This article will cover all the important aspects of the healing role. The information contained here will be of interest both to new players and to healing veterans, and reflects the state of healing in the current expansion.
We will not go into class-specific details. Talent specs, gemming, or reforging advice are beyond the scope of this article. For such information, we recommend that you read our healing class guides.
This guide is mainly targeted at healing in a raid environment, but a lot of the things we mention will, naturally, also apply to dungeons and PvP healing.
Healing is, in our opinion, the most stressful and difficult role to perform. There are a multitude of factors involved in performing well as a healer, but we feel that the most important ones are reactivity (greatly helped by a proper UI setup) and class and encounter knowledge.
While part of being a great healer comes from personal skill (which we will attempt to define and dissect below), it is also extremely important to familiarize yourself with various concepts which, for the most part, are counter-intuitive.
While, no doubt, some of you will find this part to be extremely basic and unneeded, we feel that, to have a proper discussion about healing, the act of healing must first be defined.
Healing is the act of using spells which restore the health of friendly players (your party or raid members) in order to help them survive the various forms of avoidable and unavoidable damage present in all PvE and PvP encounters.
This is a very basic definition, of course. In today's raiding environment, healers also often have to dispel friendly players of various harmful debuffs (magic debuffs, curses, poisons, and diseases).
Additionally, in organized raiding groups, cooldown (or even group) healing is often done based on assignments. Group leaders will establish a healer cooldown rotation that handles the most difficult enemy abilities. If the encounter requires the group to heavily spread out, you might be assigned to focus on healing your group.
In PvP, rather than using your cooldowns at predefined times, you will look to use them when the enemy team uses their offensive cooldowns in order to counter the incoming damage burst.
There are currently 6 classes which can perform the healing role, in World of Warcraft:
Essentially, healers will be targeting damaged friendly players and casting helpful / healing spells on them.
In order for this article's structure to be easily apparent to you from the start, we will list all the attributes of a great healer. Afterward, we will detail each of these and provide you with tips in order to maximize your performance.
As you can see, the first point relates to external factors, not necessarily related to healing. You must be extremely familiar with your user interface and with your keybinds (of which you should make extensive use).
The second point relates to encounter and class knowledge. You must be familiar with the encounter mechanics in order to know what to expect, and you must be familiar with your own class in order to know what spells to use in order to properly react to the damage in the fight.
The third and final point relates to understanding that you are part of a team and that respecting your own (and other players') assignments is crucial.
In addition to these three main points, there are other finer points, which you must keep in mind, such as overhealing (and how to avoid it) and Mana management.
More than any other role, healing is about precision and reaction. Your ability to perform your role will be strongly affected, every step of the way, by the ease with which you can input commands to your character.
Tanks and DPS players do, sometimes, have to make split-second decisions, and these decisions can sometimes impact the outcome of the encounter. Healers, on the other hand, have to make this kind of decision every time that they use a spell.
Therefore, we feel that it is important to dedicate this section to giving you the necessary information required to tune your character for proper performance.
The standard Blizzard interface has improved greatly over the years (often by including features that were previously supported only by user-created add-ons). It is possible to perform the healing role using only this user interface, but we feel that it is far from optimal.
Below, we list several user interface elements which we feel require further customization. Keep in mind that, at all times, your goal is to make your user interface aid you in completing your goals and not have it hinder you. We feel that it is a very good investment to spend a large amount of time tweaking and tuning your interface, as it will have a huge impact on your gameplay.
The raid frames are the most important aspect of your user interface. This is where your eyes will rest for the majority of the encounter, and you will need to be very comfortable with their appearance and layout.
There are several add-ons which present you with an improved (and highly customizable) version of the Blizzard raid frames. Before providing you with their names, we will list a few things which you should keep in mind when customizing your raid frames.
Obviously, these guidelines are subject to your own personal preference. The most important thing is that you are comfortable with your interface and that it does not hinder your actions.
We cannot stress enough how important it is that the relevant buffs and (especially) debuffs are properly displayed on the raid frames. As a healer, you will often find yourself having to dispel or cleanse raid members of various debuffs (magic, poison, curse or disease). Furthermore, and this is detailed below, you should have your dispel or cleanse ability properly keybound.
The most popular (and reliable) raid frame add-ons are:
Most healing specializations have various healing cooldowns and procs. It is essential to master these and use them to your advantage in order to maximize your performance.
We would recommend you to use WeakAuras. This highly customizable add-on allows you to create visual and auditory markers, to help you track any number of things.
You can also find a huge library of various Weak Auras at wago.io, out of which we recommend Healing Raid Cooldowns to track the usage of healer raid cooldowns.
