Healing Guide (Dragonflight 10.2.6) (2024)

Table of Contents

• 1. The Purpose of This Article
• +2. Introduction
  • 2.1. What is Healing?
• 3. The Attributes of a Great Healer
• +4. General Concerns
  • 4.1. Recommended Add-ons and User Interface Settings
    • 4.1.1. Raid Frames
    • 4.1.2. Buff and Proc Monitoring
    • 4.1.3. ElvUI
    • 4.1.4. Raid Announcements
  • 4.2. Keybinding and Macros
  • 4.3. Gear Optimization
  • 4.4. Knowledge of the Encounter
• +5. Healing-Specific Concerns
  • 5.1. How to Heal?
    • 5.1.1. Mana Management
    • 5.1.2. Triage
  • 5.2. Assignments
    • 5.2.1. Tank Healing
    • 5.2.2. Raid Healing
    • 5.2.3. Cooldown Rotations
    • 5.2.4. Respecting Your Assignment
  • 5.3. Overhealing
• 6. Conclusions
• 7. Changelog

This article will cover all the important aspects of the healing role. Theinformation contained here will be of interest both to new players and tohealing veterans, and reflects the state of healing in the current expansion.

We will not go into class-specific details. Talent specs, gemming, orreforging advice are beyond the scope of this article. For such information,we recommend that you read our healing class guides.

This guide is mainly targeted at healing in a raid environment, but a lot ofthe things we mention will, naturally, also apply to dungeons and PvP healing.

Healing is, in our opinion, the most stressful and difficult role toperform. There are a multitude of factors involved in performing well as ahealer, but we feel that the most important ones are reactivity (greatlyhelped by a proper UI setup) and class and encounter knowledge.

While part of being a great healer comes from personalskill (which we will attempt to define and dissect below), it is alsoextremely important to familiarize yourself with various concepts which, forthe most part, are counter-intuitive.

While, no doubt, some of you will find this part to be extremely basicand unneeded, we feel that, to have a proper discussion about healing, theact of healing must first be defined.

Healing is the act of using spells which restore the health of friendlyplayers (your party or raid members) in order to help them survive thevarious forms of avoidable and unavoidable damage present in all PvE and PvPencounters.

This is a very basic definition, of course. In today's raiding environment,healers also often have to dispel friendly players of various harmfuldebuffs (magic debuffs, curses, poisons, and diseases).

Additionally, in organized raiding groups, cooldown (or even group) healingis often done based on assignments. Group leaders will establish a healercooldown rotation that handles the most difficult enemy abilities. If theencounter requires the group to heavily spread out, you might be assigned tofocus on healing your group.

In PvP, rather than using your cooldowns at predefined times, you will look touse them when the enemy team uses their offensive cooldowns in order to counterthe incoming damage burst.

There are currently 6 classes which can perform the healing role, inWorld of Warcraft:

• Druids: the Restoration specialization;
• Monks: the Mistweaver specialization;
• Paladins: the Holy specialization;
• Priests: the Holy and Discipline specializations;
• Shamans: the Restoration specialization;
• Evokers: the Preservation specialization.

Essentially, healers will be targeting damaged friendly players andcasting helpful / healing spells on them.

In order for this article's structure to be easily apparent to you fromthe start, we will list all the attributes of a great healer. Afterward,we will detail each of these and provide you with tips in order tomaximize your performance.

1. Be able to use your character reliably and with ease, at any timeduring the encounter. This includes being comfortable with your user interfaceand your keybinds.
2. Be able to anticipate what will happen in a given encounter,in terms of damage (this involves knowing the encounter mechanics) and knowhow to properly react to it (this involves knowing your ownclass).
3. Understand your role within the team, and the importance ofknowing your healing assignment.

As you can see, the first point relates to external factors, notnecessarily related to healing. You must be extremely familiar with youruser interface and with your keybinds (of which you should make extensiveuse).

The second point relates to encounter and class knowledge. You must befamiliar with the encounter mechanics in order to know what to expect, and youmust be familiar with your own class in order to know what spells to use inorder to properly react to the damage in the fight.

