"nooby" Healer (Holy priest)

I’ve leveled a Holy Priest as an alt, but since he’s soloed almost everything until now, or only grouped up with a friend or two, I’ve never really gotten used to actually healing.

I know all my attack spells by heart, and can self-heal or shield myself reflexively, I can toss a heal at a friend…
but I’m easily stressed out, and in an actual dungeon situation I tend to get confused and forget what spells do what :frowning: :disappointed_relieved:

I find it a bit frustrating that I leveled up but never really had to learn the healing aspects of my spec other than superficially, but know my damage abilities well because all situations sort of forced me to learn them.

Can anyone give me some advice on how I can go about learning more about healing?

(and DAMN, but my Priest has a LOT of buttons!!! his action bars are just jam-packed!)

The first recommendation I can suggest is to use macros for your action buttons. You can easily bind damage and heal spells into the same button so that your action bar becomes less full. If you need any suggestions I can provide.

In regards to healing. It’s something that takes a bit of practice. If you’re just doing dungeons than your primary going to be healing through your single target heals (Heal + Flash Heal) and pushing Prayer of Mending on cd on the tank. Your big heal is Holy Word Serenity which you want to use on cd so you can recharge it with your single target heals.

For group healing you have Circle of Healing (can be hit on cd) and Holy Word Sanctify. Use them when multiple people are below 80% hp.

You also have Renew, Power Word Shield, and Prayer of Healing. Prayer of Healing you can basically ignore… Renew is good for low intensity situations where you just want to top somebody off (also good when you’re moving around a lot)… and PWS is more of an emergency oh-crap button.

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Bind everything. Highly recommend writing mouseover macros or get a UI that does this for you (no clicking/target cycling and healing). Set your raid/group frames to a size/position you’re comfortable moving your mouse over (raid frames are important for mouseover healing and shouldn’t be ignored as can be done when running as dps). Practice. Eventually, you’ll be able to tell which spells to use just by looking at raid frames, leaving you free to glance at your character more often to dodge mechanics.

You should be able to keyword search threads here for “Macros” and/or “Heal” or some other related terms to find which spells you should write ones for and what the actual scripts are.

Recommend running Enlightenment & Holy Word: Salvation talents for raids and Trail of Light & Apotheosis for dungeons.

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As a clicker keyboard turner i cant give too much advice on binding :slight_smile: but i would go into lfr and practice healing for raids in a low stress environment. I know when i decide to try something new, ie kyrian SS i go into lfr to test it. cant hurt my raid team there.

for dungeons spam normal dungeons then heroic then mythic and work your way up

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For what it’s worth. Holy priest looks like it has tons of buttons but your “rotation” is so damn small.

Flash Heal/Heal for spot healing. Circle of Healing and Prayer of Mending for group heals (on cooldown essentially), then you have the Holy Word:Serenity for big chunk of heals for a player and Holy Word: Sanctify for a bit of AoE location heal.

You’ll realize quickly you only use a small handful of spells often…the rest are for “special” moments.

Don’t get overwhelmed. I felt the same way. But my action bar, default everything, feels fantastic. KSM as holy was a breeze. No macros. No mess.

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