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Tags : wow healing, wow healing guide, wow guidance, wow guide
Dungeon healing
The next stage in wow healing development is to run 5-man dungeons. The first instance where I had to heal full time was Gnomeregan. Deadmines and such weren't intense enough to the point where I had to focus explicitly on healing. I ended up DPSing half the time anyway.
Of all the instances though, Gnomeregan wasn't exactly my favourite. It taught me some extra valuable lessons. I had to actually pay attention to where I was standing especially with patrols and the like. Each pull was handled methodically one by one. We tried the blitz approach at one point but realized that there is a linear relationship between pull speed and healer mana.
There was enough damage being tossed around that warranted my full attention. At this stage, things like gearing and healing "rotations" are distant. You're struggling with keeping your party alive using every spell available. More often, the healing was going to be directed at a single person.
I was too afraid to peel off the main tank and heal other players because I felt that if I did, the main tank would drop. As I kept running more and more dungeons, I grew more comfortable with multi-target healing. Concepts were picked up such as sneaking heals on other players. Dungeon healing didn't have all the different variables that "world healing" had.
Raid healing
The next logical step in healing would come at the end of the game. I had run Sunken Temple, Blackrock Depths, Stratholme and other such instances enough that I felt I could move on. When you're making the transition from 5 man to 20 or 40 man parties, you start developing a bit of a anxiety because now there's more people to be responsible for. Luckily, there would always be someone who established healing assignments. Instead of panicking and trying to take care of everyone, each healer was responsible for a certain amount of players.
As an aside, one of the best healing quests I did was when I was working on my Benediction quest. That's when I toggled on nameplates. It was a tense quest that challenged priests to prioritize heals and targets.
Thinking back on it now, it would've been nice if there were more quests similar in nature to Benediction for healing priests. I wince whenever I hear of healers who have just finished leveling to max level and decide to start healing by jumping into raids. What ends up happening is once they're exposed to healing at such a tedious level, new players become overwhelmed and shy away from it in the future.
So when is a good time to start healing?
The answer is anytime is a good time to start healing. The sooner you start, the sooner you develop simple healing skills. It doesn't matter if you're healing for other people in quests, healing in PvP, or healing in raids. You're going to be healing no matter what.
By Matt Low
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