Priest healing help?Follow

I've just started a priest (20 so far)as I got bored of DPs classes,and was wondering if you could advise me on how to heal efficently in instances when I start running them,as I've seen my share of bad priests on my hunter,and have no wish to join the club. I've always tried to do my job to the best of my ability. I've gone mostly Shadow talent tree so far,as it's works best for me running quests and such.

Edited, Dec 20th 2009 10:42am by ozwwjd

Sticky. Up top. Tells you how to heal. Read it. Know it. Live it.

Meanwhile, at low level when you have no spells, keep Renew rolling on the tank all the time, and, pretty much, Heal for big damage (tank) and Flash Heal for little damage (DPS). It's good to Shield the tank too but until it gets talented it can be a mana hog, so at low level you don't necessarily want to do it every time. Then every time you get a new spell while leveling, learn what it does and why and when to use it, and start using it. The strength of a priest for healing is the huge number of tools in the box. When you hit level 40 you'll get Greater Heal and then you'll take Heal off your toolbar forever. Also make sure you have a unit frame that does something special (a border or such) when someone's got a debuff you can dispel and don't forget to keep up with that.

While leveling through instances is also a good time to try various healing UI's (Healbot, Grid, Clique, VuhDo, etc.) to see what you're comfortable with. We have lots of UI discussions here so I'm sure you can find plenty of info. I think most healers are still using Grid. Dadanox and a growing number of his fans like VuhDo. I just use Pitbull frames with Clique and macros, but that does not mean I am not Dadanox's fan.

As Aethien says, if you are planning on doing lots of instances on the way up, you may want to level with a Smite spec. I'd do 3/3 Spirit Tap first, then Holy up to Searing Light, then Disc up to Meditation, then finish straight up either up Holy or Disc, whichever tickles your fancy. If you decide on Holy and you're just questing, with Spirit Tap you may find you're never drinking anyway and in that case if you don't want to take a detour for Meditation that's fine too. If you're doing battlegrounds while leveling, you need Meditation because Spirit Tap will not kick in enough.

There is no reason that you can't heal instances as Shadow while leveling, and Shadow can be a very fun spec, but if you're mainly interested in healing it is worth it to get to know the healing trees well, and they are not inefficient for leveling anymore. They're also nice if you plan on doing battlegrounds while leveling. It's a lot of fun to heal battlegrounds when you're at x1 or x2 - DPSers can still get one-shot coming in so low but healers are always strong contributors regardless of level.


Edited because I can't spell on Sunday.


Edited, Dec 20th 2009 8:27am by teacake

Also be mindful of how much you spells heal compared to how much you need to heal. You'll run oom if you use your hardest heal when the tank is down 10% health and it heals for 60% of the tank's health. Pay attention how fast the Tank's health is going down compared to how fast you can heal. When you get more experience healing, you'll be able to time your heals (in most situations) for greater efficiency. Practice will help you get that down.


P.S. I leveled shadow and heals most instances through outlands, so don't worry too much about you spec, but a healing spec will make thing easier. If you can, try and have some extra manage regen gear for when you heal.

In general (regardless of level) this depends on the group. If the tank is well geared and the DPS know how to not steal aggro, you may have some time/mana left over for doing a little DPS. If your tank is not quite up to the challenge gear-wise, you need to pick up that slack.

I'd strongly recommend that while you're learning to heal though, you only heal. This is not because I don't think you can handle throwing out a Mind Blast and watching someone's health bar at the same time (although frankly even that takes some getting used to). A huge part of learning to heal is learning to manage mana. Until you have a really good feel for how many heals you'll need to throw out before the fight is over, I don't think you want to go spending mana on optional things. Another consideration is that not everything always - or even usually - goes as expected or planned. If your tank suddenly pulls extra adds or gets an unexpected spike in damage and wasn't topped off and Shield has worn off while you were busy elsewhere and you can't throw out a heal immediately because you're on a GCD from Smite? Fail. Wipe. Much blaming of the healer.

Yep, Grid is a time tested, very configurable addon. Here's my Grid configuration post, as a blast from the past.

I'm currently using Vuhdo. It also works well. I have switched from pressing keys for most of my healing spells (except a couple of oh sh!@@! buttons), to clicking mouse button combinations (5 button mouse strongly suggested). I suggest checking the option to make any target healed your current target. To give you a feel for how this works, my mousebindings include:

left click: PW: Shield
right click: Renew
Middle: Mass Dispell
Shift Middle: PoM
Side one: Penance
shift side one: Pain Suppression
Side two: Flash Heal
Shift side two: Greater Heal
Shift left: dispel magic
Shift right: abolish disease
Alt left: PoH
ctrl left: binding heal

I've got Vuhdo auto-firing both my spell power trinkets during combat, and I have inner focus and power infusion included in macros to autofire on PoH or Greater Heal. I've got fade, shackle, rocket boosts (with desperite prayer), holy nova, and divine hymn keybound.

I've probably forgotten something, but you get the idea.

Edited, Dec 29th 2009 12:22pm by dadanox

I rarely dps when healing. I find that my sporadic dps doesn't add much to the group, and the loss of focus on healing can be a detriment to the group's survival. There are exceptions of course, like holy nova on non-elite adds, and I nuke the heck out of the dragon at the end of timed CoS runs.

Since I'm pretty firmly entrenched in disc as my healing spec, I made shadow my off spec. I like that I can still throw a shield as shadow, and have some heals bound as backup healer (PoH especially useful). I've got my Vampiric Touch macro automatically putting me back in shadowform with "/cast [nostance] Shadowform", in case I've popped out with a heal. I'm going to do the same on my druid, so I don't forget to go back into Tree form.

Edited, Jan 1st 2010 8:40am by dadanox

Yeah, for most runs and hardly any raids (unless it requires a full out dps burn on the boss) I do not bother to dps.

But in battlegrounds it is nice to not have to take my hand off the mouse to dps. I'm horrible with pvp and very lazy, I avoid moving my cursor from my raid frames as much as possible, safer for everyone that way.