I have been playing World of Warcraft as a healer for almost six years now (with on and off breaks). My first character to 60 in vanilla WoW was a holy priest. I even leveled as a holy priest. (Yes, /headslap.) These days, my main is a Resto Druid, while I tinker around with my alt 80 Resto Shaman, Holy Paladin, and Holy Priest.
Needless to say, I have seen many healing add-ons! Here is my all-time top 10 list of most helpful healing add-ons. These are mostly geared toward raiding, but may also be helpful for leveling or PVP:
Healbot is my #10 add-on because I actually couldn’t think of a 10th add-on. I used Healbot ONCE back in the day, probably about 3 years ago, and the version that I downloaded allowed players to click on a person’s name in their raid frames. If you left clicked, you cast one spell. If you right-clicked, it was another healing spell. You could bind certain abilities to certain mouse buttons. However, I thought it was awful.
In order to write this article, I checked a number of healing add-ons, and to my surprise, Healbot actually looked like it could be…useful. I have not used this add-on myself so I’d be interested to hear what people have to say about it.
This add-on is most useful for healing leads. If all the healers in the raid have this add-on installed, they can easily see who they are assigned to heal. The downside to this mod is that all your healers need it for it to work, which probably is only useful for guild raids or a raid group with a consistent attendance.
Another helpful mod for raid leads is Rebirther, which keeps track of druids’ Innervates and Rebirth cooldowns. The great thing about this add-on is that the druids themselves don’t need to install this mod.
I would recommend this add-on to everybody, not just healers, but it can be especially useful for switching out gear sets without rummaging for half an hour through your bags. This add-on allows you to create and save outfits, and put on or take off outfits with one click.
Recount is an add-on that tracks real-time data regarding things like damage done, damage per second (DPS), healing done, healing per second (HPS), resurrections, deaths, decurses, and things like that. Recount can both be a help and a curse. You can honestly use Recount to get immediate feedback on your healing performance during a raid. You can see which spells you used the most often, and compare them against those of the other healers. You can see who you healed the most. This information can be very useful, as long as you take it to improve yourself. The reason why Recount is a curse is because you can sometimes get caught up in topping the meters, or feel very bad when you are at the bottom. The point to remember is that Recount is a tool that can help, but at the same time, numbers don’t always paint a true picture. If you are a tank healer, for example, you may not have as high a healing output as the raid healer. If you are a single-target healer like a Paladin, perhaps you won’t do as well on a fight with lots of small, incoming damage. Use the numbers to your benefit.
This add-on is extremely useful for Priests who have no idea “who the what where and when” their PoM just went. In a raid of 25 people, it may be hard for your eye to see where exactly your Prayer jumped to, and thus you don’t know when you should refresh it (pssst…you should refresh it after the 5th charge is used up….or if the charge is on someone you know isn’t going to get hit). This handy tool eliminates that problem by showing you exactly where your PoM has gone.
SmartRes adds a series of nifty bars that show up on your screen, showing exactly who is rezzing whom. No more wasted time rezzing the same person!
This is a must-have tool for Paladins in a raid (as long as your raid leaders use it!). This add-on creates a list of classes along the side of your screen, and the type of Blessing that you are assigned to give them. Simply click on each class icon, and your Paladin will automatically buff them with that blessing. Ideally, someone who is a raid leader or assist will set this up so that the Paladin Blessings are organized.
#2. Deadly Boss Mods (or an equivalent boss mod helper)
DBM creates all sorts of messages and alerts to help the player succeed in a boss fight. For certain mechanics where you have to jump out of the fire, heal someone, decurse someone, run together, hide behind a pillar, and so on, this mod is there to help you out. The mod also shows timers until the next boss event, such as an Enrage, a special attack, etc., thus helping you set up for success.
#1. Pitbull (or an equivalent unitframes mod such as Grid, ora, etc.)
Pitbull is a mod that allows you to customize your unitframes, which is the name for that piece of your screen where you see people’s portraits and health bars. This is the #1 area where healers must have perfect information, otherwise you are healing blind. Pitbull is fairly complicated to use (and I’m planning to write a guide on how to use Pitbull later), but you get a lot of control over a ton of information. Most specifically, I would suggest setting up your unitframes such that:
- You can clearly see the health and mana of all the people you need to heal.
- You have easy access to click on those health bars to deliver a heal.
- You turn on “healcast,” which is a special colored overlay on a health bar to show you how much incoming healing that person is going to get. I have mine currently set up only to show my own incoming healing, but I know there are mods that will show you the incoming healing from other healers as well.
- You turn on the range checker, which will fade out the health bars of anyone who is not in range of your heals. That way you are not mindlessly pounding healing buttons and not seeing the little system message that tells you your target is out of range.
- I also turn my Pitbull options such that I can only see my own buffs on the raid. This is especially helpful for a Resto Druid, because then I can clearly see the duration left on the hots on each person.
Now, if only there were a mod that would say “AWESOME JOB!!!!” and give you a cookie whenever the healers do a good job…
Images courtesy of www.curse.com.
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