III. Common Raid Healing Techniques

Stacking HoTs - HoTs are hawt, especially when they're stacked. One of the changes to healing that came about with The Burning Crusade was the introduction of stacked HoTs. Prior to this, in the dark ages of vanilla WoW, a druid casting Rejuvenation on a target that already had a priest's Renew would override the Renew and essentially waste that priest's mana. Now, both Rejuvenation and Renew can happily coexist - along with Regrowth, Lifebloom, and Healing Stream Totems.

This is especially key to druid healing. Druids not only get to stack their HoTs with other players' HoTs, they can stack some of their own. The Lifebloom HoT is unique in that a druid can keep up to three of these stacked on a single target. I don't believe that's the case with Rejuvenation, and it certainly isn't with Renew for priests.

Off-Healing - The glory of hybrids! Off-healing is usually the role of DPS/healing classes. Frequent off-healing classes would be Shadow priests, non-Restoration shaman, non-Restoration druids, and Retribution paladins. These players will DPS through most of the raid, but are available and prepared to drop into a healing role when certain fights require additional healing. Sometimes these classes will be asked to heal only, but I tend to feel that's a waste of the utility these classes and players bring to a raid.

Queuing Heals - This technique is mostly used against bosses that do crazy spike or burst damage to your tank. This prevents a situation where the tank takes a lot of damage, we start our heal, and the tank gets hit again and dies before we've even cast that first one.

With this strategy, a healer with a long casting heal (for example, a priest's Greater Heal) would start the heal and let it channel until it's almost complete. At, say, 2.0 out of 2.5 seconds, the healer analyzes the situation and decides if the tank is going to need that heal. If not, he or she interrupts it so that no mana is wasted. (I jump to interrupt, though a lot of priests frown on jumping.) The healer immediately starts queuing the next big heal. When the tank finally does need that heal, we let it continue to its completion.

This is preferable to quicker heals when the "bursty" damage is very large - even with a 1.5 second cast time on my Flash Heal I've been in situations where the damage was just so much so fast that I was never able to catch up. This also allows a healer to take advantage of the Five Second Rule. As long as the spell is only channeled, not cast, you're not considered "casting" for the purposes of mana regen.

Frequently, another healer is on stand-by for the quick heals during a major spike. This is the tactic I tend to use during the Murmur fight in the Shadow Labyrinth - I'll start queuing a big heal after the "sucking in air" emote, and an off-healer will be prepared with his or her small and fast heals. Between the two we tend to get the tank out of the danger zone pretty quickly.

Healing Rotation - This is used in long, drawn-out fights when a single healer alone is likely to run out of mana. It's also mostly used with Priests as many other healing classes don't stack Spirit like we do. However, it can be used in combination with Greater Dreamless Sleep potions for other classes.

In a healing rotation, a priest will take on Main Tank healing duty (usually solo) until his or her mana pool gets low. This could be as high as 50 percent of total mana or as low as 25 percent of total mana, depending on the demands of the fight. At that point, he or she hands the tank off (verbally is best, though it can be done in a healing chat channel) to the next healer in the rotation.

The first healer then regenerates mana while the second healer takes care of the tank. (Paladin seals can help with this - the first priest can wand and get that mana back while Spirit does the rest.) When the second healer is low, that healer then hands off back to the first healer or to the third healer in the rotation - though I think 3-healer rotations are a thing of the past now that we're at 25-man raid caps.

Spot Healing - The under-recognized and unglorified task often assigned to a raid's off-healer, this refers to quick-moving quick-cast heals on the raid at large. For the most part, healing in a raid pretty much only concerns the tanks. However, to keep things moving during trash pulls - or if a particular boss encounter has a lot of "splash" damage - healers may be assigned to spot healing.

Any class can be good at this. Priests and Druids can use their Heal-over-Time spells, and Pallies can use their seemingly endless Flash of Light spells. Shaman have two tricks for this: Chain Healing which heals up to three people at a time, and their Healing Stream totems which generate a small amount of healing over 2 minutes (as of the 2.1 patch).

Spot healing can be assigned to particular groups, where each healer takes responsibility for healing a particular group in the raid. (We do this a lot on trash pulls.) Or it can be assigned to particularly important classes that are going to take some damage - for instance, AoE classes during the "bat waves" in the Zul'gurub fight against the bat boss, or rogues when you need to ensure you have a spell interrupt handy.

Downranking - Once the bread and butter of raid healing, this tactic has diminished in importance with the changes of The Burning Crusade. The basic use of this is fairly straightforward. A healer has at his or her disposal several "ranks" of a healing spell. Prior to TBC, a priest with enough +healing on his or her gear would be able to heal with only, say, Greater Heal Rank 3. The benefit of this was that Great Heal Rank 3 costs about 200 less mana than the Rank 6 version - and with enough +healing it was still a large enough heal to work well in most raid damage situations.

