Got Six healer classes to 3k + a bit of a tip for new healers who’re trying to improve /u/Calm_Conversation878 World of Warcraft

Title was sort of a click bait, I couldn’t get my paladin to 3k. I think I’ve burnt out enough during season enough and I feel I’m hitting my skill ceiling on paladin so I decided to stop, but overall I’ve achieved what I wanted, enjoying all healers. (Initial goal was to do 7 healing specs.. but I gave up on paladin already 😂)

The rating below is Evoker, Shaman, Monk, Druid, Priest(disc), Paladin in order.

https://preview.redd.it/licg7milavde1.png?width=607&format=png&auto=webp&s=6d1373e208437e7f1132088d89e4fdd694c7a59d

I wanted to share a bit of my journey on the way and give out some tips that I found along the way.

Not that it matters but I’ve played 4 seasons so far. I have a tenancy to quit the game when I feel I’m not progressing either in skill or rio.

In Shadowlands S1 I’ve done 15 level keys with druid (equivalent to +5 after squish) and I hit my skill ceiling and I quit. I’ve played evoker in DF S1, I was around 2.8k, again I’ve hit my skill ceiling I quit. I’ve started in later season DF S4, I’ve played evoker and MW. As I started later in the season, I didn’t quit and naturally carried over to TWW. This is the longest season that I’ve played, I guess because I got into a nice guild, but also I had a goal.

The reason why I started this project is I wanted to expand my knowledge on healers, their healing style and the hope that I learn something in the progress, also to see whether any of the healers would be fun to play as a future reference, because watching somebody playing and playing it gives quite a different feeling so to not miss out potentially on any fun healers.

I was able to improve my healing skills over the seasons I played and even so much in this season, I’ve learned a lot on the way but it was a bit of a struggle. There are really great healer streamers (automaticjak, megasett, Growl, etc) out there that I watch, but sometimes they don’t make contents that I can make use of to improve my skills, so usually when I hit a wall I needed to search a solution to that myself. So I thought of bragging the result (although this is not very high) as well as sharing something that I learned along the way, in case someone is looking to do something similar.

The following things are what I did to I gradually became better at healing :

* mentality

I know this is not something people might want to hear, but I tried considering myself to be liable for every death in a dung. This is not good for enjoying the game or mental health, but most death are usually combination of multiple factors (except when you’re standing in a frontal, but even so could the tank have made it different by tanking it elsewhere?). When you cannot control others’ behavior, you can control your own to have a better chance timing a key. It can even be something like communication, looking at other’s talent tree and see whether they missed to spec into a dispel that is need for this dungeon.

Along that, I find healing though some damage pattern solving a puzzle, you need to find your healing pattern to solve your problem fighting a boss or a trash mob within the limited healing CD you have. I’ve been playing 13-14 key range max, and I’m six-seven key levels behind the people who’re pushing the highest keys, meaning that although I don’t know the solution to this now, there is definitely one and I can solve it in some way.

* Have a better understanding on the class and practice executing it better

To state the obvious, every healer has some sort of combo or heal rotation that enhances the following heal or to give a buff. One obvious example is not having the double 10% hp buff on shaman, this was the mistake that I was making a lot and still make it by not doing it.

I’ve learned Druid, Priest, Paladin, Shaman newly this season. And just repetitively reading up the talent just helped me understand better what I was not doing correctly.

In terms of finding the best talent – usually raider.io or murlok.io were good resources for me to find what highest io people were speced into. You can’t go much wrong by blindly following these.

Another way to expand your class knowledge is watching videos of healer streamers that have their details skill visualization being put on. This is a feature shows skill icons, on which order you pressed skills, so if you’re struggling in a boss, you can try to execute in the exact order of how the streamer healed, and try to understand why it was possible for them to heal through and you weren’t to see the difference. Megasett always turns this feature on in her stream, so this was super useful when I was trying to push MW.

* Understanding damage patterns, in particular the dangerous overlap.

Learning damage pattern is just something that you naturally learn over the progress of the season, but there are something that if you’re not particularly paying attention/are trying to figure out is difficult to understand when exactly it is happening. One example is the overlap of orb/AOE cast of the second boss of DB, the orb cast and the aoe cast are de-synced so this happens only every X time, and unless you’re watching a recording are reading logs, it’s sometimes very obvious, so you do need to make the effort.

It’s important to save cooldowns or prepare some sort of mitigation during those moments. Some other example is that the second pull of SoB, depending on how late you pull the raider next to the stairs, the shatter cast can overlap with the pull from raider so this is extremely dangerous and you most likely want to mitigate it with a big heal CD.

