Surprisingly, I've had a few questions asking for advice on learning how to heal, mostly shaman.

Most of these forums deal with the picky little details, but nothing really on general healing itself.

As I'm not much of a generalist, and most of my knowledge boils down to trying things out, what little gems of advice do you guys have on Learning2Heal?

This thread is from a while ago, but there must something useful there Teaching Healers to Heal

Two conjoined factors: Desire and Experience.

A player that desires to improve their healing will analyze their experience each run, identify their strengths in style and gear and the group composition. It's an evolution; I don't know as I could really tell someone "do X and Y" without feeling like I'm giving them a vague generalization. Something like "before a pull, spam rank 1 Healing Wave to stack Healing Way and possibly get Ancestral Fortitude procced" is something that someone that wants to maximize their capability would have thought of, and only time and experience will bring those realizations out.

I disagree. It'll help in that it's experience casting healing spells in dynamic situations, but there are a lot of things that don't effectively make the jump. Optimizing your gear, for one. Arena gear is typified by maxing your HP, resilience, +healing and crit. You blow all your cooldowns as soon as they're relevant. You don't manage consumable use, you don't really manage your mana either. Downranking is rare and fast heals are the key to success. Especially as a Priest or Druid you are able to control fights in a way that you simply cannot in raids. In arenas, you keep your teammates alive no matter what...there's no prioritizing, it's all or nothing. Essentially, you have a degree of control in Arenas that you will almost never get as a raid healer. PvP healers in my experience tend to tunnel-vision on specific targets, because in PvP you just spam. You spam that guy being focus-fired until he dies or your team is able to take the heat off him.

My biggest tip for raid healing is planning. As soon as you start casting a heal, you figure out your next heal. Pre-targetting (selecting your next healing target) gives you a huge leg up. Especially when all your heals are 2.5 seconds (or around there), you NEED to use that time to plan 1-2 heals in advance. Always be thinking 5 seconds ahead of yourself.

Second, ALWAYS be casting. If your tank hits an avoidance streak, great. Cancel your heals by the halfway point, so if he DOES get hit he'll never be more than 2-3 seconds away from a heal landing. If you ever stop casting and wait for a hit, you are REACTING rather than anticipating, and you're behind the game.

The tough thing is, like tanking, healing can't be taught. You can ask a Rogue what his finisher rotation is, you can ask a Mage about his AB/Fireball cycle. Great healing is a product of experience, which is why it's very important to hang on to your good healers, just like you would your MTs.

edit: I forgot this, but NEVER look at Effective Healing meters. If somebody (usually a Paladin who spammed top rank HL on the MT for the entire fight nonstop with lolinfinitemana) links them in guild/raid chat, ignore them. More specific breakdowns (who healed this particular tank?) can be useful if applied correctly. Do your job. Go above-and-beyond when you can afford it, but don't plan on it. Focus on your assignments. If your tank dies, take it personally and vow not to let it happen again. Where you end up on healing meters counts for nothing. If you never ever let your assignments die, you are already better than 95% of healers out there. Take pride in it.

For one make sure they enjoy their role as a healer. As monotonous as the job can get sometimes in raids its very critical that healers enjoy healing rather than just going through the motions. I tend to challenge the healers of my guild to best each other in several different categories. Some heartfelt competition can really keep things interesting at times.

Ghando has it on the button pretty much. Always be casting a heal as a healer. You always have the option of canceling it so there is no reason any healer should never have one casting unless they are silenced somehow. Do not every get into a bad habit of being a reactionary healer. Doing so will consistently get your tanks killed on just about every encounter that incurs spike damage. Stay focused on the specific timers of a boss because you will need to plan ahead your next heal or two.

Know your role and stick to it. Don't stray away from your specific assignment until you feel comfortable enough with a specific encounter to do so. Thinking your hot shit and healing others when you primary focus is supposed to be that OT tanking the adds will get you into some hot water pretty fast. Always stay focused on your role within an encounter and perform it well.

Re: targeting, a few macro's may be useful

/cast [target=mouseover] <insert heal>
/cast [target=focus] <insert heal>

/focus & /clearfocus are used to set and remove your focus targets

These are useful for getting your targetting going faster

I wrote this up for my guild alliance forums.

Preliminary

You should already be familiar with basic healing - that is, you know what healing spells are available to your class and when they're best used, and you've gathered a good amount of gear with +healing, intellect, stamina, spirit and mana regeneration. You see damage, you heal it.

But where do you go from there when the tank and your party seem to be taking an impossible amount of damage? Here are some tips and strategies that may help.

Situational Awareness

Know the fight! All enemies have certain abilities that will do certain amounts of damage. Some like to cleave, some AOE, some throw 'random secondary target' spells that do significant amounts of damage, some will fear anyone standing nearby, or a random person. Experience will teach you which enemy does what.

Avoid death. You may have to move away from bombs or bomb-targets. Or you might be standing close to enemies that like to AOE or cleave. Or you might need to move to a safe zone periodically, to avoid a massive killing AOE. A dead healer does no healing.