The third and final point relates to understanding that you are part of ateam and that respecting your own (and other players') assignments iscrucial.

In addition to these three main points, there are other finer points,which you must keep in mind, such as overhealing (and how to avoidit) and Mana management.

More than any other role, healing is about precision and reaction. Yourability to perform your role will be strongly affected, every step of theway, by the ease with which you can input commands to your character.

Tanks and DPS players do, sometimes, have to make split-second decisions,and these decisions can sometimes impact the outcome of the encounter. Healers,on the other hand, have to make this kind of decision every time that theyuse a spell.

Therefore, we feel that it is important to dedicate this section to givingyou the necessary information required to tune your character for properperformance.

The standard Blizzard interface has improved greatly over the years (oftenby including features that were previously supported only by user-createdadd-ons). It is possible to perform the healing role using only this userinterface, but we feel that it is far from optimal.

Below, we list several user interface elements which we feel require furthercustomization. Keep in mind that, at all times, your goal is to make your userinterface aid you in completing your goals and not have it hinder you. We feelthat it is a very good investment to spend a large amount of time tweaking andtuning your interface, as it will have a huge impact on your gameplay.

The raid frames are the most important aspect of your user interface. Thisis where your eyes will rest for the majority of the encounter, and you willneed to be very comfortable with their appearance and layout.

There are several add-ons which present you with an improved (and highlycustomizable) version of the Blizzard raid frames. Before providing you withtheir names, we will list a few things which you should keep in mind whencustomizing your raid frames.

• Ensure that they are large enough so that your eyes do not become tiredfrom focusing on them at length (which you will have to do).
• Ensure that they have a position on your screen which is relativelycentral (usually under your character).
• Ensure that they show all the relevant buffs and debuffs present onplayers.
• Situationally, configure the pet frames to also be displayed (this option isusually turned off by default).

Obviously, these guidelines are subject to your own personal preference. Themost important thing is that you are comfortable with your interface and thatit does not hinder your actions.

We cannot stress enough how important it is that the relevant buffs and(especially) debuffs are properly displayed on the raid frames. As a healer,you will often find yourself having to dispel or cleanse raid members ofvarious debuffs (magic, poison, curse or disease). Furthermore, and this isdetailed below, you should have your dispel or cleanse ability properlykeybound.

The most popular (and reliable) raid frame add-ons are:

• VuhDo: our author's choice,VuhDo is highly customizable, and you can find how in our VuhDo guide.
• Enhanced raid frame indicators: allows you to use Blizzard's default raid bars
• Grid2: A popular option with many plug-ins which allow you to further enhance and customize it.
• HealBot Continued: another popular option.

Most healing specializations have various healing cooldowns and procs. Itis essential to master these and use them to your advantage in order tomaximize your performance.

We would recommend you to use WeakAuras.This highly customizable add-on allows you to create visual and auditory markers,to help you track any number of things.

You can also find a huge library of various Weak Auras at wago.io,out of which we recommend Healing Raid Cooldownsto track the usage of healer raid cooldowns.

In all of our class guides, we recommend usingElvUI. This is acomprehensive interface add-on that will change the way your interface looks inmany ways. We find that its minimalistic approach allows you to see a largeamount of your screen and focus on the important events.

Communication is extremely important as a healer. Generally, healers havemany cooldowns which affect other players (raid damage reduction cooldowns,Mana regeneration cooldowns, single-target damage reduction cooldowns). It is,therefore, useful to have a means of communicating the use of these cooldownswithout choking your voice-chat medium.

We recommend Raeli's Spell Announcer,a highly customizable add-on. We suggest that all raid-wide damage reductioncooldowns and all raid-wide Mana regeneration cooldowns be announced in raid chat.

Other single-target abilities (such as Pain Suppression) can simplybe configured to be whispered to the targeted player.

So far, we have covered some important aspects related to add-ons anduser interface settings. If you have customized your interface suitably, youshould now have a good view of the encounter area and quick and easy accessto your raid frames.

