Holy Paladin Add-ons - Healbot
Once you’ve understood importance of a strong UI, and you’ve got your macros set up, its time to get a good healing Add-on installed and set up. If you’re really serious about healing, you need to install the Add-ons that will help you do your job well. For this post, I’ll focus exclusively on Healbot. Later, I’ll talk about the other Add-ons you should have.
There are two popular options for healing Add-ons:
Grid and Clique are two separate add-ons that work together to provide many of the same options that Healbot has. However Grid and Clique are much more customizable (and confusing) compared to Healbot. They give you more control over many things, including where each person’s health appears on your screen and how it looks. I have used Healbot since the start of Wrath and it works wonderful for me. Since this blog is focused on helping new healers, I recommend Healbot because its easier to set up and works well.
What does Healbot do?
Green Healbot Bars
First, Healbot will allow you to hover over someone’s Healbot health bar and heal them back up with a single-click. The awesome thing I’ve found about Healbot (which may also be the case with other add-ons, or with no Add-on at all) is that you can actually “boot up” your next heal before your current heal is even finished casting. In other words, when your Flash of Light is about 3/4 done casting, you can click on your next target and it will automatically cast another Flash of Light as soon as the first one is finished, meaning you have zero time lost between heals, even with latency issues, etc. You don’t have to wait until your heal is done casting to click a new one, and you don’t have to worry about spamming the button repeatedly. Just click once near the end of your previous heal and you’re good with your next heal.
Secondly, Healbot will give you a good idea how much each person will be healed, both by you and other healers using Healbot. It will also tell you who is out of range of your heals. It does this by using different color greens for different states. A fully healed person will have a dark green bar. When someone loses health, part of that bar will disappear corresponding to how much health they lost. If someone is out of range, the entire bar will turn a very light green. Lastly, if you or another healer with Healbot is casting a heal on someone, part of their disappeared bar will turn a slightly darker green corresponding to how much Healbot estimates they will be healed. This is very useful so you don’t overlap heals with another healer.
Third, Healbot will help you keep track of your buffs on your targets, mainly Sacred Shield and Beacon of Light. When you cast one of these spells on someone, a small icon of that spell will show up on the right side of the health bar. When the buff has only 10 seconds left, a small countdown timer will appear within the buff icon, letting you know that you need to rebuff the target. When I see this, I click on the user’s Blizzard character frame to the left of Healbot to target them and press my hotkey for the buff to cast it on them. You could also assign those spells to a Healbot click to cast buffs with a click instead of a hotkey.
Lastly, when you’re out of combat Healbot does smart casting. If someone is dead, you can left-click their bar and it will rez them. If someone is low on health, left-click will Holy Light them. If they’ve lost just a bit of health, left-click will Flash of Light them. This will happen automatically with no setup required, although only when out of combat.
Installing Healbot
To install Healbot, click on the Healbot Continued link to go to Curse Gaming, where you can download the Healbot Add-on. Click the big orange “Download” button, and then click “Manual Install”. Unzip the files using WinZip or a similiar tool (you can usually just click “Open” instead of “Save”. You’ll want to extract all the files to your WOW Add-ons folder, usually located at: C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns. Just hit “Extract” in WinZip and select that folder. That’s all you need to do! Now when you enter WOW, you’ll see a little circle on the bottom left of your mini-map. Click it to open your Healbot control panel.
Setting up Healbot
Healbot doesn’t take a whole lot of setup. Check out the screenshots below and try to replicate my settings. I’ll go over what each of them do below.
Healbot Skin Tab
I keep my Healbot health bars just to the right of the unit frames. You can move them around by clicking just above them and dragging. I turn off the border so that it doesn’t take up quite as much space. I’ve been gradually increasing the width of my healbot bars so that I can see every little bit of health that is gone from each person. The longer your bars are, the more health detail you see, but the more screen space they take up, so try to find a good balance between too long and too short.
The most important part of Healbot is your opacity settings so that you get the information you need. You should be able to know right away if someone is out or range of your heals. You should also know who the other healers are healing. And most importantly, you should always know the exact health levels of each person in the raid. For 10-mans, you’ll want to use one column of healing bars. For 25-mans, you’ll want to increase it to two columns. It will take up quite a lot of space on the left side of your screen, but its not too bad and those green health bars are the most important thing for you to look at anyway. If you’re in a raid, ask to have all the tanks put into group 1 and then drag group 1 from Blizzard’s raid UI onto the area just below your character portrait and to the left of Healbot. That way you can easily target and buff each of your tanks with Sacred Shield, Beacon, etc.
Using Healbot
Healbot Spells Tab
Once you have the look and feel of Healbot set up how you like it, you’ll want to set up your mouse-clicks. I use macros for most of my mouse-clicks. If you put a macro name or spell name into your spell tab, it will use that macro or spell. You can see my macros in my previous post. Here is my mouse setup for Healbot. Whenever I click one of these buttons while hovered over a health bar, it will perform the following action on that person.
