Hi all,

I wrote this guide a while ago for the priests in my guild as i noticed many of them were playing a healer for the first time and had various gaps in their knowlege of raid healing. After a few people suggesting i should i decided to post it up here for anyone who finds it useful.

Please keep in mind -

This is mostly aimed at priests in ZG level guilds, hence the multiple references to ZG fights.

This is also aimed at people already level 60 who have healed the 5 mans and are ready to raid, it's not a "how to make a priest guide"

This is also my opinion, it's based on an MMO lifetime of raid healing, but it's still just my opinion :o) i always welcome constructive discussion and people suggesting things i can improve on or may have overlooked, just don't tell me something sucks or is wrong :o)

This is very much a plain english guide on what to actualy do on a raid, you won't find much in the way of technical data or statistics here, there's plenty of good info on that elsewhere.

Some of this is very basic stuff and some of you won’t need it, others are playing a healer for the first time and I hope will appreciate being given the basics of what others take for granted.
Also while most of this is simply the best way to do things, some of this is my personal view of “the right way” and there are alternatives.
Also this guide is written mostly from the point of view of priests, but there are many points that will help any and all healers.

Builds and equipment.

First off, builds are about spec and equipment, the two are basically the same thing and should be thought of together.

My opinion is that there are only 2 real styles of healing builds people should be going for. One is extreme, the other balanced.

A balanced build is where you try to have a good mana pool, a good amount and mix of spirit and MP5 and a good amount of +healing. A balanced build may just go for a big mana pool and lots of regeneration and I’d still consider it balanced. A balance build is also likely to talent spec to have divine retribution, spirit buff, improved shield and improved fortitude and maybe even power infusion or lightwell.
The idea of this build is flexibility. You have lots of mana and regen it back fast, you can heal well but you also have all the “toys” available to us such as the improved buffs and shield, divine retribution, moonwell etc. With this build you can basically do any job on a raid.

An extreme build has only 1 focus. You are trying to be the best at your single focus but to do this you sacrifice flexibility. My build for example is a focused +heal build. All my specs give me better heals, cast time, mana cost and healing power. All my items are +healing and I will take +healing over pretty much anything else. With no talents or + healing a top rank renew heals for about 820, mine currently heals for 1600. Another type of focus build might be on regen and mana preservation, getting every high spirit or MP5 item going and taking every mana reducing and mana pool increasing talent. This build wouldn’t have huge heals or a massive mana pool but they regen back much faster than others which is great in long fights and if they were doing dispel duty or a lot of shielding.
The disadvantage of a focused build is that it’s focused. My +550 healing is totally wasted when I’m decursing, or buffing, or shielding. Someone with a regen build gets next to no benefit in a fast fight where chain healing is required and has fairly low healing per second. I have only 5300 mana, in full devout alone you get well over 6k and people going for mana pool will have close to 7k

These disadvantages can be lessened by having a good mix of builds and by your healing team talking to each other and making sure everyone is being used for their skills. For example, on fights in ZG where we have 3 warriors tanking, I assign specific healers but tell them not to renew, I then assign myself to keeping renew active on all 3 tanks, so they get up to 500hp healed more per cast than if other priests were doing it. For thekal (tiger boss) where we use a shield when he mortals strikes, we make sure a priest with improved shield is on thekal.

3Raid healing

There are a few different parts to raid healing so I’ll break it down a bit.

Priority –
We can’t keep everyone alive all the time, so we have to prioritise. In general your healing priority should look like this –
YOU
Tanks
Randoms

Now this is very situation specific and depends on your assignment, for example you might be assigned to a hunter on Hakkar because he’s pulling the sons so must stay alive, or you might be healing AEing Mages in which case you ignore the tanks totally.
One thing that never changes, no matter the situation, is that the most critically important person for you to keep alive is YOU. A dead healer can not heal, a dead healer does not regenerate, a dead healer can not use their full bar of mana. Even if you have to use 80% of your mana in a fight to keep yourself alive, that’s 20% more of your mana going on heals than there would be if you were dead.

Spells to cast, when and how for general raiding –
What spell to use is mostly covered above but not when or how. The main spell you will use is your 2k greater heal and the main method will be cast/cancel. What this means is this. Let’s take a simple fight such as snake boss where you have all the healers cross healing the Main tank, you have nothing else to worry about. An important note here is that the 5 second rule kicks in at the end of a spell cast, not at the start. What you should be doing is casting greater heal and during the cast time, judging the tanks health against your cast. If the tanks health is full and you are half way through casting, tap a direction key to move slightly or hit escape, this will cancel your spell. (Careful with escape, hit it twice and you lose your target). Then cast GH again straight away, again as your spell is getting close to finishing, if the tank is near full health cancel it. If the tank needs the heal then keep it going, the thing to look out for then is someone elses heal landing, thus taking the tank to full health at the last minute, if this happens try to cancel your spell, sometimes it won’t cancel and you over heal, that’s just how it goes.
This method takes some getting used to, judging when to cancel and when not to and watching out for those last moment heals from others. What bar you look at is up to you, your target bar, ctra bar or the client raid bars. I personally don’t use the target bar because while you’re looking up there, you probably can’t see anyone else in the raid and there are usually other people to watch as well.
The other thing to judge in a boss fight is your mana bar. You should roughly balance your mana against the fight and situation. In simple terms, as the boss goes down so should your mana bar. In more complicated and accurate terms, if you are for example healing a tank on the first phase of tiger boss, you just need to balance your mana bar against how the raid is doing vs the 3 bosses, think of all their health as 1 bar, so if they’ve dps’d thekal down and are just moving to the rogue, they are just under half way through the phase, so you will need to be on about half mana, if you’ve got lots more you can afford to over heal a bit to make sure your tank stats up. If you have less you need to back off a bit, use a potion, ask for manatide or call it so someone can help you. One golden rule is your Mana bar should never be full unless everyone on the raid is full health. If your mana is full, you can’t regen any more, so you’re wasting mana, instead you could have thrown a renew on any random who needed it and regenerate that mana back. After the first 10 seconds of a fight you should never be full mana. Small exceptions might be the AE healers on bat fight, they regen between bat rounds, but even then if you’re full and confident you won’t lose your focus, you can go heal a random or renew the tank and come back when bats are called