* Actively try to understand when you don’t need to heal, avoid overhealing

This does not apply to all healers but there are some healers (Totemic shaman / Resto druid ) that has strong passive / heal over time. Try to actively think how much those heal are and avoid healing when you’re not expecting more damage to come. This is something that needs proactive thinking and adjustment that doesn’t come naturally.

I think it was around when I was doing my first 13 SV on my resto shaman, I was burning out my mana so quickly on the first boss, because I was spamming healing surge after the aoe dots have fade away, when I instead just could have wait for my totem to heal up.

A similar mistake by dpses I see is using HS / pot after being on a low hp, when there is no more expected damage to come, but I guess this is understandable because dpses usually have a lower understanding on the expected damages than healers do.

* Have a better UI

M+ is all about how well you can process information and react accordingly. The best way to do this is via Addons and WAs. Here are the things that are useful to track

1. allies’ defensives CD (omnicd)
2. Allies defensives on/off (party frame/omnicd)
3. Interrupts / Stops (omnicd)
4. Trash mob cast towards allies (plater / party frame)
5. trash skill internal cooldown (plater / WA / Elwigo)
6. enemy casting ( default ui / plater)

You can go to Elwigo page to see how the ui looks. I’m also using quazi’s plater profile which shows internal cd of monsters, which was useful for me of improving my heal a level better.

Here’s my omnicd profile settings which track defensives/external/raid defensives (might have missed a few) : 1vvxpYTnmW)k37jfq8lrQxVMCnfOb5q37P(GbCU4KBb8zVWRdAU)9LsuUjaPflwyUIsdjNzK3by4HHt3pUT)sn4YrW0323gVDC7A9hBJN)Kh326ZJlFDC((1FkXld3jColwQuyjNvmn85FHPHtFB4UCgmoXywznjfSMHh2BFoqbB1Dz8JZtFA42)7kHhvsGeX5esavkz77vYiYe2kKvkGPW3R0PLXNNgoDAF9Y1FOS0)3ur9AL1mKqtTcNDi5aX2uLsqXKKQu2enhDX(XC9LPLPTX5kmxFA9VVFE8LPnFY8uxwVEE)86sn34((4JpnC6HpC)F827QIW201P9FyHXLhFADRTWF(7)27EOIW1ltZZT2LqtOuLXabrTm8XHtiKjcQrmbmKRzjvsMwxt5u9bzm5nDDtjkhBhGSXniCES0wIY(uYnujHLOsLCdtaecAGjwXInLsMaTKPCrAqGIz5OMo8a2I8IJ9AwedRNWlacLaUg(ysalWxio2t2xQngqYqnAhadmfVjIUanmQORDseLr3fECWavcrx(AStb7ZeLfsIJMvijbWkOPoh4EUOOCs6dGhHDI00afgrUDw3I4M1oBLulQgaP2G6AML7nvxOKerCiqsgBJkMPmBHgRoEngbqneiW6QI5xaBKeGahj97C9HPam25nSYLTivuUx961OWvC4fQ0uOKLef6cO9NflLBOXQqXa4MjkSoQRcTdsGFZpWkfIaMzLKAoU0giFi8UUMYHmzDXl5MWoh31SQ9T7VuI60o2imwvloOtffjeIkz32fYAyoSCPObZjDeki11Cxw5UBVeAjQIFGON97tTXidumSEHc7oPS0he3Jduujpk0EKkPGG1ssc6hlAJaCRc4SFnIWu(FDsrB7(dj4a0VvhstP6wo8uHrN8s05ffTU24Ep6W7Z9Oc2mq(Roo)46Y1J3k9W668(5lTm13rUUm9x(3tt77Nx(YX)iuZn8HNxo)RVbhNNF97F1nVBACEA7M3m95XVoV)p

I think what to do with those information that the addons give should be quite clear, except for the casting tracking. Of course, the best way is to kick the interrupt if possible, but otherwise if you see the person who’s being targeted is already low, you should try to give them external or quickly heal them.

For instance, the first pack after GB’s first boss, the common death for 12+ dungeons is a caster’s bolt went out after the giant casting the AOE. Same goes for the raider pull + bomb combo in front of the first boss of SoB and etc. There have been countless moments of these cast that I were able to save from, and dpses in my key range rarely use defensives in these moments and eventually die if I don’t help them. Which makes it more helpful if we as healers can react to them.

* Check every death

Especially in the beginning of the season, checking every death either through details or through logs, naturally helps you expand the knowledge on the dungeon and understand which parts of the dungeon are more dangerous and which are not.

