I've been playing with my disc/holy priest alt, and have a hard time figuring out how to heal in the battlegrounds -- especially in pug groups. Part of that is because I'm a dps class out of my element, but part of it is the fog of war.

Grid/Clique give you decent visibility into what's happening to the raid, but I find the out-of-range vs. in-range distinction a little bit too visually indistinguishable, especially when dots and aggro and miscellaneous alert crazinesses are popping up all over the display, making it not-obvious who's in front of you in the crowd getting aced.

Back in The Day, we had Emergency Monitors which could figure out who's close and give you a clickable list of people who need heals who are near you, but obviously that's out with the new lua lockdown.

I find myself locking onto the nearest arms warrior and just keeping him up, hoping that'll bring success.

What steps are people taking to be more-effective healers in battlegrounds? Are there any tricks or mods that significantly lighten the load?

Grid is phenomenal for this task. I have no trouble distinguishing between in and out of range individuals to heal. The trouble really comes when someone is *just* out of range and by moving 10 yards you could get to them - no way of knowing that.

Maybe you need to play with grid a bit to make it more visually distinct on your display. See if there's an opaqueness setting, a shading color, or increase the scale perhaps to make it more visible. I think you have the right tool for the job.

Yeah make sure your OOR indicator is pretty substantial, and get all your squares set up so you can tell when people need cleansing or are low on mana, etc.

Generally I'm one of the few healers in a BG, so it's not so much a matter of healing everyone but deciding who is worth healing when things get hairy. A caster who's out of mana...might be better to just let them die and come back full. Or at least assume that they're just getting the hell out of the battle (and presumably need less healing) so they can go drink.

Also, be sure you reserve a grid square for MS. Unless it's a very valuable player and/or a warrior/feral druid, someone who's MS'ed is much less likely to get a heal from me. If they're at all squishy, they're basically a goner -- no sense blowing heals and mana on a player that's going to be dead in the next 5 seconds anyways. See a solo mage running into the middle of a group of enemies? Let him have his two seconds of glory, and save your healing/mana on members of a larger group that's going in.

Basically, focus your tools around triage, and dole out your heals appropriately.

I agree that the default opacity settings for Grid can make distinguishing whos in and out of range difficult at times. If you go into options for Status, you'll find that you can adjust the opacity of the frame for the Out of Range indicator. I set mine really high so that when they're out of range, they nearly go invisible.

In the advanced settings for the frame, you'll also find an option for adjusting the scale of the Center Icon. I cranked mine down to 6 and scaled my frame up. That way I can still distiguish the icon in the center without it obscuring the health text.

Since I also use Power Auras, I set up an Aura for when my target has Mortal Strike, Wounding Poison, and other similar % Health reduction effects. I also found it useful to set up an aura if my target has Unstable Affliction (so I know that dispelling him is dangerous), or when I have Focus Casting, Clearcasting, or am missing my Inner Fire buff.

Grid is nice for frames, but I found that I gained much more situational awareness from Power Auras simply because I can create feedback where I want it for things that interest me.

Another tip - make sure if you're playing a priest that you don't have curses and poisons that you can't cleanse cluttering up your grid interface.

What Melador said, basically.

Identify the couple of players in the BG who aren't retarded and make them look pro. There's no sense trying to keep everyone up. First of all it won't work and second most of the scrubs are just wasting your mana unless they have a way out of the damage train.

I'd just wear a mix favoring more heavily towards PVE gear. Most people in BGs aren't going to be supremely well geared as opposed to an Arena match.

Pitbull or Xperl also work for range finding, as do a number of other mods I'm sure.

And yeah it is really worth repeating that 95% of people in most battlegroups are completely worthless to heal. You just have to look around and use good judgment, or just make snap calls based on gear. Good players will certainly thank you and maybe even strive to keep people off of you.

I find watching the battlefield and tab targeting enemies who target your friendly players and quickly "F" and heal/shield/dispel them quite easy. AV isn't anymore about 40v40 on the SP bridge for 2 hours, so it's easier to just stay a bit behind and watch what's going on than staring at a grid and try to react according to it. I play with very few addons, quartz and proximo (for arena mainly) and I play healer, as druid and priest (both in 1800-1900 arena brackets).
But maybe it's my 2 year experience that helps me predict who needs most healing and my perception of "most urgent target" to heal is much higher since as you stated, you only played healer for a short time coming from a dps class. But even so, I think that healing in BG really isn't about watching a grid/raid bars, but rather the field itself, and only have few helper addons for your target/tot frames with debuff coloring and such. It just takes a bit of practice, but if I were you, I'd try to be less addon dependent.

Healing in BG's is easier than Arena. If you are playing with team mates

PUG BG healing is, sadly, all about staying close behind a good melee player. Pref. warrior since they die the hardest. Others die before you get the heal off and range dps often share the same space as you do.


Before TBC we did alot of WSG raids, our setup was, hunter in ramp with frost trap, 5-7 ppl by zerker house, depending on if we had flag defence. And three offence, often, mage druid and pala. This group of 5-7 ppl could often stop whole zergs because of healing and killing healers. But it is also imperitative to let warriors and rogues know that NEVER EVER move out of range. Killing blows never count and chasing ppl just to "finish them" is a big nono. This way won several games.