The next step is making sure that you can deliver your healing spells in theshortest possible amount of time. Having an excellent reaction time is animportant quality of a good healer, and this is hard to accomplish withoutthe use of keybinds. Furthermore, selecting a target from your raid frames(by clicking it) and then using one of your spells, even through a keybinding,is not optimal.

Any ability which you may need to use during combat should bekeybound. This does not only refer to healing spells but also to dispels,healing cooldowns, Mana regeneration abilities, and trinkets.

Missing even a second to click an ability, as a healer, can often provedisastrous to your raid.

Moreover, we advise you to make extensive use of mouse-over macros. Mouse-overmacros, in short, allow you to cast spells on friendly players without selectingthem as your target. You can simply hover your mouse over their raid frame anduse your ability.

This saves you precious time. As you can probably tell, however, this onlyworks if your heals are keybound (because otherwise, when moving your mouse toyour action bar to click a heal, you would stop mousing over your target). Thisis another reason why keybinding is practically mandatory for any healer thatis interested in their performance.

Below, we use the Healing Wave spell to provide you with an example ofa mouse-over macro:

• #showtooltip Healing Wave
• /cast [@mouseover,exists,nodead,help,][exists,nodead,help][@player] Healing Wave

While seemingly complicated, this macro changes your Healing Wave spellin such a way that:

• If you are mousing over a target that exists, is not dead, and is friendly,it will cast Healing Wave on them.
• Otherwise, if your currently selected target exists, is not dead and isfriendly, Healing Wave will be cast on them instead.
• Lastly, if neither of the above two conditions are met, it will castHealing Wave on yourself.

You can reduce the macro to a simpler format:

• #showtooltip Healing Wave
• /cast [@mouseover] Healing Wave

This provides less functionality, though.

An added bonus to using mouse-over macros is that it allows you to havethe boss or another add targeted (so that you can use your offensive spellson them) without it impacting your ability to heal. This is especially relevantwhen playing a Discipline Priest, who needs to deal damage in order to heal.

It is worth mentioning here that there does exist a sort of alternative, inadd-ons such as VuhDo,which allows you to set up a feature to simply click a mouse button whenhovering over a player and causing this to heal them. In certain cases(such as when you need to intensively move your character while you arehealing), such add-ons can provide a superior healing method to themouseover macro + keybind combination, even though, in essence, the same thing isaccomplished.

The underlying point here is that the practice to be avoided at all costsis one where you need to click a player on your raid frames and then click aheal from your action bar in order to heal them. Any streamlining of thisprocess that you make (keybinds, mouseover macros, both, or add-ons that handlethe task for you) is a step in the right direction.

It is beyond the scope of this guide to discuss specific stat prioritiessince these depend from one healing class to another, and they can changeoften. It is important to note, however, that your gearing plays an importantrole in your ability to carry out your healer assignments.

As a healer, you have to be intimately familiar with a great part ofeach encounter your raid is attempting. You have to be prepared for everyability cast by the boss or an add, which has the potential to deal damage toanyone in the raid (regardless of whether this damage is avoidable or not).

A great part of being a good healer is being prepared for what is about tohappen. Most boss abilities are on fixed timers or cooldowns and will oftenhave a predictable outcome. You must be prepared for every such abilityand already know which spell you are about to cast to heal your targets beforethey have taken any damage.

It is advised that, while learning encounters, you pay special attentionto how much damage various abilities do and how sustained that damage is.This will give you a good indication, for future attempts, of which spellsare best used when.

For example: if you know there is a boss ability which deals a veryhigh amount of damage (let's say around 80% of the health of most raidmembers) at a specific time, and that it is not followed by any raid damagewhatsoever for 30 seconds, you would make sure that everyone has enoughhealth to survive it, and you would then go on to heal them with Mana-efficientspells, allowing you to preserve your Mana. If you were not familiar with theencounter mechanics, you might fail to have everyone at the minimum healththreshold to survive, and you might then panic and use Mana-inefficient spellstrying to heal everyone up after the damage hits.

If you have been following this guide so far, you should have your userinterface, add-ons, macros and keybinds in place. You should be comfortablewith clicking your raid frames, tracking your own procs and cooldowns, andjust generally using your character.

