by Bethany Myers

So you’re ready to venture into the thankless realm of healing? It’s not for the faint of heart. You will be begged to heal an instance you hate and blamed for deaths that aren’t your fault, only to lose gear upgrades to DPS — all in the same run! On the other hand, healing can be a nice diversion from faceroll macro-mashing, and it’s definitely nice to have instant dungeon queues.

Whether you’re changing specs at level 80 to help your guild progression, stepping into The Deadmines as a level 18 healer or twinking out a battleground medic — here are some helpful hints as you prepare to make those health bars greener.

5-man PvE
Regular dungeons, heroics and group quests in which you are the only healer
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by Mathew McCurley

Warrior knows best

Warriors, especially of the protection variety, need to know what the heck is going on on the battlefield and when pressed up real close against a boss type. I want to recommend Event Alert for those warriors out there who do not want to deal with the occasionally steep learning curve of Power Auras. Event Alert comes ready to go out of the box.

Power Auras is the superior addon — I know it is. The reason I want to highlight Event Alert is because of its relative ease of use. For the novice or the player who doesn’t want to spend the time configuring Power Auras, Event Alert works well. (Power Auras tutorials and use cases are coming soon, however, for all of you who are looking for some good Power Auras techniques.) In addition, Event Alert comes preloaded with settings for almost every class, which makes the addon a no-nonsense tool for dealing with alts as well. Up top is an example of a death knight’s Event Alert, but the warrior’s experience is similar.

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by Zuggy

When it comes to macros, the druid class has seen both extremes. From the classes initial conception, which literally required dozens of macros to effectively operate in both PvP and PvE environments, to the more simplistic druid we see today. After years of tweaking and adjustment this type of mass macro creation is no longer environment (thank God!), as many shifting abilities are now automatic.

Restoration Druid Macros

Nature’s Swiftness Heal
/cast Nature’s Swiftness
/stopcasting
/cast Healing Touch

Mouseover Healing Macros
/cast [target=mouseover] Healing Touch

/cast [target=mouseover] Rejuvenation

/cast [target=mouseover] Lifebloom

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by Mimetir

If you do know something about macros then have a read anyway – some of these might be basic to you, but you might pick up something that saves your skin, bark or cow-printed hide.

Paladins

1. Buffs up quicksmart

/castsequence [target=focus] Beacon of Light, Sacred Shield

• This macro will put both of your essential healing buffs up on your focus, which is likely to be the tank.
• TIP: you can use the addon Need To Know in conjunction with this setup. It’ll give you permanent timer bars for those buffs regardless of whom you’re targetting.

2. Easy judging

/cast [target=focustarget] Judgement of Light

• Casts your judgement of light which both does healing and gives you a powerful haste buff
• It won’t cause you to overaggro when casting your judgement as you’re using it on the tank’s target
• Means you don’t have to mess around with tab or mouse targetting a mob to cast it on. You may need to re-target your tank but that’s less trouble than having to target everything manually.
• TIP: you could use the addon Clique, which will allow you to set up mouse and key bindings for anything you could wish. Want to heal the tank? Sure, click the <insert mouse button here> and you needn’t retarget them after using your JoL macro.

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by Thespius @ worldofmatticus

Lord Marrowgar

So here we are, Lord Marrowgar, a very interesting challenge for healers. However, it does give Druids a chance to show off their ability to heal on the run. This can be arelatively hectic fight, so regardless of whether you are tank or raid healing, you will need to be tossing HoTs at some points during the fight.

Tank Healing

This is the easier of two roles against Marrowgar.  During his initial phase and all the ones where he is not spinning all over the place, it is essentially a one tank fight. Since the nerf, Marrowgar does quit a bit less melee damage. So the damage your meat shield will be taking will be fairly minimal. This is pretty manageable for Trees, as we can keep the tank pretty well topped off with our HoTs.

One ability you need to be prepared for though is Saber Lash.  Saber Lash is an ability similar to Koralon’s Meteor Fists, in which two tanks will need to stack in order to distribute the damage. Your healing priority will be the Main Tank followed by the Off-Tank after a Saber Lash. As a tree, you have the added benefit of hitting both with Wild Growth before topping off the Main Tank. Other than dodging the occasional slow-motion blue flames, there is not much to deal with during this phase.

Raid Healing

As stated above, this fight can be quite hectic for a raid healer. During the first phase you will have quite a bit to manage. In 10-player, one random player will be Bone Spiked. DPS will be turning to focus on getting the player down as quickly as possible. This presents two things for you as a raid healer. You obviously will need to be focusing on healing the spiked player. I’ve managed to safely keep them up with Rejuvenation and Swiftmend, though this can also be accomplished with a few Nourishesas well. The other thing is people taking Coldflame damage, as they will often be ignoring the flames to get the person off the spike. Again this is usually handled by tossing some Rejuvenations and Wild Growth, saving Swiftmend for anyone who stands in the fire just a bit too long.