If DPS could learn to wait for the enemy to come, the healing would ease up alot in WSG. AB defence is better, but I still find my self too far away from the flag saving DPS and getting the flag capped behind.

The reason all healers hate healing in bg's is that you have no chance what so ever alone. But team up with a pal DPS on vent and the whole experience is much better. Sorting per healing is always a good thing.

My experience at group healing is the exact opposite from most here on a resto druid. It's my alt, so I feel we're in similar shoes. Hopefully my experience can prove helpful.

Regarding unit frames: I haven't been able to find one I love. Instead I keep my eye on the battlefield, not the bars. You can estimate how much damage someone is taking by watching bolts fly at them, a warrior charge them, etc. I have enemies targeted more often than allies, watching target of target to see who is they are about to attack. Sometimes this backfires and someone you didn't even realize was at low health keels over, but very often it beats staring at Grid or your healing frames of choice. The added benefit, is you are able to keep track of everyone's location more easily, and are better able to anticipate incoming damage (crucial as a healing druid).

Regarding who to heal: I find that so long as I have water, mana isn't a huge concern. So I do the same thing as everyone else and identify players that are worthy of monitoring, but I also toss heals to other players whenever I can. DPS is often so unfocused in BGs that a single HoT can buy someone 7 more seconds of life, which gets them an additional HoT. For very low mana cost you can sometimes keep the less skilled/geared players alive, reducing pressure on you, and on your pro dps friend as well.

After a skirmish is over, with limited exceptions, I heal everyone around me to full. I'll also HoT warlocks and whisper them to lifetap. It ensures that your team can spend more of its collective time in combat as opposed to eating/drinking/actively trying to die.

Other stuff:

Positioning is a huge part of healing in BGs. If you've played affliction on your lock, you hopefully know how to stay relatively anonymous while healing. BG dps very often develops horrible tunnel vision, targeting the closest enemy to them until one of them dies. So stay behind your force, constantly moving to be as close to max healing range as you can afford to be.

Lastly, I initially found healing to be frustrating, because it was so reactive. I wasn't dictating the flow of combat in any way, just removing debuffs and compensating for enemy damage. Two tips can reduce this frustration:

Play for disruption/CC as well as healing. It's a bit different for a priest I'd imagine, since your CC is cooldown based and serves a defensive function primarily, but I can occasionally have one player cycloned, another rooted, and a third hibernated. This can dramatically reduce the healing you need to put out.

Healers often have the best view of the fight overall. DPS may not see or care about an enemy priest that is healing over all of the damage they are doing. Don't hesitate to yell for a target switch (I'll sometimes chain cyclone their target to force a switch ;-). It's lead to this maxim: Always treat people with respect in BGs, but rarely defer to their judgment.

I learned quickly to customize quite a bit of my Grid layout to save a bit of searching and frustration when looking to heal:

• Completely hide people not in range of heals
• Remove the center-debuff indicator because it clutters up the health bar.
• As noted by a previous poster, make sure Mortal Strike is visible and has its own corner of the frame.
• Make sure anything you can dispell (for me, just curses and poisons) are visible and have their own corners so that you can dispel them easily.
• Optionally, make sure that HoTs are displayed in an additional corner.
• Make sure health-bars are "black and white" so that you can easily tell someone's health at a quick glance. On mine, the healthbars are a somewhat-bright green and the defecit is black. Also, I prefer not to have any numbers, just names.
• Make sure their name is visible and in the color of their class.
• Make sure dead people are blacked out so you don't confuse them with almost-dead people.

I don't display any debuffs in grid for BGs. I really just couldn't be bothered removing random debuffs from people and if it's important I'll likely see it ingame. It depends how much you're able to actually view the battlefield though, and it takes some work before you can heal effectively and see the battle at the same time, but I think it pays off to develop that ability.

When i'm pugging as disc/holy in wsg or AB, that's pretty much all i do. Assisting off your enemy not only helps you know where the opposing force is spending it's energy, it helps you know when you've got to move before you get hit with that 3-4k frostbolt, or that you need to shield yourself, or w/e. Once you do that for a bit, it becomes instinctual.

Of course, you could just run with a full group on vent. Makes healing easier, plus it's not as frustrating.

I have always found that healing in BG's created a case of sensory overload.

I found that turning off some mods (or simply disabling them) and making my screen fairly devoid of clutter helped greatly.

The key is to stay behind some big folks such as warriors, or even the main group. This way you can focus on what's going on ahead of you. I always liked to simply click on people in the world and cast heals that way. I like a good tooltip mod to help distinguish healthbars; it made things a lot easier. I liked the tooltip to be anchored to my mouse.

When in doubt just /focus a geared MS warrior and be his personal healbot. Majority of the time they thank you and often try to keep the odd rogue off your back.

One thing of note is if you like to stand back away from the main group you may get more rogues on you then normal. For me this wasn't much of a problem because my earthshield ticks negated a lot of their damage. For some reason rogues don't like wound poison in BG's

For me the key was removing clutter, and don't try to heal like a raid. It's not possible to worry about everything so simply stick to one thing (healing) and try to do it well.

Also, if you're going to be focusing on a particular warrior, make sure you let them know! A well-geared warrior with I've-got-a-personal-healer confidence is a powerful thing.

It's also really useful to target the enemy warrior and assist off of him for his charge target, shield that target and you've reduced alot of early burst dmg, a good thing to get in the habit of doing.