* Don’t hold on to healing CDs/externals

A mistake that I still sometimes make is to hold on to heal CDs. Unless there’s a big AOE coming that you need to heal through, don’t sleep on them and use it whenever they’re ready in every mid-or above healing situations. You don’t gain anything by holding on to these cds and it also doesn’t prove anything when you’re able to heal X without a healing CD or not. Occasionally, even when nobody died, dps will have a more stressful situation thus more likely to make mistakes when their hp isn’t stable.

* Have better understanding in tanks

This is something that I still struggle a lot, understanding what different tanks are capable and not capable of, their strength and weakness to be able to heal them appropriately. Tank busters has been especially unforgiving this season, so it’s really beneficial to understand how tanks work in general. (does tank A survive well in a AOE dmg situation or a ST, etc..)

I’m also struggling so I cannot recommend anything besides asking to a tank you know or try playing them yourself, but there’s a video from quazi that talks about exactly this topic, so I recommend you watching it if you’re interested in it.

* Align healing with enemy skill cast

Easy to be said and to be executed, you can pre-cast healing while enemy cast is almost about to finish so that the people have more higher hp uptime. Especially when there are multiple things going out such as the pack after second boss of SoB(the one with the giant), there’s usually disease cast going on, crushing slam happening at the same time and all kinds of craziness, if whatever big heal you’re casting finishes (e.g. evoker spritbloom) right after the enemy cast, you’re team will have much high chance of living during overlaps.

* Understand squishiness of dpses and triage healing

I’m a healer only user so I also don’t have a good understanding in how squishy the dps classes are, but usually they’re good to know, for instance DK in this season are unkillable, so I try to heal them as my last healing target unless they’re in immediate danger.

Otherwise in high pressure AOE situation, yet easier to be said than done, try to see who has defensives or not and prioritize the one without a defensives, and better if you can also see which defensives are better in a situation (absorbs are usually better than DR)

One other thing that I usually do is I tend to prioritize healing myself the last (with an exception being an evoker due to utilization of mastery), because I can use my healing pot as my defensive and it works as a group wide defensive as a healer if used appropriately.

What’s up next for me?

Maybe I want to try out tanks a bit to fill in my gap in tank understanding. I’m still not proficient in all the things I listed above, so I hope I can get a bit better and be able to improve further :)..

ps: please fix the LFG simulator issue blizz..:D

Title was sort of a click bait, I couldn’t get my paladin to 3k. I think I’ve burnt out enough during season enough and I feel I’m hitting my skill ceiling on paladin so I decided to stop, but overall I’ve achieved what I wanted, enjoying all healers. (Initial goal was to do 7 healing specs.. but I gave up on paladin already 😂)

The rating below is Evoker, Shaman, Monk, Druid, Priest(disc), Paladin in order.

https://preview.redd.it/licg7milavde1.png?width=607&format=png&auto=webp&s=6d1373e208437e7f1132088d89e4fdd694c7a59d

I wanted to share a bit of my journey on the way and give out some tips that I found along the way.

Not that it matters but I’ve played 4 seasons so far. I have a tenancy to quit the game when I feel I’m not progressing either in skill or rio.

In Shadowlands S1 I’ve done 15 level keys with druid (equivalent to +5 after squish) and I hit my skill ceiling and I quit. I’ve played evoker in DF S1, I was around 2.8k, again I’ve hit my skill ceiling I quit. I’ve started in later season DF S4, I’ve played evoker and MW. As I started later in the season, I didn’t quit and naturally carried over to TWW. This is the longest season that I’ve played, I guess because I got into a nice guild, but also I had a goal.

The reason why I started this project is I wanted to expand my knowledge on healers, their healing style and the hope that I learn something in the progress, also to see whether any of the healers would be fun to play as a future reference, because watching somebody playing and playing it gives quite a different feeling so to not miss out potentially on any fun healers.

I was able to improve my healing skills over the seasons I played and even so much in this season, I’ve learned a lot on the way but it was a bit of a struggle. There are really great healer streamers (automaticjak, megasett, Growl, etc) out there that I watch, but sometimes they don’t make contents that I can make use of to improve my skills, so usually when I hit a wall I needed to search a solution to that myself. So I thought of bragging the result (although this is not very high) as well as sharing something that I learned along the way, in case someone is looking to do something similar.

The following things are what I did to I gradually became better at healing :

* mentality

I know this is not something people might want to hear, but I tried considering myself to be liable for every death in a dung. This is not good for enjoying the game or mental health, but most death are usually combination of multiple factors (except when you’re standing in a frontal, but even so could the tank have made it different by tanking it elsewhere?). When you cannot control others’ behavior, you can control your own to have a better chance timing a key. It can even be something like communication, looking at other’s talent tree and see whether they missed to spec into a dispel that is need for this dungeon.