In all of our class guides, we recommend using ElvUI. This is a comprehensive interface add-on that will change the way your interface looks in many ways. We find that its minimalistic approach allows you to see a large amount of your screen and focus on the important events.
Communication is extremely important as a healer. Generally, healers have many cooldowns which affect other players (raid damage reduction cooldowns, Mana regeneration cooldowns, single-target damage reduction cooldowns). It is, therefore, useful to have a means of communicating the use of these cooldowns without choking your voice-chat medium.
We recommend Raeli's Spell Announcer, a highly customizable add-on. We suggest that all raid-wide damage reduction cooldowns and all raid-wide Mana regeneration cooldowns be announced in raid chat.
Other single-target abilities (such as Pain Suppression ) can simply be configured to be whispered to the targeted player.
So far, we have covered some important aspects related to add-ons and user interface settings. If you have customized your interface suitably, you should now have a good view of the encounter area and quick and easy access to your raid frames.
The next step is making sure that you can deliver your healing spells in the shortest possible amount of time. Having an excellent reaction time is an important quality of a good healer, and this is hard to accomplish without the use of keybinds. Furthermore, selecting a target from your raid frames (by clicking it) and then using one of your spells, even through a keybinding, is not optimal.
Any ability which you may need to use during combat should be keybound. This does not only refer to healing spells but also to dispels, healing cooldowns, Mana regeneration abilities, and trinkets.
Missing even a second to click an ability, as a healer, can often prove disastrous to your raid.
Moreover, we advise you to make extensive use of mouse-over macros. Mouse-over macros, in short, allow you to cast spells on friendly players without selecting them as your target. You can simply hover your mouse over their raid frame and use your ability.
This saves you precious time. As you can probably tell, however, this only works if your heals are keybound (because otherwise, when moving your mouse to your action bar to click a heal, you would stop mousing over your target). This is another reason why keybinding is practically mandatory for any healer that is interested in their performance.
Below, we use the Healing Wave spell to provide you with an example of a mouse-over macro:
While seemingly complicated, this macro changes your Healing Wave spell in such a way that:
You can reduce the macro to a simpler format:
This provides less functionality, though.
An added bonus to using mouse-over macros is that it allows you to have the boss or another add targeted (so that you can use your offensive spells on them) without it impacting your ability to heal. This is especially relevant when playing a Discipline Priest, who needs to deal damage in order to heal.
It is worth mentioning here that there does exist a sort of alternative, in add-ons such as VuhDo, which allows you to set up a feature to simply click a mouse button when hovering over a player and causing this to heal them. In certain cases (such as when you need to intensively move your character while you are healing), such add-ons can provide a superior healing method to the mouseover macro + keybind combination, even though, in essence, the same thing is accomplished.
The underlying point here is that the practice to be avoided at all costs is one where you need to click a player on your raid frames and then click a heal from your action bar in order to heal them. Any streamlining of this process that you make (keybinds, mouseover macros, both, or add-ons that handle the task for you) is a step in the right direction.
It is beyond the scope of this guide to discuss specific stat priorities since these depend from one healing class to another, and they can change often. It is important to note, however, that your gearing plays an important role in your ability to carry out your healer assignments.
As a healer, you have to be intimately familiar with a great part of each encounter your raid is attempting. You have to be prepared for every ability cast by the boss or an add, which has the potential to deal damage to anyone in the raid (regardless of whether this damage is avoidable or not).
A great part of being a good healer is being prepared for what is about to happen. Most boss abilities are on fixed timers or cooldowns and will often have a predictable outcome. You must be prepared for every such ability and already know which spell you are about to cast to heal your targets before they have taken any damage.
It is advised that, while learning encounters, you pay special attention to how much damage various abilities do and how sustained that damage is. This will give you a good indication, for future attempts, of which spells are best used when.
For example: if you know there is a boss ability which deals a very high amount of damage (let's say around 80% of the health of most raid members) at a specific time, and that it is not followed by any raid damage whatsoever for 30 seconds, you would make sure that everyone has enough health to survive it, and you would then go on to heal them with Mana-efficient spells, allowing you to preserve your Mana. If you were not familiar with the encounter mechanics, you might fail to have everyone at the minimum health threshold to survive, and you might then panic and use Mana-inefficient spells trying to heal everyone up after the damage hits.
If you have been following this guide so far, you should have your user interface, add-ons, macros and keybinds in place. You should be comfortable with clicking your raid frames, tracking your own procs and cooldowns, and just generally using your character.
Naturally, the deeper the understanding you have of your class, the better your performance will be. This sort of coverage is beyond the scope of this article. There are, however, various aspects of playing a healer in a raid environment that are not related to class or specialization but rather to the healing role in general.
We have done a great deal of talking about all sorts of aspects which prepare you for healing. Now it is time to actually look at how you should heal, who you should (and should not!) heal, and what you should avoid doing.
