Try proving grounds and it gives you hints. Much better than a video.
Same here exactly. I’ve been playing Disc priest mainly this expansion, and it can be difficult when damage comes in fast. I find shaman and monk a bit more pleasant. i have not played evoker much. Druid is fairly easy as well, but is a combo of preventing and reacting, while monk is more reacting. Disc has more planning which makes it sometimes difficult. Not a fan of pally healing.
Disc is a weird one really… whenever people call this the first DPS healer I always think they’re forgetting about the original shadow priest and Vampiric Embrace. Much less problematic than atonement and if you were smart enough to stay out of Shadowform, you could heal quite effectively with a combination of mind flay, renew, and the various direct heals.
Most of my healing the last two expansions has been done on the Evoker… it’s fun enough but I find that I need to coach my ranged dps on how to position themselves. Temporal Anomaly and Dream Breath see heavy use but cast forward and away from me - it seems hunters in particular like to stand behind me so they don’t get hit by those two abilities and it makes keeping them alive so much harder. All melee groups are so easy for me to keep up I usually have plenty of time to toss in some damaging spells to speed encounters along. I’ve healed on my Druid and priest, but having been enjoying them most as Guardian and Shadow respectively so that’s where my playtime on them has been focused.
Recent iterations of monk have suffered because Blizzard tried to keep some of the feel of the play style of chi and crane stance and it hasn’t really worked since those mechanics were removed. I have yet to level my monk this expansion because I knew we had some significant revisions to the talent tree coming, so we’ll see how those changes pan out - it looks like you can come a lot closer to replicating “fist-weaving” than we have in a long time.
only reason I heal, and I do mean the ONLY reason, is for short q times
I don’t have enough free time to have some stupid game I pay for throw it away like garbage on long q times
You made the right call. Healing in retail is just being a dps that is also responsible for keeping people alive.
It’s better to just be a dps because you actually do damage without having a second job.
The new changes to Mistweaver Monk are pretty cool, and the spec heals through DPS’ing, so it could be a good healer to start with. For normal damage during a pull the spec can keep the group passively healed and topped up by just using Jadefire Stomp, Spinning Crane Kick, and a standard rotation of Tiger Palm, Blackout Kick, and Rising Sun Kick.
From there, the new interaction of Thunder Focus Tea + Crackling Jade Lightning does massive damage and healing and can triage heal a group to 100% in a big pack of mobs. Chi Ji is only a 1 minute cooldown and is another emergency healing cooldown that tops everyone quickly. But if you only need some instant healing on one or two members of the group, instant cast Vivify or Sheilun’s Gift is usually enough.
Healing takes some practice, but it’s ultimately about using spells and abilities to keep the group’s health bars full. So the only real difference is the focus isn’t on killing the mobs or the boss, it’s on keeping your group at 100% as best you can.
Even better, Monks now have Sithweaving
The new change to Thunder Focus Tea + Crackling Jade Lightning is really cool and heals for a ton. I’ve been hanging out in +2s on my ilevel 593 Mistweaver Monk alt and I feel like it’s a much, much stronger healer than this shaman was at that ilevel. It’s definitely a good time to give Monk healing a try.
In my opinion jumping into those types of guides right off is too much too quick. They turn people off more than encourage.
I’d suggest just reading the tooltips of your abilities. Learn to make mouseover macros if you don’t already have them.
Step 1. Put your party frames in the middle of the screen where you can reach them
Step 2. make Mouseover macros of your main healing spells.
Step 3. Jump into dungeons to practice.
Follower dungeons are a good place to start, but even normal and timewalking dungeons are good. You don’t need 30 minute guides/videos to do that much. you don’t even need optimal gear, food, pots etc to handle those.
And once you’re comfortable with that, then maybe look at what you can do to improve and start diving into those guides and tutorials.
For spells most classes have a big expensive heal, a mid range heal, and a light or DOT heal. You can learn through practice what works best when. Just don’t spam any of them or you’ll run out of mana. Overhealing is thing, you don’t want to waste your resources. After that, knowing what is coming before it happens is probably the most important thing that new healers/tanks struggle with.
Just wait till you realize that while you have to watch your own mechanics/procs/abilities you also have to watch health bars, boss abilities, fire on the ground, manage your mana, meanwhile the DPS just push their buttons and probably get hit by obvious ground swirlies or huge AOE frontals, often that can be avoided or interrupted. I have mostly refused to do mythics. I have ran a few with guildies and thats it. I even hated those runs because I was expected to know the M+ mechanics despite mentioning I dont like or run mythics.
Lol and yet I dont quite feel like im raging or embarrassed though. Its……a video-game forum not some doctoral dissertation or journal publication blah blah. Unless…… is this really that high stakes? Oh snap i didnt knowwwwwww.
Honestly mate, Im just replying to your life’s pointlessness with deserved pithy snark.
But by all means live in whatever world you want mate. You wanna believe im hurt because i didnt use youre vs your on a game forum to be able claim some modicrum validation in life ill let you have it if its that important lol. Im not worthyyyyy.
What you major in english or something and get off on this stuff?? Rofl
Talk to your parents, they failed you.
Healing does not require any of the things these people say. And I would even go so far as to say that if you are new to healing it will make it more complicated and confusing than it needs to be.
The best thing you can do is learn your core spells and from there add in others. I would recommend practicing in timewalking. Concentrate on making sure you and the tank live and throw out heals to dps in between. Any good dps can keep themselves alive during an emergency. Of course, that being said, most dps are just bad. It’s ok to let those people die.
I play all classes and if I could heal on every class I would.
Which healer did you try? Some are more straight forward than others, and/or perhaps will click with the way you think/play.
I will say that healing is more stressful feeling this expansion.
Some tutorials are better than others and sometimes getting firsthand experiences are better than watching a video or reading a website.
Some groups will kick and use defensives and some groups are just the tank wanting to do mongo pulls and dps just staring at the dps meter, not kicking a single spell or getting out of a single aoe.
Some people are destined to be garbage Hunters (Garbagehunt)
FWIW: Most DPS specs aren’t intuitive either.
Could say the same of you. Moms just up stairs for you too probably. Rofl.
As a long time healer, if you’re expecting a chill time all I can say is to turn back.
As expansions goes on, everything being overdesigned, every trash pack having 5+ interrupts required and if they don’t… well… its a healing mechanic
Everything turns out to be a healer mechanic: spiky damage everywhere, low dps extending the fights while you’re out of mana, even tank with low survivability
Its getting more stressful as we go
If you’re ok with that, go for it
You can change it to only show stuff you can cleanse.
Also, it helps if you know what your class can remove. Like on my pally it’s poison (green) and disease(brown/orange ish) if ret, magic (blue) if holy. Curse is purple and bleed is a bright pink, which I left on because some fights like Diruna have had gnarly bleeds.
Healing is the most rewarding of the three roles, the problem for me is that means I need to put my full trust in the tank and I’ve been let down by too many tanks over the years to do that.