That's what I do, on top of Grid. I couldn't stand Clique; applying pressure to click interferes with the smooth movement of the mouse. My left hand gets into the rhythm of the GCD and my right follows my awareness of the fight as it plays out across the raid frame. I've tried pretty much every healing UI setup from RaidBars to present-day and this is by far the most effective setup I've found, with respect to maximizing my GCDs and reacting quickly to damage, aggro, and debuffs.

With respect to educating healers, I agree with those who have said PvP is the best trainer. Battlegrounds, not Arenas. The novice healer sees heavy damage on random targets and resorts to whack-a-mole; the veteran picks up cues from the environment to anticipate the damage and triage his teammates. That kind of anticipation and awareness is what you need your healers to learn; efficiency is just a matter of having the right gear and tools.

Patchwerk would be one of the bad examples. I can imagine telling a person to stand in a certain spot target this offtank, cast this spell, this rank, use pots and runes earilest possible moment.

A good encounter from vanilla WoW would be Sartura - here's four flying lawnmowers who are going to be killing people left and right tanks are going to do their best to contain them but it's really wishful thinking, people are also going to be punted straight across the room 200 yards diameter. However I imagine she just doesn't do as much damage anymore.

Patchwerk was one of the first examples where shamans started picking up healing way, people started downranking heals and going for max efficacy in droves... so while it may not be much to actually execute in the end, the theorycraft for healing behind patchwerk is probably the most game changing of any encounter in WoW to date.
The healing in our guild can be classified as pre and post Patchwerk.

Exactly. Healing component to Patchwerk is organizational overhead from raid lead or heal lead. It's optional for first offtank healer to understand why is he mashing this button as opposed to that one - there's no interaction in what you're doing. I'll give you second offtank since you can predict when he's going to be taking damage - you look at the first offtank. You can't castcancel on first offtank at all, the UI just isn't fast enough. You have to spam.

Sorry but I found patchwerk to be the easiet encounter to heal to be honest ... heal your target and cancel if they are full hp , down mana pots. It's so stupidly easy to heal that i've tanked him and played a healer on my laptop to heal my self at the same time.

I find encounters where the priest has to acually be aware of their surroundings like twin emps for example , a larger challenge. Large tank damage , lots of random factors that the healer has to be ready for at any given time.

The [target=mouseover] really is a nice function and one I use for decursing as well as for my healers on the rare occasions that I heal these days. Another favorite along the same lines is the /cast [help] HealofChoice; [target=targettarget] HealofChoice. While WoW doesn't stress assist-healing much, I do sometimes like to have the boss targeted rather than the tank.

Little macros and other silliness aside, the real tricks for healers seem to be the same as any class. First you have to drill in the fundamental math and mechanics (what spells are ideal for hpps, hppm, the 5-second rule, class perks and so on) and then gear selection for that purpose. Then you can move on to practicing certain types of healing and finally graduate to executing these skills in a setting designed specifically to distract and divert attention.

If you read what I wrote though, I claimed as well that it is easy to perform; the point was that the key to patchwerk was the organization and elements of efficacy and choice in spells, consumables, raid makeup. Most healers didn't HAVE to heal in an efficient manner until patchwerk... On twin emps you could spam flash heal all day and still get by... but you had to move around, so its harder to execute, but we're now talking about completely different things. Was pretty clear from my original post.

This is surprisingly true with quickly leveled alts or alts of people with a minimal (guild only) friends base. I'm at 41 on Carlotta and I've been on one instance run total (SM library for my hypnotic blade. GG). By the time I hit 50 on Bekah (my priest) and started keying for Onyxia (And thus the multitude of BRD runs...) I had done SM maybe 2-3 times and that was *it*. I didn't do a single instance run from 1-55 on my warlock, although at 55 I started getting power geared through strat/scholo.

I don't expect to see another instance on Carlotta until I hit 62-64... which is fine for ME since this is my second mage to that level (I retired Amelia, my skywall mage, at 62 with a bunch of grouping experience so this is basically part deux) but it could be really rough on a healer.

Another good tactic we used for a long time to train healers- pairs. Pair a weak healer with a strong healer on a very basic assignment, and have the strong healer gradually cut back on their support- forcing the weaker healer to slowly fill in the gap until they're set to the task solo. This takes time though, and strong healers who are "in the loop". We had 3 healer officers for a long time and it worked really really well- but the stronger healers MUST know how to cut back and let the weaker healer learn to cover the problems on their own.... otherwise you wind up with a parasitic relationship.