Naturally, the deeper the understanding you have of your class, the betteryour performance will be. This sort of coverage is beyond the scope of thisarticle. There are, however, various aspects of playing a healer in a raidenvironment that are not related to class or specialization but ratherto the healing role in general.

We have done a great deal of talking about all sorts of aspects whichprepare you for healing. Now it is time to actually look at how you shouldheal, who you should (and should not!) heal, and what you should avoiddoing.

Your most basic goal for every encounter is that each and every one ofyour raid members survive until the boss is dead (or until he enrages due toinsufficient DPS).

For the most part, this means you will have to wait for raid members tosuffer damage and then use your healing spells to heal the damaged targets.

This is a simplistic look at things, and the reality is more complicatedbecause of several factors:

• Different healing spells are suited for different situations (high Manacost and low cast time versus low Mana cost and high cast time, forexample).
• The damage your raid takes is not always predictable; player error willoften cause random bursts of damage which you will have to heal.
• Various encounter abilities can target healers, shifting the balance ofthe assignments. You will need to communicate and improvise.
• Some heals (particularly Discipline Priest Atonements and Restoration DruidHoTs) are designed to be applied to targets before they begin taking damage.

In order to achieve this goal, you will need to make good use of bothyour Mana and your global cooldowns and use the correct spells at thecorrect time. Let us go into a bit of detail!

All healing classes use Mana as their main resource. Without Mana, yousimply cannot heal.

Mana regeneration is a fixed value per second, which can be boosted by someclass talents and abilities. You can also use items to recover Mana quickly.Healers have to manage their Mana for the entire duration of the encounter, andmistakes in this management can quickly lead to a wipe.

The true skill of a healer comes from using the right heal for eachsituation. For example, you should use a fast and expensive heal when yourtarget is dead before you have the time to finish any other heal; youshould use a slow and inexpensive heal when you have ample time to heal yourtarget; you should use slow, large heal when your target is sufferingsustained damage.

The idea is that, for the entire duration of the encounter, you have tostrike a perfect (or near-perfect) balance between healing enough to keepyour assignment alive while not using too much Mana. The only way to do thisis to use the proper spells for each situation. To be able to do this, youwill need an excellent understanding of your class' abilities as well as ofthe encounter mechanics.

Finally, one key aspect of properly managing your Mana is to ensure thatyou do not overheal. Overhealing is covered below, but to summarize, you shouldensure that you do not expend Mana on a heal which lands on a player whosehealth is already full (or that a great part of the heal is wasted becausetheir health is almost full).

As a healer, it is your job not only to try to keep every single raid memberalive, from the start of the fight until the end, but also to know when it ismore profitable for your raid to let someone die so that you can betterheal others (and possibly to save Mana). Before we detail this further, wewould like to remind you not to forget to heal yourself. It is very easy tomake the mistake of trying to heal everyone else and simply overlooking yourown raid (or unit) frame.

Sadly, there are times when, as a healer, you simply cannot keep everyonealive. This can be either due to encounter design (fights where the damageramps up progressively until it becomes unhealable) or due to the mistakeswhich your raid makes in the execution of the fight.

When this happens, you will find yourself in a position of desperatelytrying to heal several low-health (and dying) targets at once, and you willface being overwhelmed or running out of Mana. In times like these, you willhave to choose which players to heal and which players to simply let die.

While this is counter-intuitive to the nature of the healing role, it isoften the only way to survive the encounter. It is impossible to state ingeneral terms which players should be sacrificed and which players should besaved, as this can depend greatly based on the encounter.

As a rule, you should keep as many tanks alive as are needed for theboss to be killed. Furthermore, when choosing among DPS players, those who domore damage should be preferred over others (keep in mind what stage the fightis in, though, as overall DPS numbers may not be relevant in a specific "burnphase").

Finally, while your initial reaction might be, when seeing how difficulthealing is, to try to save as many of the other healers in preference of DPSplayers, this is often wrong. The reason is that when a fight reaches sucha critical moment, the only thing which will make it easier is if the bossdies extremely quickly. Therefore, even a few seconds of another DPS playerbeing alive can make all the difference.

