This post is intended as a quick blurb on why I decided to focus on this specific area of gameplay, and make this blog+video series.
Healing, in comparison to DPS and tanking, is a fairly ethereal playstyle requiring adaptation and a thorough knowledge of encounters. There is never one set "rotation" or sequence of spells that will cover the needs of every fight. Different bosses require players to heal in different fashions. Some fights require very focussed, perfect rotations of single target healing for maximum Healing Per Second (Will be referred to from now on as HPS). Others demand snap raid healing with all cooldowns being rotated and 100% skill uptime on multiple raid members.
There are many many forums and sites dedicated to the bleeding edge of damage and tanking- the perfect way to hit X button after Y button and how using Z button N seconds after X button will eke out K more DPS (where K is a number between 15 and 300). There are many guides, sites, spreadsheets and forums to help the DPS player maximize their DPS, gear choices, and playstyles, but there is a drought of such for healers.
Healers are constantly changing their play styles depending on the role they fill in a guild, the requirements of the boss encounter, and the simple variable of who has shown up on any given raid night. We are never once doing the same 3 skills endlessly. There is no other role in this game that is so dynamic and ever changing as the healer. Often healers get branded as "bad" when they have simply never seen that kind of encounter before. Healers are expected to adapt quickly to new encounters even though the healing required from one fight to the next may change drastically. So, another thing I will be attempting to do is to break down the belief that some people "just get healing" or some people simply don't.
What this video/blog series will be trying to do is to help new up and coming healers get situated in the end game of healing and the demands therein. Some of the things I will focus on are:
- To learn what abilities are good to use, when.
- What mods are good and which are duds and can be improved.
- To learn what separates a "good healer" from a raid dominating one man/woman carry machine.
- As well as serving as a strategy forum for more advanced players in the hardmodes/meter attack methods of play that blizzard implements in this game.
I hope you'll enjoy taking this journey with me and learning something new about World of Warcraft healing, whether you're new to the game or a veteran player.
Glossary:
HPS - Healing per second. A measure of a healer's healing output per second. High: good. Low: not so good, unless you're disc.