One of the best parts of a guild atmosphere, imo, is the after raid vent or guild chat where people start actually talking about what went wrong, what went right, and the theory behind it all. Mostly it's the math people or the gamers, and everyone else just listens while they duke it out. Many people are basically sponges and if you create an environment where it's not only okay to just chill out in the channel and listen to the people who know WAY more than you ever wanted to know- but to ask questions- even stupid ones- the entire audience comes out with stronger players through osmosis. One of the bigger problems is finding a gamer or mathematician healer willing to start babbling for hours on the theory of healing- and having people knowledgeable enough to hold the conversation with them so your healers can listen. Most of my experience with healers is that they very much tend to be a listening group instead of jumping in. I learned more about the theory of dps and tanking that way than I did healing- most of my healing came from places like EJ. EJ can be downright TERRIFYING though to someone who's just looking for general tips. It took me 2 months of lurking with saucers for eyes before I was willing to start debating theory. Everyone sounds smart... with lots of pretty numbers and experience. =P

Patchwerk got our healers *thinking* about the theory of healing. It basically shook them out of their zen long enough to reevaluate everything. When we got to him and the raid leader announced the healing strategy (we did 2k heals, even tank splits, no prediction- only cancel) it was so totally counter to what the majority of healers in guild had even considered before- they couldn't even determine which heals WOULD hit for 2k with their +heal. That lead to a discussion of coefficients- lots of the healers downloading theorycraft and about 2 weeks of the majority of our healers trying to determine why the mechanics of the fight supported strict healing instead of "by feel" and why healing still had to BE by feel (cancels required to maintain enough mana)... along with how THEIR talents impacted the fight compared to OTHER talents. It was the first major discussion of regen because *everyone* needed the basic knowledge. Previously on Emps (the other hard healing fight we had) we did assignments based on the strength of the healers and the weaker healers were never in important enough of a position to screw it up- basically 5-6 healers could support everything. Patchwerk was the perfect theorycraft fight for tanks, healers, and dps. It's a true shame TBC lacks one quite so perfectly tuned.

For reflex healing though- AQ40 was great. Run Mechannar on heroic with your healers, it's easy badges- but more important, that first major boss is beautiful for teaching spacial awareness.

Agreed 100%

This is an older thread that covered some basics of healing spell choices (motivated by the omnipresent Emps.) Some of the stuff is still worth a read, even if the specifics are showing their age.

I really reckon that Twins and defintely cthuin makes more of a difference to healers than patchwerk did. Learning to heal whilst moving is much much harder than just taking more drugs than a chinese swimmer and trying to cancel the odd one.

It took us about a month to kill Cthun due to retarded dying (to a large extent by the healers) and about 8 pulls to kill patchwerk (about 3 of these were aborted due to fuckups by the offtanks and rogues getting trigger happy).

Just let them keep healing and dont allow people to blame them for wipes due to their inexperience. They will really improve from the practice.

2 main issues with healers:

1) Healers who lack spacial awareness. They stand still and let things kill them and are doing poorly at their job due to lack of being alive. This also includes healers who are apparently blind/deaf and can't see people's hp dropping or hear their instructions over vent. They'd get hit by the bus if it came careening down the road without a warning- and even WITH a warning, some might die.

2) Healers who are unaware of mechanics/techniques of healing and make poor choices repeatedly and are doing poorly because they're just not punching the buttons in a good order or don't really understand what/why they're doing it.

You can have good movers who are total idiots about the mechanics, and good mechanics people who trip over their own feet standing up.... but honestly folks- people can be slow to catch on to either problem and the solutions are entirely different. Patchwerk type fights help the people who are behind on mechanics. Sartura/C'Thun type fights help the slow movers. If they're shy on both awareness and mechanics, well tackle whichever one you think they'll grasp better first.

I like teaching mechanics first because you can apply good mechanics to growing awareness and see immediate results while the opposite (teaching people how to move while they still don't understand what they're supposed to be pressing while they're moving) tends to just frustrate everyone involved. But once you've got either down, focus on the rest ^.^

Most of the time, you have assigned MT healers though...the fact that a rogue gets hit more often than not shouldnt affect the MT staying alive. Also, if someone is taking more damage then they are supposed to, they are most likely going to die. Use your damage meter to find out who takes the most damage and why then fix it.