Watch where people are. If the tank moves in order to gather up enemies and gets out of range of your heals, he's not trying to spite you, he's doing his job. You need to move when the battle is moving.

If someone pulled adds, or a crowd-controlled enemy breaks loose, it's a good idea to hold off on heals for a bit (unless someone desperately needs healing) so the tank has time to get things back under control.

And of course, you may have utility skills that could actually prevent damage from being done. For instance, priests can dispel magic from enemies, such as the Astromancers' highly destructive fire shields or Temporus's attack- and run-speed buff. Stuns, fears, and Cyclone can put enemies on hold for a while. Watch for opportunities to stop damage from happening.

Anticipate the Damage

Prepare your heals before the target has even taken damage, and cancel them if they don't take the damage after all. You can cancel a heal by moving, jumping in place, or by hitting the 'escape' key, though this latter has the possible side-effect of de-targeting you if your cancel is too late.

On a hard-hitting melee enemy, constantly queue up a heal, then cancel it at around a second or a half-second before it would have finished, if your target isn't hurt, and start a new heal immediately. If you wait for the tank to be hit, then you've introduced a half second or more of 'reaction time', and the tank may go down before your heal can complete.

On enemies that you know will AOE, either they have a casting time or the AOE doesn't do too much damage (or they need to be nerfed). As soon as you know the AOE is coming, or if you think it will be coming, throw protective heals on party members - heal-over-time spells, or shields, or 'reactive heals' like Earthshield and Prayer of Mending.

Sometimes it's useful to target the boss, so you can see what abilities he's casting. You can cast your spells this way: hit a spell button, then hit 'f' to assist the boss, and your spell will be cast on whatever the boss is targeting. Or, if the boss is sacrificing someone, which means that person will be taking extra damage over time, then hit 'f' when he's casting, and you'll be targeted on the person who needs to heal, and can start saving his or her life.

In some raids, it's necessary for several people to be healing the tank at the same time. You need to spread out the healing workload - instead of using your biggest heal, which will run you dry if you accidentally heal when no damage was done, use a medium-sized heal, and count on other people to also land their heal. Stagger your heals, so that if the tank takes a sudden hit, in the next two seconds, there should always be a heal landing to pop him out of the danger zone. If everyone is casting their heals at the same time, then there's a three-second window in which the tank could die before any heal lands.

But it all boils down to, start your heal before damage happens, don't wait for it.

Don't Heal on the Pull

The standard measure of threat is damage caused to the enemy. If all else is equal, anyone standing in melee range of an enemy will pull the enemy off when they have done 110% the damage, or threat, of the enemy's current target. Beyond melee range, you have to generate 130% the threat to pull the enemy.

So, don't stand on top of the tank or an enemy! By being too close to an enemy, you're greatly reducing your 'safety margin', from 30% to 10%.

Healing threat is half the amount healed, i.e. if you heal someone for 3000, then you have just generated 1500 threat. This threat is then divided among all 'active' enemies, i.e. if there are five enemies, none of them crowd-controlled in some form, each enemy now has 300 points of threat from you.

If the tank has just shot one of the enemies and hasn't done anything else to generate threat on the other enemies, then these enemies will proceed to stomp on you.

Therefore, don't heal as soon as the pull has started - time your heal to land after the tank has had a little time to generate aggro on each of the enemies.

If the tank is dying before he or she can establish enough aggro on the group, then there is a pull issue. Explore alternate methods of making the pull, or be prepared to hit Fade (for priests) as soon as you've healed.

Keep the Party Topped Off with Downranked Spells

You may already know that the amount of bonus healing you receive for lower level spells is reduced based on their level - but that doesn't make these spells useless. In higher-level instances, the enemy can do enough damage to two-shot, or even one-shot a tank that isn't topped off. Cleaves and AOEs can also take down party members that were low on health.

While it's tempting to stick with your biggest heal and wait as long as possible until using it will fully heal a target, so you can regenerate mana for longer, this logic will not appeal to dead party members.

Lifebloom is an excellent candidate for top-off healing for druids, and paladins can use Flash of Light for minor amounts of damage. Otherwise, use downranked heals. Chain Heal and Prayer of Healing may be efficient with several damaged party members.

In addition to the things already said, prioritizing is a big part of the healing role. In what order should I heal my party members? When multiple party members are being hit, who is it most crucial for? I believe these questions are something every healer should have in mind when they heal.

I admit, for most people in here this seem quite obvious, but unfortunatly there are healers out there who think spamming max rank flash heal on one target at the time (till their target's healthbar is topped) is the solution to all healing.

Binki you posted in the original thread :p

Teaching Healers to Heal

Yeah, I know :p

I guess this is a bit different in that the thread linked there is for leaders getting their healers to improve, while this is more Healing 101 for beginners..

Some similarities I guess.

*reminds self to post both into the Significant Threads page*

Definitely. And that reminds me-- If you have proc-based buffs like Ancestral Healing or Healing Way, a good way to make sure your tank has that buff up is to spam a rank 1 version of the spell that procs it. Couple that with a Lower City Prayerbook and you can stay outside FSR while keeping up that buff.