that was able to make that run work when most other healers would not.
-Don’t be afraid to use different talents/leggos/etc
Certain healers are more flexible than others in this regard, but don’t be afraid to try or use something different than what the top players use. They all run with highly coordinated groups which is sometimes a very different environment than pugging. On certain weeks I sacrifice a little bit of damage for increased HPS just so I can more easily heal groups that I wouldn’t be able to with the “standard” setup. I only pug so I don’t always have a great idea how good the players in my group will be.
-You shouldn’t have to babysit the tank’s healthbar
This varies with the tank and player, but many tanks have strong self healing and mitigation such that you don’t need to be throwing heals on them constantly. Certain pulls are just high damage and there are times where you just have to spam heal them, but this is not the norm. If your tank is undergeared or not playing well sometimes you have to give them more attention, but you will encounter this less and less as you get to higher keys.
-Track CDS
Omni CD is most popular addon to track CDs, but it will be more and more useful the higher you go. Quite honestly, at lower levels you really don’t need to track them, but it’s a good habit to get into. Tank CDs in particular are useful to track. Knowing if your druid tank has incarn, for example, will tell you that you don’t need to heal them.
This was longer than I anticipated, but it’s something I wanted to write for a while. Healing is an extremely fun and rewarding role and I would highly recommend trying it. The hardest part is to just start doing it. Do a couple of low keys to learn your spells and just keep climbing.