The hardest part of wow though, is the healing game. If a priest doesnt know that dropping down a few ranks on a heal will let him heal more over time, then tell him. If he doesnt know what situations to use G. Heal over Flash Heal, tell him.

The biggest thing they need is experience. You might suffer through boss fights now, but if you keep your cool and analyze what goes wrong and attempt to fix it, the healers will catch up.

On a slightly related note, how would you say a healers gear affects how good a healer they are?
And also "off specs".

My Kara group went from 2 resto spec shaman, a holy priest & a shadow priest to 1 resto shaman, 1 enhancement DW shaman (he picked up a 2h axe of Prince and decided to respec), a holy paladin that had hit 70 a short time before and still had alot of +dmg gear on, and the shadow priest still.

Suffice it to say, I felt that healing on Shade was alot harder than it had been previous weeks (I got taken in as a "fill-in" healer, and as such had never done anything pre-Curator until a Maidin sub this rotation).

The questions are: do you think healers need to gear up in a similar fashion to DPS/Tanks, and does enough gear make up for being an off spec when main healing.

Personally, I've found that even with a minimal amount of "good" healing gear, with enough skill you can still make it work. I've been caught with my DPS gear on a few times (+490 spell damage/healing) on the first pulls of instances and didn't really notice until after a few pulls, when I kept going OOM. The gear really helps with longevity, and pure healing power, but if played right, you can still be a positive factor.

Enough gear/consumables can make up for throughput, no questions. This is what kept shadow priests healing pre-tbc viable.

Gear/Consumables CANNOT make up for emergency buttons/buffs (Inspiration I'm looking at you) and the distance between a shadow priest and a holy priest in terms of efficiency is (with the introduction of GHeal as *the* primary healing spell- which holy priests can strengthen while shadow priests cannot- opposed to flash heal which was only marginally upgraded in holy) growing wide enough to make throughput equality difficult.

The chasm yawns wider and makes the people on the fence think really *really* hard about their spec.

As for gear- gear choices make a big difference, but it's on an individual basis and related, strongly, to the players healing strategy and how well they know what meshes well. A player with the best m/5 gear in the game who insists on max rank gheal with 5-10 second breaks for regen isn't making use of their gear- they ought to be wearing spirit gear. Vice versa, a player decked out in spirit gear without meditation and spamming flash heals is screwing themselves.

Give a player the best gear in the game- but totally unsuited to their playstyle and it'll play like they have bad gear.

Not to mention how much it is as healer to compensate for bad gear. Its amazing how long someone with very bad healing gear can keep going if he chain pots super mana.

Holy cow, thanks a lot for reminding me of pre-2.0 and 3.5s heals in feral spec.

Now practically almost every effective druid spec seems to require Naturalist. In that sense, we're a pretty lucky hybrid class.

Indeed, this mainly effects Shadow Priests or atleast used to, now that they dont need Silent Resolve perhaps they can invest the points in Holy.

However my experience of people wanting to be an offspec is that they really want to not waste any talent points in anything relating to healing unless it benefits their damage.

I'm a relatively newly-minted horde paladin (having switched to give the guild a reliable raiding paladin down the road).

I've seen quite a bit on Clique/Grid mentioned here--could someone compare and/or contrast against the Healbot mod? Healbot has been working well for me for the most part in 5 man instances, but I wonder if there aren't some advantages to Clique/Grid that I might appreciate, particularly in 25 man content.

I too have noticed night and day when it comes to just clicking to cast a spell rather than targeting and then hitting a key (not my strongest suit anyway--I prefer to be mouse driven anyhow.)

nice, im checking it out now. Ive been using Natur since it was Carnival, and I loved it for spell casts and what not, I found that reapplying debuffs like Demo and Thunderclap either would stop showing or if another warrior applied would no longer show when I reapplied.

Well said, and so true. And to add further weight to your statement, Blink! is all about such "instinctive" play.
I strongly believe in the "DPS is a science, healing is an art" sentiment. During my time as a Mage I was the "Mathematician" type, I knew everything about my class and character (hp/mana value, spec, mana cost of spells, etc)... however, as a Priest I've gradually inclined towards the Zenn Bhuddist type. I still rely on mods tho, but not excessively as before.

I really liked Grand Widow (and to a lesser extent Hydromancer) as a fight requiring movement, sometimes high healing required, and triage.