- Left-click: Flash of Light Macro
- Center-click (mouse wheel click): Holy Shock Macro
- Right-click: Holy Light Macro
- Shift+Left-click: Hand of Sacrifice
- Shift+Center-click: Hand of Freedom
- Shift+Right-click: Hand of Protection
I spend most of my time Left-clicking on the green Healbot bars. I do a Center-click for a quick Holy Shock. I do a Right-click when someone is very low on health to get them back to full (if I think I have time for a full Holy Light before they die).
The Shift-clicks are for my hand spells. Hand of Freedom (Shift-center-click) I primarily only use for PvP. Hand of Sacrifice (Shift-left-click) I use often when a boss enrages. Hand of Protection (Shift-right-click) I use when I notice a clothie or healer get aggro from a melee mob.
If you have more mouse buttons you can assign other things, like Sacred Shield and Beacon of Light, to those mouse buttons. If you want, you can also assign them to Ctrl-click, although personally I have a hard enough time using Shift-click, so I avoid Ctrl-click altogether.
Summary
Healbot can give you a huge amount of information to help you heal and makes healing a lot easier with single-click heals. I highly recommend that you try it out.
Related Articles
- Holy Paladin Macros
- Holy Paladin Add-ons (continued)
- Holy Paladin Hotkeys (coming soon)
Great info. thx
Hi, I was wondering if you could also post about when you use certain abilities. For example, priests have power infusion, insta grp heal, ect. Could you make a post about situational spells paladins have, and when it would be best to use them? I’m currently leveling my paladin as prot, but I would like to be able to heal efficiently as holy when duel specs are available and when I’m needed to heal.
Yep, I can definitely do that. I have some info scattered within my posts already, but I definitely have plans for a post to just go over all the Holy Paladin abilities and when and how to use them. When I talk about hotkey setup, I’ll go over that some more too, since most all of your abilities should be keybound and I’ll explain why and when to use them. I’ll also talk about the ones that don’t need to be keybound and when they should be used. So, it’s coming up! =-D
Yeah, i cannot get healbot to “boot up” my heals and i cant find anywhere that tells me it does this but here,the main reason i downloaded it. also, from what i can tell it is a grid and clique put together into on addon. Are there options im looking over?
ignore the grid/healbot question, i didnt read the first paragraph apparently, but i still cant get it to boot up my next heal. If healbot can indeed do this it is the best addon ever.
I tested this out again last night in Ulduar, Adam. Healbot definitely “boots” up my heals, but it only works if the previous heal is about 3/4 of the way done casting. It might just be lag/latency, but I can definitely click the next heal well before my previous heal is done casting. If I click too early, I’ll get an error noise. When that happens, I just click again quickly and it usually works by that point. You can tell it worked because there’s no error noise. Its possible its just a lag issue and it happens even without Healbot, but I definitely find it useful either way.
You’re no doubt familiar with the concept of the global cooldown. From the little bit of experience I’ve had with Healbot, it just starts the next cast after the GCD is up (or the spell cooldown if its along cast). Just like timing a button press for the next cast of Holy Light before the cast is done.
I personally dont like using Healbot. I macro’d all my heals (FoL, HL, HS) to be mouse-over casts and use X-Perl for a raid-frame. This lets me choose who to cast on just as fast as click casting, and I can actually click to target for Hands, Lay on Hands, Beacon, etc, which are all conveniently hotkeyed.
The reason I dont recommend click to cast healing is that it is very easy to develop healer tunnel vision. In current content (Naxx, Ulduar) you need to be very mobile, even as a healer. Those shadow fissures really dont care what addons you’re using… the added benefit for me of mouse-over macros is that you can mouse over players in the field, if you have to be moving, and you can keep your attention focused. (Heigan dance and Sarth Lava Walls come to mind..)
Just my personal preference, good luck however you do it.
Healbot makes paladins healing very boring. As for me It’s quite more fun to use Grid addon and use mouseover macros. Maybe healing with healbot is a little bit more effective, but it’s totaly boring, though maybe it depends on particulary personal peculiarities.
Hey Classiccc, I’m just curious… what’s the difference between healing with Healbot and healing with mouseover macros? How is one more boring than the other? How are they different?
Another thing I like about healbot is the long health bars. I’ve seen some Add-ons with very small healthbars and I don’t think you can see health going up or down well enough with those add-ons. With long healthbars, I can see every piece of damage that is done as soon as it happens and I have a better idea of exactly how much health each person has.
I used healbot for ages as I found the clique/grid combo completely overwhelming.
A few weeks ago I moved to Vuhdo (voodoo) vuhdo and can honestly say it’s the best healing addon I’ve used. I’ve removed healbot and grid/clique completely now.
The dev is constantly listening to feedback from healers, is a regular contributor on the plusheal.com forum and is really quick with improvements and updates.