Along that, I find healing though some damage pattern solving a puzzle, you need to find your healing pattern to solve your problem fighting a boss or a trash mob within the limited healing CD you have. I’ve been playing 13-14 key range max, and I’m six-seven key levels behind the people who’re pushing the highest keys, meaning that although I don’t know the solution to this now, there is definitely one and I can solve it in some way.

* Have a better understanding on the class and practice executing it better

To state the obvious, every healer has some sort of combo or heal rotation that enhances the following heal or to give a buff. One obvious example is not having the double 10% hp buff on shaman, this was the mistake that I was making a lot and still make it by not doing it.

I’ve learned Druid, Priest, Paladin, Shaman newly this season. And just repetitively reading up the talent just helped me understand better what I was not doing correctly.

In terms of finding the best talent – usually raider.io or murlok.io were good resources for me to find what highest io people were speced into. You can’t go much wrong by blindly following these.

Another way to expand your class knowledge is watching videos of healer streamers that have their details skill visualization being put on. This is a feature shows skill icons, on which order you pressed skills, so if you’re struggling in a boss, you can try to execute in the exact order of how the streamer healed, and try to understand why it was possible for them to heal through and you weren’t to see the difference. Megasett always turns this feature on in her stream, so this was super useful when I was trying to push MW.

* Understanding damage patterns, in particular the dangerous overlap.

Learning damage pattern is just something that you naturally learn over the progress of the season, but there are something that if you’re not particularly paying attention/are trying to figure out is difficult to understand when exactly it is happening. One example is the overlap of orb/AOE cast of the second boss of DB, the orb cast and the aoe cast are de-synced so this happens only every X time, and unless you’re watching a recording are reading logs, it’s sometimes very obvious, so you do need to make the effort.

It’s important to save cooldowns or prepare some sort of mitigation during those moments. Some other example is that the second pull of SoB, depending on how late you pull the raider next to the stairs, the shatter cast can overlap with the pull from raider so this is extremely dangerous and you most likely want to mitigate it with a big heal CD.

* Actively try to understand when you don’t need to heal, avoid overhealing

This does not apply to all healers but there are some healers (Totemic shaman / Resto druid ) that has strong passive / heal over time. Try to actively think how much those heal are and avoid healing when you’re not expecting more damage to come. This is something that needs proactive thinking and adjustment that doesn’t come naturally.

I think it was around when I was doing my first 13 SV on my resto shaman, I was burning out my mana so quickly on the first boss, because I was spamming healing surge after the aoe dots have fade away, when I instead just could have wait for my totem to heal up.

A similar mistake by dpses I see is using HS / pot after being on a low hp, when there is no more expected damage to come, but I guess this is understandable because dpses usually have a lower understanding on the expected damages than healers do.

* Have a better UI

M+ is all about how well you can process information and react accordingly. The best way to do this is via Addons and WAs. Here are the things that are useful to track

1. allies’ defensives CD (omnicd)
2. Allies defensives on/off (party frame/omnicd)
3. Interrupts / Stops (omnicd)
4. Trash mob cast towards allies (plater / party frame)
5. trash skill internal cooldown (plater / WA / Elwigo)
6. enemy casting ( default ui / plater)

You can go to Elwigo page to see how the ui looks. I’m also using quazi’s plater profile which shows internal cd of monsters, which was useful for me of improving my heal a level better.