No matter what encounter your raid is progressing on, and regardless ofthe raid size, your raid or healing leader will surely provide you with anassignment.

In short, you will be told when to use your raid cooldowns to cover specificincoming damage and possibly also which group(s) to focus heal. For the mostpart, healing assignments will be simple, along the lines of "Healer #1 uses hisraid cooldown first, followed by Healers #2 and #3.", although sometimes theencounter may require more specific assignments.

Currently, all of the healing specializations are fairly well balanced intheir roles in a raid. In the past, certain specializations were suited to asingle role (for example, Holy Paladins were exclusively tank healers duringWrath of the Lich King, while Discipline Priests were extremely potent raidhealers).

Despite this balance, some specializations shine in certain situationsmore than others. A good raid leader will assign specific healers to specifictasks based on the strengths and weaknesses of the healing classes (and theplayers playing them). If you feel that you have been given an improperassignment or that the assignments provided, as a whole, are not satisfactory(i.e., your cooldowns would be best used elsewhere), you should voice yourconcerns.

The tanks are the only players who, regardless of encounter, take sustaineddamage for the entire duration of the fight. The amount of damage that theytake and the frequency with which they take it varies widely from fight tofight, but in every case, the tanks must always have at least one healerassigned to them.

Most fights require two tanks, although it is possible that they willbe taking damage alternatively and not simultaneously. In any case, theamount of healing that each tank requires, based on their gear and on theencounter, is something which will have to be determined on a case-by-casebasis.

You should be at least remotely familiar with the kind of tankingmechanics your composition's tanks use (Brewmaster Monks have a smooth damageintake because of Stagger, Death Knights can do a lot of self-healing,etc.).

Finally, it is very important that you communicate with the tank you arehealing so that you can both make good use of your respective cooldowns.

Healing the raid varies widely from encounter to encounter. Some encounterspresent very little unavoidable raid damage, while other encounters containheavy, sustained, unavoidable raid damage.

Based on the type of damage you are facing, you will have to adapt yourhealing style (and possibly your talent spec and gearing) to match it. Raidhealing is the most common type of healing required in a raid.

As a result, you must be able to communicate with your fellow healers, andwe advise you to set very specific healing assignments. Below are a fewexamples:

• Healer #1 heals the raid members (non-tanks) in Group 1 and Healer #2heals the raid members in Group 2.
• Healer #1 starts by healing the damaged raid members, from left to right(on whatever raid-frame add-ons you are using) and Healer #2 starts healingfrom right to left (this is to avoid the same target within the same groupbeing healed by multiple healers, while other targets remain unhealed).
• Healer #1 heals the players damaged by the first cast of ability X andHealer #2 heals the players subsequently damaged by ability X.

Another type of assignment which you will receive in many encounters isto use your raid-wide healing or damage reduction cooldown at a specificallydetermined time.

The reason for this is that there are various boss abilities which are toodamaging for your raid to be able to survive without the use of cooldowns.Furthermore, these abilities will often add continuous and increasingstrain on your raid's healing, meaning that a single cooldown will not besufficient to mitigate them.

In order for each and every damaging hit from the ability to be mitigatedby some cooldown, it is important that all healers know when to use theircooldowns (so that they do not end up using two cooldowns for one abilityand none for another).

When being assigned a time to use a cooldown, you should make sure of a fewthings:

• That you understand exactly when you need to use it and why (timinggenerally needs to be very precise, with only a few seconds as a margin oferror);
• That you do not (accidentally) use your cooldown on something else before,and end up not having it available for when it is needed;
• That your cooldown does actually mitigate the damage that you areassigned to counter (your raid leader may be mistaken in how exactly yourspells work).

If, for some reason, your cooldown is not available at the designated time,you should announce it to the raid ahead of time so that they canimprovise.

One of the most sensitive issues related to teamwork in raiding is theability (or inability) of healers to respect their own healingassignments.