AE Healing –
This is probably the toughest kind of healing to get the hang of because it’s a change of mindset. 99% of healing is reactive, meaning someone takes damage, you react to it and heal them. AE healing works best and sometimes only works if you are proactive. If you wait for the mage to take damage, he’s already dead.
Usually you will get a warning, either you know when the pull is going to happen, or you get a ctra raid warning (like for bats on bat boss), or someone is calling in vent. Use this warning to put a renew up, either on your specific mage or on all of them if you can, or the first 1 or 2 in the rotation if the mages are using one. This means once they are taking damage, they’re already getting heals from renew that doesn’t cost you any cast time, because you’ve already cast it.
The next part is personal preference between two methods. You can cast flash heals as soon as you see any damage or think they might be taking damage, throwing in a shield for a quick heal if your flash’s can’t keep up with the damage. Or you can cast greater heals before they take any damage (if they’re already hurt it’s too late, you have to flash), as usual you can cancel if there’s no damage taken, but if they’ve taken any at all, let it land, because once they start taking damage they usually keep taking it and a lot, because if they agro 1 mob they agro them all.

Random healing –
When healing randoms, spider boss is a good example because we have to heal the randoms, in general a low rank greater heal is the best option. As usual do not use flash unless they’re going to die in under 3 seconds. Renew is the alternative but when throwing random renews you have to check if they already have a renew active, two people throwing renew on the same person means 1 person wastes their mana. Also if you are not healing spec, it’s better to let someone who is do renew because they get a lot more healing per tick from them.

Tank switches –
At various times in fights there will be tank switching going on, where a boss or other hard hitting mob is changing target from one tank to another. This might be because the MT has died, it might be forced because of a boss ability like the spider boss webbing or the rogue at tiger boss gouging, or it might be optional like the raptor tanks switching after a few sunders.
In any of these situations it takes a moment to realise what’s happening, and a moment to retarget the new tank and get a heal going. At these times, mana efficiency is a lower priority than keeping the tank alive. At these times it’s important that you do what you have to to keep your tank alive. If that means you have to throw a shield and a flash heal while you wait for someone else to land a heal then do it. It’s better to blow some mana than to lose the tank because often in these situations we don’t have tanks to spare.

Pair healing –
Quite often healing will be broken down to specific assignments, tiger boss is a good example of this. in this situation you will be paired (or maybe 3 or 4, the idea is the same) with another healer and between you you’ll need to do a job, usually this will be keep a tank alive, but it might be random healing while others deal with the tanks, it might be dispelling or whatever.
Now you can just do what you like and now and then see your partner healing, but what you should be doing is talking to them, discussing what you’re going to do. For example, if you’re with another priest, are either of you going to renew? Decide who is going to do it so you’ve got the best person on it and the other can forget it. Will you use shield? Again decide who based on your talent spec. If you’re with a shaman, will you do hots and shields and if necessary flash while he concentrates on big heals? Talking is good. The other thing to do is balance your mana with your partner. The two of you should run out of mana at about the same time, so if you’re lower than your partner back off a little, if you’re higher heal more and expect him to back off.

Raid Bars
This is another personal choice thing, but there are some points in here that will help everyone. Clearly as a healer you need to have the raid bars for every group in the raid visible so you can see everyone’s health bar. You can use the in client bars or the ctra bars, your preference. The ctra bars you can set up to show various options such as health as numbers, percentage or remove the numbers so you can just see the bar. 

You should also at the least have the warrior group visible as well, so you have a separate bar with just the warriors on, this is the single best way to improve your monitoring of the tanks and to help make healing on tank switches faster. The bar with the tanks should be somewhere prominent so you can have your mouse hovered over them and your fingers ready on the heal keys.
I personally also pull a separate group for mages for AE healing and because they require quick reactions to save if they get agro. Sometimes I pull warlocks too if we’re low on mages. 

Mainly as priest leader, but also for general information I also pull the priests, shamen and druids and put them to one side somewhere, this is for information rather than healing them, I can quickly see the health and mana of all the raid healers. This is why I often call for someone to heal more if they have lots of mana, or to heal themselves more if they’re going too low on health. I am watching you!