Here’s my omnicd profile settings which track defensives/external/raid defensives (might have missed a few) : 1vvxpYTnmW)k37jfq8lrQxVMCnfOb5q37P(GbCU4KBb8zVWRdAU)9LsuUjaPflwyUIsdjNzK3by4HHt3pUT)sn4YrW0323gVDC7A9hBJN)Kh326ZJlFDC((1FkXld3jColwQuyjNvmn85FHPHtFB4UCgmoXywznjfSMHh2BFoqbB1Dz8JZtFA42)7kHhvsGeX5esavkz77vYiYe2kKvkGPW3R0PLXNNgoDAF9Y1FOS0)3ur9AL1mKqtTcNDi5aX2uLsqXKKQu2enhDX(XC9LPLPTX5kmxFA9VVFE8LPnFY8uxwVEE)86sn34((4JpnC6HpC)F827QIW201P9FyHXLhFADRTWF(7)27EOIW1ltZZT2LqtOuLXabrTm8XHtiKjcQrmbmKRzjvsMwxt5u9bzm5nDDtjkhBhGSXniCES0wIY(uYnujHLOsLCdtaecAGjwXInLsMaTKPCrAqGIz5OMo8a2I8IJ9AwedRNWlacLaUg(ysalWxio2t2xQngqYqnAhadmfVjIUanmQORDseLr3fECWavcrx(AStb7ZeLfsIJMvijbWkOPoh4EUOOCs6dGhHDI00afgrUDw3I4M1oBLulQgaP2G6AML7nvxOKerCiqsgBJkMPmBHgRoEngbqneiW6QI5xaBKeGahj97C9HPam25nSYLTivuUx961OWvC4fQ0uOKLef6cO9NflLBOXQqXa4MjkSoQRcTdsGFZpWkfIaMzLKAoU0giFi8UUMYHmzDXl5MWoh31SQ9T7VuI60o2imwvloOtffjeIkz32fYAyoSCPObZjDeki11Cxw5UBVeAjQIFGON97tTXidumSEHc7oPS0he3Jduujpk0EKkPGG1ssc6hlAJaCRc4SFnIWu(FDsrB7(dj4a0VvhstP6wo8uHrN8s05ffTU24Ep6W7Z9Oc2mq(Roo)46Y1J3k9W668(5lTm13rUUm9x(3tt77Nx(YX)iuZn8HNxo)RVbhNNF97F1nVBACEA7M3m95XVoV)p

I think what to do with those information that the addons give should be quite clear, except for the casting tracking. Of course, the best way is to kick the interrupt if possible, but otherwise if you see the person who’s being targeted is already low, you should try to give them external or quickly heal them.

For instance, the first pack after GB’s first boss, the common death for 12+ dungeons is a caster’s bolt went out after the giant casting the AOE. Same goes for the raider pull + bomb combo in front of the first boss of SoB and etc. There have been countless moments of these cast that I were able to save from, and dpses in my key range rarely use defensives in these moments and eventually die if I don’t help them. Which makes it more helpful if we as healers can react to them.

* Check every death

Especially in the beginning of the season, checking every death either through details or through logs, naturally helps you expand the knowledge on the dungeon and understand which parts of the dungeon are more dangerous and which are not.

* Don’t hold on to healing CDs/externals

A mistake that I still sometimes make is to hold on to heal CDs. Unless there’s a big AOE coming that you need to heal through, don’t sleep on them and use it whenever they’re ready in every mid-or above healing situations. You don’t gain anything by holding on to these cds and it also doesn’t prove anything when you’re able to heal X without a healing CD or not. Occasionally, even when nobody died, dps will have a more stressful situation thus more likely to make mistakes when their hp isn’t stable.

* Have better understanding in tanks

This is something that I still struggle a lot, understanding what different tanks are capable and not capable of, their strength and weakness to be able to heal them appropriately. Tank busters has been especially unforgiving this season, so it’s really beneficial to understand how tanks work in general. (does tank A survive well in a AOE dmg situation or a ST, etc..)

I’m also struggling so I cannot recommend anything besides asking to a tank you know or try playing them yourself, but there’s a video from quazi that talks about exactly this topic, so I recommend you watching it if you’re interested in it.

* Align healing with enemy skill cast

Easy to be said and to be executed, you can pre-cast healing while enemy cast is almost about to finish so that the people have more higher hp uptime. Especially when there are multiple things going out such as the pack after second boss of SoB(the one with the giant), there’s usually disease cast going on, crushing slam happening at the same time and all kinds of craziness, if whatever big heal you’re casting finishes (e.g. evoker spritbloom) right after the enemy cast, you’re team will have much high chance of living during overlaps.

* Understand squishiness of dpses and triage healing

I’m a healer only user so I also don’t have a good understanding in how squishy the dps classes are, but usually they’re good to know, for instance DK in this season are unkillable, so I try to heal them as my last healing target unless they’re in immediate danger.

Otherwise in high pressure AOE situation, yet easier to be said than done, try to see who has defensives or not and prioritize the one without a defensives, and better if you can also see which defensives are better in a situation (absorbs are usually better than DR)

One other thing that I usually do is I tend to prioritize healing myself the last (with an exception being an evoker due to utilization of mastery), because I can use my healing pot as my defensive and it works as a group wide defensive as a healer if used appropriately.

What’s up next for me?

Maybe I want to try out tanks a bit to fill in my gap in tank understanding. I’m still not proficient in all the things I listed above, so I hope I can get a bit better and be able to improve further :)..

ps: please fix the LFG simulator issue blizz..:D