When healing assignments are first devised, it is assumed that each healercan complete their own task without the aid of other healers. In practice,however, this is not always so. There are many factors that will cause ahealer to fall behind on their assignment (latency or user interface problems,encounter mechanics, mistakes caused by the people they are assigned to heal, oreven by themselves). When this happens, there are two possible outcomes:

• The other healers ignore the situation, and continue to only heal theirassigned targets, and the first healer's target dies.
• The other healers decide to help and therefore ignore their ownassignment for a few seconds.

While the second outcome may appear to have a good chance to save livesand the raid, this is often not the case. More often than not, what happensis that, as a result of the other healers' reaction, they themselves will fallbehind on their assignments. After this point, either chaos ensues, or healersare forced to use a lot of Mana-inefficient heals to catch up, thus runningout of Mana later on in the fight.

We advise you to stick to your assignments as much as possible. This doesnot mean that if something exceptional occurs during a fight, causing oneof the healers to fall behind on their assignment, they should not be helped.Indeed, great healers are those who can react to the unexpected as well asto the expected damage and situations that occur during an encounter.

What should be avoided is constantly making up for the lack of healingability of a healer or improper healing assignments by improvising andfilling other people's roles. This type of practice is not helpful foryour raid in the long term. Instead, you should aim at correcting theunderlying problems which cause you to perform someone else's assignment.This means the other healers should be helped to improve (or replaced), andthe healing assignments themselves should be revised.

Another important reason for respecting your own healing assignment isthat it ensures (in theory) equal healing of all targets. Each player in theraid has one or more healers assigned to heal them, and if assignments arerespected, they will all receive heals. If you go outside of the assignments,some players will end up without any heals, while others will be overhealed.

The final concept that you should be familiar with, as a healer, isoverhealing. In essence, overhealing refers to when a target receivesheals when their health is already at maximum. Any such healing is effectivelywasted, and so is the Mana that that healing cost.

We have gone through many facets of the healing role so far in thisarticle. All of them are important on their own, but during all of them, youmust also keep in mind that you should not overheal.

In order to avoid overhealing, you must be familiar with the amount ofhealth that each one of your spells restores. Moreover, you should have agood understanding of the encounter mechanics so that you know whether adamaging ability will hit the player while you are casting a heal.

Basically, you should not heal a player who is already at full health andyou should only heal a damaged player with a heal which, roughly, matchesthe amount of missing health that they have.

Some overhealing is unavoidable due to having to top players off inpreparation for boss abilities and due to the critical heals, which willoften overheal their targets. So, do not be alarmed if anywhere between10 and 30% of your healing is overhealing. Keep in mind, though, that reducingyour overhealing goes hand-in-hand with properly managing your Mana, so if youare struggling for Mana, you should review your overhealing.

Finally, there is one additional, less well-known way to avoidoverhealing. You should configure your raid-frames in such a way that theydisplay any incoming heals on players (pay special attention to enableHoTs). By doing this, you are able to avoid using a heal on someone who wasalready in the process of being healed (either through another healer'sin-progress cast or through a HoT), thus reducing your overhealing or that ofthe other healer.

We cannot stress enough how important it is, as a healer, to anticipatethe damage which will occur and to know exactly which of the many spells inyour arsenal are suitable to counter it.

Provided that you have followed this guide and have allowed yourselfsufficient time and practice to customize your user interface and familiarizeyourself with your class, you should be well on your way to being a greathealer!

Lastly, keep in mind that healing, more than any other role, is a teameffort, and you should try to find ways to work with your teammates at alltimes.

We hope you have enjoyed our guide, good luck healing in World of Warcraft!

• 18 Apr. 2024: Minor adjustments for Season 4.
• 19 Mar. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 10.2.6.
• 07 Nov. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.2.
• 11 Jul. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.5
• 03 Jul. 2021: Reviewed for Patch 9.1.
• 06 Dec. 2020: Adapted the guide to 2020 and Shadowlands.
• 08 Oct. 2018: Made a few tweaks to bring the guide in line with the current state of the game.
• 22 Oct. 2017: Updated ElvUI download link.
• 25 Jul. 2016: Made a few minor tweaks to bring the guide in line with the current state of the game.

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