With the release of The Burning Crusade preparation patches, however, the game mechanics were changed so that less of a healer's +healing would be applied to spells that were considered "under level." This was a significant nerf to downranking, and led to its decline as a raid healing tactic. Still, downranking can be used to some effectiveness.

For instance, I keep a Greater Heal Rank 3 on my hot bar to heal squishies. A good 1000 of my healing is usually just overheal on, say, mages who have significantly less total HP than my usual healing targets. So I keep a smaller heal (which is more mana efficient than Flash Heal) on my hot bar just for them.

IV. Aggro Miscellany

Though it's a little outside the proposed scope of this glossary, I wanted to devote a small section to threat and how it works with healing. A more comprehensive (and excellent!) guide to threat is located on wowwiki.

Terms - I couldn't couch this as a glossary if I didn't explain my terms! The quick and dirty definitions I'll be using are:
[list]threat - how much a mob dislikes a character, built incrementally
aggro - when a mob dislikes a character so much s/he attacks that character[/listu:6129dc7f74]
Basic Healing Threat - Most people know that 1 point of damage equals 1 point of threat. But as healers we aren't usually doing damage. So we need to know how we still generate threat.

Healing threat affects every mob that is aware of the healer; in other words, healers will accrue threat against every mob in a pull. This is very different from damage threat, and one of the biggest causes of healers gaining aggro. We tend not to pull aggro from the main or even secondary DPS targets, but "extra" mobs in a pull that haven't yet been attacked by the tank will often bolt right for the healer.

The basic formula for healing threat is 2 points healed per 1 point of threat. That threat is then divided among all the mobs in the pull. So if there are four mobs, and you heal someone for 1000 hp, you have just gained (1000 divided by 2 threat divided by 4 mobs) 125 threat on each target in the pull.

This is why it's generally a good idea to wait to heal the tank until he or she absolutely needs it - you want to give them time to generate threat on ALL the mobs, not just the main DPS target.

Class Threat Modifiers - The basic healing threat formula is often modified by class and class abilities. The breakdown is as follows:

• Paladins - The whole class has a base healing threat formula of 4:1 healing to threat. Blizzard didn't want paladins to be able to "tank by healing" and so reduced their healing threat accordingly. They also can provide "Blessing of Salvation" which reduces threat of the receiver by 30%.
• Druids - Druids can spec into Subtlety, which reduces their healing threat by about 20% (I think, I'm bad at maths).
• Priests - Priests can spec into Silent Resolve, which reduces Holy and Discipline spell threat by about 20%.
• Shaman - Shaman can spec into Healing Grace, which provides a 15% threat reduction on healing spells. They can also reduce all party members' threat by 20% with a Tranquil Air Totem.

Special Spell Threat Mechanics - In addition to the modifications provided by certain class abilities, certain healing spells also have quirky threat mechanics.

• Prayer of Mending (Priest) - This spell heals the person it is cast on only once they take damage, and the threat from the heal is given to the person who received the heal. This makes P(r)oM an excellent "opening" combat move: tank is preemptively protected against damage, and gets the threat. It's my favorite spell in the game, honestly.
• Power Word: Shield (Priest) - This spell shields the target against all damage up to a certain amount, or until 30 seconds has passed (whichever comes first). It's generally thought to generate 4:1 "damage not taken" to threat. In other words, your shield for 1000 damage will generate 250 threat.
• Earth Shield (Shaman) - This spell is similar to Prayer of Mending in that it generates healing only when the target is damaged. It also causes the threat from that healing to generate on the healing target, not on the healer. Unlike Prayer of Mending it does not jump to new targets, but it does have ten charges before expiring.
• Nature's Guardian (Shaman) - This is technically a class talent, but it operates a little like a spell so I'm putting it in this section. When fully talented, this ability gives the shaman a 50% chance to proc a heal on any hit that drops him or her below 30% health. The heal is for 10% of the shamans total hitpoints but it also reduces the Shaman's threat against that mob.

I just wanted to make it clear that I didn't write this guide because I think I'm some kinda of uber raid healer - far from it! This guide is also not intended to be comprehensive, or to provide healers with the very basics of healing. I wrote it mostly to solidify my own thoughts on "raid healing" and to try to systematically explain some of the common raid healing tactics I've learned from more experienced players. If I've missed something (I know my shammy knowledge is very weak) I'd welcome any thoughts or input for improving this. Thanks for reading, and happy healing!

VI. Addendum: Useful Healing Tools

Priests can see at which point downranking (even with the nerf) can be useful for them by using the Healing Efficiency Calculator.

Druids can view this information by downloading the excel spreadsheet created by Peanuts.

If I stumble across something similar for other classes I will add that to this guide as well.

WOTLK Tool: http://zusterke.orderoftheathanor.eu/tool.php?t=regen