Your most basic goal for every encounter is that each and every one of your raid members survive until the boss is dead (or until he enrages due to insufficient DPS).
For the most part, this means you will have to wait for raid members to suffer damage and then use your healing spells to heal the damaged targets.
This is a simplistic look at things, and the reality is more complicated because of several factors:
In order to achieve this goal, you will need to make good use of both your Mana and your global cooldowns and use the correct spells at the correct time. Let us go into a bit of detail!
All healing classes use Mana as their main resource. Without Mana, you simply cannot heal.
Mana regeneration is a fixed value per second, which can be boosted by some class talents and abilities. You can also use items to recover Mana quickly. Healers have to manage their Mana for the entire duration of the encounter, and mistakes in this management can quickly lead to a wipe.
The true skill of a healer comes from using the right heal for each situation. For example, you should use a fast and expensive heal when your target is dead before you have the time to finish any other heal; you should use a slow and inexpensive heal when you have ample time to heal your target; you should use slow, large heal when your target is suffering sustained damage.
The idea is that, for the entire duration of the encounter, you have to strike a perfect (or near-perfect) balance between healing enough to keep your assignment alive while not using too much Mana. The only way to do this is to use the proper spells for each situation. To be able to do this, you will need an excellent understanding of your class' abilities as well as of the encounter mechanics.
Finally, one key aspect of properly managing your Mana is to ensure that you do not overheal. Overhealing is covered below, but to summarize, you should ensure that you do not expend Mana on a heal which lands on a player whose health is already full (or that a great part of the heal is wasted because their health is almost full).
As a healer, it is your job not only to try to keep every single raid member alive, from the start of the fight until the end, but also to know when it is more profitable for your raid to let someone die so that you can better heal others (and possibly to save Mana). Before we detail this further, we would like to remind you not to forget to heal yourself. It is very easy to make the mistake of trying to heal everyone else and simply overlooking your own raid (or unit) frame.
Sadly, there are times when, as a healer, you simply cannot keep everyone alive. This can be either due to encounter design (fights where the damage ramps up progressively until it becomes unhealable) or due to the mistakes which your raid makes in the execution of the fight.
When this happens, you will find yourself in a position of desperately trying to heal several low-health (and dying) targets at once, and you will face being overwhelmed or running out of Mana. In times like these, you will have to choose which players to heal and which players to simply let die.
While this is counter-intuitive to the nature of the healing role, it is often the only way to survive the encounter. It is impossible to state in general terms which players should be sacrificed and which players should be saved, as this can depend greatly based on the encounter.
As a rule, you should keep as many tanks alive as are needed for the boss to be killed. Furthermore, when choosing among DPS players, those who do more damage should be preferred over others (keep in mind what stage the fight is in, though, as overall DPS numbers may not be relevant in a specific "burn phase").
Finally, while your initial reaction might be, when seeing how difficult healing is, to try to save as many of the other healers in preference of DPS players, this is often wrong. The reason is that when a fight reaches such a critical moment, the only thing which will make it easier is if the boss dies extremely quickly. Therefore, even a few seconds of another DPS player being alive can make all the difference.
No matter what encounter your raid is progressing on, and regardless of the raid size, your raid or healing leader will surely provide you with an assignment.
In short, you will be told when to use your raid cooldowns to cover specific incoming damage and possibly also which group(s) to focus heal. For the most part, healing assignments will be simple, along the lines of "Healer #1 uses his raid cooldown first, followed by Healers #2 and #3.", although sometimes the encounter may require more specific assignments.
Currently, all of the healing specializations are fairly well balanced in their roles in a raid. In the past, certain specializations were suited to a single role (for example, Holy Paladins were exclusively tank healers during Wrath of the Lich King, while Discipline Priests were extremely potent raid healers).
Despite this balance, some specializations shine in certain situations more than others. A good raid leader will assign specific healers to specific tasks based on the strengths and weaknesses of the healing classes (and the players playing them). If you feel that you have been given an improper assignment or that the assignments provided, as a whole, are not satisfactory (i.e., your cooldowns would be best used elsewhere), you should voice your concerns.
The tanks are the only players who, regardless of encounter, take sustained damage for the entire duration of the fight. The amount of damage that they take and the frequency with which they take it varies widely from fight to fight, but in every case, the tanks must always have at least one healer assigned to them.
Most fights require two tanks, although it is possible that they will be taking damage alternatively and not simultaneously. In any case, the amount of healing that each tank requires, based on their gear and on the encounter, is something which will have to be determined on a case-by-case basis.
You should be at least remotely familiar with the kind of tanking mechanics your composition's tanks use (Brewmaster Monks have a smooth damage intake because of Stagger , Death Knights can do a lot of self-healing, etc.).
