Healing in TBC - how do you think that'll change? ;P

[Dorje]

As a follow up from a different chat (took part of Mazzle UI's thread), since this seems to have a lot of interested people, here it is.

How do you guys think healing in WoW 2.0 will look like? Mods, spells, everything. What do you think a healer should be doing most of the time?

Do you think we should concentrate on the health bars all the time and just heal, or be able to see the world as it is discovered and especially during the fight?

Do you think that healers should be addon dependent in ways we are now (Decursive, etc) and and especially on Emergency monitor? How would you say the EM should be used (crosshealing, etc)? All that considering the changes in WoW 2.0.

Is a healer who uses mods that chose the ranks automatically for them a healer?

I can sense a great chat coming up

[ravagernl]

anti overheal/rank selecting addons and emergency monitors will no longer work. However, click casting will become very populair I think.

[Defx]

I was concerned about the changes for a while, but recently I completely changed my UI to include only mods that were likely to still be active and working in TBC.

I've found that it is really not that difficult. Click-casting will still be in effect, we will just have to manually select which ranks of heals we want to use. The hardest part about that is remembering where each spell and rank is keybound to.
The reason I made the switch now, is so I can give myself plenty of time to adjust to the changes now and not have to pack it all in at once when TBC releases. I get more comfortable with it each day, and by the time the expansion comes out, I expect it will be second nature to me again.

The only problem is that keybindings are very limited (and will be even more limited with new spells and talents in TBC) so we aren't able to bind every rank of every spell, so it is up to the healer to determine which spells and ranks they want to bind based on mana and cost, gear, cast time, etc.

The biggest issue I am coming across is, I have dropped all healing mods now to get ready for TBC, is mana canservation and crosshealing. Healers are going to have to really communicate, set up rotations and make healing assignments. If we as healers don't learn this now things are going to be very dificult in TBC.

[JoshBorke]

i'll take this opportunity to plug mods like HealSync and HealWatch which output who's healing your current target and who is healing whom (respectively). If you want something that just works, use HealSync, HealWatch (as the author) needs more work to really be nice.

I think healing will take the direction of mods providing information so that the user can act on it.

[Benea]

How will it change for me? (I play a priest.)

Decursive wise, not much. I hardly ever used decursive. Chromaggus mostly. I feel for the druids/mages come patch time. Sorry guys.

Healing wise, basically I'll be focusing on watching a 3" x 2" space of Grid. I was very sad to lose my Squishy EM, but I began to use Grid early to adapt. As usual, I won't see any of the neato things in the dungeons, I'll be playing whack a mole. Such is the lot of healers. (I never used any of the "automatic" target selection and rank selection mods out there).

[robthedude]

Me, the first 40 levels of my priest I just used myself and the standard UI to do all the healing, no addons whatsoever.

Around 40-42 I 'discovered' the joy that is interface customisation and went mad installing everything from the various addon sites, this left me with a rubbish framerate, but I had toyed with a couple of the heal bot addons (HealBot was the name of one, in fact)

Didn't like them, so started finding ways of healing better than those addons could, with the thought in mind that no matter how good the logic in the scripts, none could match the pure logic of MY brain.

So, today I have TheoryCraft, which displays the average damage or healing a spell does, right on it's action button.
And I can't live without Discord Unit Frames, upon which I have the amount of health each party member has LOST, so I never ever overheal (ooooh the evil Overheal and her twin the equally evil Manawaster)
And who can live without CT Raid Assist? even if they break the emergency monitor the raid frames will still show health lost, so I'll be just fine.

On the subject of Decursive. yup, it won't work according to the way it works right now... but I'm sure it won't be breaking Blizzards sacred rules to have an addon warning you of a debuff you can cure, even if you have to manually click on the player then the action button, I can cope with that... besides, us priests are getting an AoE Dispell, to soften the blow of having to think.

Lastly, to the subject of not being able to watch the fight... partially transparent frames in the middle of the screen? Video capture so you can watch it later? I dunno, it's how the healing class is, I don't think there is anything that can be done about that. The End.

[Dorje]

Thanks for all the feedback guys. I sure do hope more and more will post here.

I must say I love the idea some of mod developers have come up with so far.
The idea of whack-the-mole being one of them. That helps a lot imho, you don't exactly need anything like Emergency Monitor or even decursive for that matter. A big bow and thanks to the developers of Grid. You rock! All nicely packed in a very small part of the screen

Myself, I've just been using Detox for certain fights, where it was essential (like Chrommy), but it's pretty much useless otherwise. I've also found Perfect Raid a great help, since it's light and shows all you need using very little screen space.

As for amount of healing done by various spells, I use FlexBar having both keybindings and button remapping (ooc only) for various spell ranks. And it's not exactly hard to learn how much your healing spell usually heals for so I just stick to that. I roughly know how much a spell will heal for and go with that.

So go go If any of you have any tips or ideas regarding healing in TBC, please post them here. I've seen a great many priests dropping their toons just because they didn't like the changes.

Check out Clique for all your click casting needs and suplement that with DiToolTip. DiToolTip is a very small mod that allows you to attach the tool tip to your cursor or move it to different locations on your screen and it has a health bar attached.

What I have been doing is using the cursor tooltip to scan the raid/party, when I roll over someone with low health I target them and perform a click cast. My guild as rule heals only the MT and Aoe folks, everyone else is on a low priority heal/ bandage stratagy, so I usually only have a few folks to keep track of.

It is my understanding both of these mods have been tested in TBC and are working fine.