Worth checking out
If you have a gaming mouse healbot becomes even more effective. I have a logitech mouse with L and R and Middle mouse buttons as is standard, but also mouse 4 and mouse 5 as 2 thumb buttons, and 3 tiny buttons near the middle mouse button intended to be used to control the mouse sensativity and an alt-tab like program.
If you use Uberoptions however you can set these to be whatever you want. So I’ve set mouse 4 and mouse 5 to be ctrl and shift respectively. I have my default clicks set up as above, but shift (mouse 5 thumb) clicking uses my combat utility spells (beacon, shield, cleanse), and ctrl (mouse 4 thumb) clicking uses hand of freedom, salvation, protection. I set one of the tiny buttons to be alt, and alt right clicking uses DI (these buttons are hard to hit unless you’re really trying, which is good to avoid accidental DIs), while alt left clicking self casts my bubble.
This way I can do all my healing very quickly with just my mouse, leaving me free to keyboard turn to my heart’s delight.
How do i make a macro for Divine Favor then cast Holy Light straight after and put this into a Healbot?
Here’s the macro for that. This will also eliminate the error messages when Divine Favor is on cooldown.
/console Sound_EnableSFX 0
/use Divine Favor
/console Sound_EnableSFX 1
/cast [target=hbtarget] Holy Light
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();
That addon is a must for a true holy paladin:it’s that kind of addon that lets you be the raid saver when other healers slack on targeting and healing efficiently like a healer should;
I use VuhDo also and gotta say it’s amazing. I combine it with a command pad with my off hand and a gaming mouse. (can you say total geek?) I use the ‘Hat switch’ on the command pad to do all my alt/ctrl/shift combos for casting heals/hands etc, which leaves all the regular keys of the command pad free for movement and my emergency hot-keys and macros.
One of the things I like the best about VuhDo is if you set it up to show the player’s targets, you can assign a totally different set of spells/abilities for it to use when you hover over hostile targets. I put JoL, SoR, Exorcism, HoJ, etc. This allows me to assist with dps when healing requirement is low and I can easily keep JoL on the DPS’s target since I can see what everyone is targeting, be it an add, boss, fly on the wall, whatever. I’m also starting to lead raids and this is a great way to make sure everyone is focused where they should be, or I can call for the dps to assist a specific person (ala faction champs). It’s easy as hell for everyone to click on the player called and hit their assist macro, especially in some of the more hectic encounters.
Hey there’s my 2 cents and just some ideas that I bet lots of people overlook.
I have never used and type of healing add-on. Looked into em a few times but never could bring myself to installing yet another add-on. So i figured I’d leave a healing strat I use that wrks very well for those who are like myself and prefer to run with the least number of add-ons.
My heals are bound to my #1,2+3 keys. Holy light being #1, Shock #2 and Flash of light #3 key. Using the 123 keys also puts your fingers at the WASD keys for when you need to move. I drag my raid windows out from my social tab.In raid windows I click my target and heal with my keys. The one thing that works great about this set-up is you can have your next target selected at anytime during your cast. This makes healing very fast and efficient. I also have my Beacon, SS, judgements and other regularly use spells on my tab bar where they can be easily used.
I’m not saying this is better than using a healbot (or Vuhdo) but more of an option for people who’d rather not deal with a healing add-on. As a note, I’d like to say, there is no magical add-on or style that will make you a great healer. Any style you choose takes
practice.
I realise that this article was posted a while ago, but maybe it’s time for an update. Healbot has some cool features since this article was written, some of which might even make Decursive redundant (or obsolete, depends on perspective). I personally use Healbot in combination with VisualHeal, since the latter gives me more of an in-your-face view of the incoming heals on my target. Same as Healbot does, but bigger and right there in the center of your screen. For all the rest, Healbot matches my playstyle perfectly. I love it
Just one small thing: I do hate people who still think that Healbot actually does work *for* you. Besides the smart casts (out of combat!) it doesn’t do a thing unless you tell it to. It still takes skill to heal properly, not addons.
I was thinking that maybe you could post a more up to date, in-depth post of how you set up and use Healbot? I suppose everyone has their own preference, but a small guide on the basics can’t hurt, right?
I am of the opinion that you can’t ever judge an addon without having tried it at least once. I don’t even care if it was just for a few minutes or less, if you never even considered it, you can’t form an opinion of any value. So maybe the Healbot haters (the ones that actually never tried Healbot, mind you) change their mind even for a bit and try Healbot before judging it.
I had used healbot all throughout Sunwell raiding and many people tried to get me to use grid. I was pretty stubborn because I liked the flow of watching deficits of health and just the look of the mod. I finally decided to try grid and when I saw all the tracking it does (even for hot countdowns), deficits (just like healbot), aggro and debuffs I knew I wasn’t going back to healbot. I think grid (or vudho) makes you a more competent raider in a raid due to the fact you can see what is effecting the raid and tracking cd’s (keeping up hots) more accordingly. (Clique to cast comboed with this is just awesome - I just destroy people on decursing).