Finally, it is very important that you communicate with the tank you are healing so that you can both make good use of your respective cooldowns.
Healing the raid varies widely from encounter to encounter. Some encounters present very little unavoidable raid damage, while other encounters contain heavy, sustained, unavoidable raid damage.
Based on the type of damage you are facing, you will have to adapt your healing style (and possibly your talent spec and gearing) to match it. Raid healing is the most common type of healing required in a raid.
As a result, you must be able to communicate with your fellow healers, and we advise you to set very specific healing assignments. Below are a few examples:
Another type of assignment which you will receive in many encounters is to use your raid-wide healing or damage reduction cooldown at a specifically determined time.
The reason for this is that there are various boss abilities which are too damaging for your raid to be able to survive without the use of cooldowns. Furthermore, these abilities will often add continuous and increasing strain on your raid's healing, meaning that a single cooldown will not be sufficient to mitigate them.
In order for each and every damaging hit from the ability to be mitigated by some cooldown, it is important that all healers know when to use their cooldowns (so that they do not end up using two cooldowns for one ability and none for another).
When being assigned a time to use a cooldown, you should make sure of a few things:
If, for some reason, your cooldown is not available at the designated time, you should announce it to the raid ahead of time so that they can improvise.
One of the most sensitive issues related to teamwork in raiding is the ability (or inability) of healers to respect their own healing assignments.
When healing assignments are first devised, it is assumed that each healer can complete their own task without the aid of other healers. In practice, however, this is not always so. There are many factors that will cause a healer to fall behind on their assignment (latency or user interface problems, encounter mechanics, mistakes caused by the people they are assigned to heal, or even by themselves). When this happens, there are two possible outcomes:
While the second outcome may appear to have a good chance to save lives and the raid, this is often not the case. More often than not, what happens is that, as a result of the other healers' reaction, they themselves will fall behind on their assignments. After this point, either chaos ensues, or healers are forced to use a lot of Mana-inefficient heals to catch up, thus running out of Mana later on in the fight.
We advise you to stick to your assignments as much as possible. This does not mean that if something exceptional occurs during a fight, causing one of the healers to fall behind on their assignment, they should not be helped. Indeed, great healers are those who can react to the unexpected as well as to the expected damage and situations that occur during an encounter.
What should be avoided is constantly making up for the lack of healing ability of a healer or improper healing assignments by improvising and filling other people's roles. This type of practice is not helpful for your raid in the long term. Instead, you should aim at correcting the underlying problems which cause you to perform someone else's assignment. This means the other healers should be helped to improve (or replaced), and the healing assignments themselves should be revised.
Another important reason for respecting your own healing assignment is that it ensures (in theory) equal healing of all targets. Each player in the raid has one or more healers assigned to heal them, and if assignments are respected, they will all receive heals. If you go outside of the assignments, some players will end up without any heals, while others will be overhealed.
The final concept that you should be familiar with, as a healer, is overhealing. In essence, overhealing refers to when a target receives heals when their health is already at maximum. Any such healing is effectively wasted, and so is the Mana that that healing cost.
We have gone through many facets of the healing role so far in this article. All of them are important on their own, but during all of them, you must also keep in mind that you should not overheal.
In order to avoid overhealing, you must be familiar with the amount of health that each one of your spells restores. Moreover, you should have a good understanding of the encounter mechanics so that you know whether a damaging ability will hit the player while you are casting a heal.
Basically, you should not heal a player who is already at full health and you should only heal a damaged player with a heal which, roughly, matches the amount of missing health that they have.
Some overhealing is unavoidable due to having to top players off in preparation for boss abilities and due to the critical heals, which will often overheal their targets. So, do not be alarmed if anywhere between 10 and 30% of your healing is overhealing. Keep in mind, though, that reducing your overhealing goes hand-in-hand with properly managing your Mana, so if you are struggling for Mana, you should review your overhealing.
Finally, there is one additional, less well-known way to avoid overhealing. You should configure your raid-frames in such a way that they display any incoming heals on players (pay special attention to enable HoTs). By doing this, you are able to avoid using a heal on someone who was already in the process of being healed (either through another healer's in-progress cast or through a HoT), thus reducing your overhealing or that of the other healer.
We cannot stress enough how important it is, as a healer, to anticipate the damage which will occur and to know exactly which of the many spells in your arsenal are suitable to counter it.
Provided that you have followed this guide and have allowed yourself sufficient time and practice to customize your user interface and familiarize yourself with your class, you should be well on your way to being a great healer!
Lastly, keep in mind that healing, more than any other role, is a team effort, and you should try to find ways to work with your teammates at all times.
We hope you have enjoyed our guide, good luck healing in World of Warcraft!