The last thing you will be concerned with during the pre-Bone Storm phases is the aforementioned Coldflame. As the raid healer, you will be responsible for topping off anyone who doesn’t get out of the way of the flames quick enough. The damage it does is not too horrible as long as no one just stands there. Its actually more of a nuisance avoiding it yourself, as you will often need to decide between standing their long enough to finish casting a heal, or cutting it short to avoid taking too muchdamage yourself.

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Author: Jacemora

Trash when entering the Lower Spire…

• Depending on how your raid is ran is how you will DPS early trash. For the most part you can AoE mobs down however we have mobs that can explode in this early part of the encounter so we have a tank peel 1 out of the group at a time for single DPS. Also be cautious of chains CC and positioning if you do use some swipe early in the mobs pull.
• Break people out of webs when they get web wrapped.
• Don’t stand in front of the huge skeleton mobs, you will die.
• Don’t wonder around, there are traps that release the large guys and most raids prefer to find these after clearing all the trash leading up to the first boss.

Lord Marrowgar

• Stay behind the boss. Burn Berserk early (hopefully you get hero early as well).
• Break people out of spikes quickly
• Shift to bear and pop barkskin when he whirls. Run away and stay out of fire.
• After whirls get back to boss quickly… use kitty charge.
• Try your best to get off 5cp rips before switching to DPSing spikes that are on other people.

Trash in the 2nd Boss Room

• DPS trash in kill order.
• Be carefull using swipe here as some mobs will most likely be getting chained up.
• When on the big spiders in the back corners if you get the “mark” run away from other players until it is gone.

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by Allison Robert

Between 41 and 50, Ferals should add 2/2 Improved Leader of the Pack to their builds, this talent is the greatest thing since sliced bread. As soon as you add this, Feral’s mana problems while you’re leveling and grinding just vanish; you’ll be gaining 8% of your maximum mana each time ILotP’s self-heal procs. While some Ferals abandon the talent at 80, a number of raid builds still incorporate it because: a). the 4% self-heal on crits adds up to a lot of +healing done for melee, tanks, and Hunters on fights with heavy raid damage, and: b). You’re likely to be out of form to Innervate, battle-rez, and pop Tranquility unless your guild outgears the encounter. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care what role I’m filling in a raid — you can have this talent when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

The positionally-equivalent Balance talent — Improved Moonkin Form — doesn’t have nearly the same effect on leveling speed that ILotP does; it’s one of those things that’s a lot better at 80 than 41. Owlkin Frenzy is more broadly equivalent to ILotP, more so in patch 3.2 with the addition of the mana return component, but the earliest you can get the first rank of OF is level 44. Because OF benefits only your good self and nobody else, it’s shakier as a raid talent at 80 than ILotP, but an obvious pick for Balance PvP builds.

LEVEL 42

5 upgrades to existing skills, but nothing new otherwise:

• Demoralizing Roar, rank 4: standard upgrade.
• Maul, rank 5: standard upgrade.
• Ravage, rank 2: standard upgrade.
• Regrowth, rank 6: standard upgrade.
• Starfire, rank 4: standard upgrade.

LEVEL 44

A key ability makes its debut here, and it’s one of only two new trainable abilities you’ll get between levels 41 and 50.

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by Matticus

After blitzing through Northrend Beasts and Lord Jaraxxus, it’s time to check out Faction Champions from a healer perspective.

Not a traditional fight

This is the key. There is no such thing as aggro management or threat on this encounter. This is an extremely chaotic, fast paced, arena-esque fight. Players that dual spec into PvP may even wish to consider doing so for extra survival or abilities. Your raid group is going to be facing off against 10 champions of the opposing faction (6 on normal). They’re selected from a random pool of NPCs.

• Death Knight
• Balance Druid
• Resto Druid
• Hunter
• Mage
• Holy Paladin
• Retribution Paladin
• Healing Priest
• Shadow Priest
• Rogue
• Caster/Healing Shaman
• Enhancement Shaman
• Warlock
• Warrior

Ones in bold are your raid’s targets of interest. Isn’t it rather odd that they’re all healers?

Execution

It’s difficult to provide an exact outline of what your group has to do. The best I can provide is a general guideline. Go ahead and move your group under the Alliance (or Horde) section first before activating the NPC. It’s a good idea to take stock of what class combination you’re group is going to be facing so that crowd control can be used accordingly.

In most cases, our raid group initially crowd controls every NPC as much as possible other than healers. For example, this week we had a healing Priest, the caster Shaman along with the Holy Paladin. We opted to zero in on the Shaman first. Our Warrior tank started working on the Holy Paladin just by keeping him locked down and interrupted. Placing a Rogue or 3 on the Priest is also a nice idea.

Our basic mentality is that if we run down the healers first, then the other NPC’s are a cake walk. The next dangerous Champion after healers is the Rogue based on the speed at which it can kill a target.

This is an endurance fight. Expect to invest around 10 minutes from start to finish. Each NPC has around 2.4 million health (some have 1.9 million).

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Currently you’re able to use engineering bombs in Swift Flight Form.
Moderately useful. Mainly for fun and just airbombing people while flying
around. Perhaps the first airstrikes in Wintergrasp. Who knows what
possibilities this has. Picture ofcourse generously included.

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