If you check out the official World of Warcraft forums, you’ll find a lot of discussion about which healer is the best in different situations and about how changes to our class affects our ability to heal.  At the basis of this discussion is the underlying question of what exactly makes a class, or even a person, a good healer.  Answering this question can help us not only determine which class and abilities are the best for healing, but it also helps us to evaluate the actual players in our raid… even two healers of the same class.  So what actually makes someone a good healer and what can we do to improve our healing skills?

The Three Measures

There are three qualities that we can use to evaluate healing ability:

• Total effective healing (burst healing ability and total healing output)
• Longevity/Sustainability (how long we can maintain different levels of healing)
• Ability to keep people alive (healing the right people at the right time)

Interestingly enough, very similiar qualities can be used to evaluate your dps.  Maximum dps is a useful comparison tool for damage dealers, as well as their longevity/sustainability of different levels of dps.  And a damage dealer’s ability to stay alive and keep others alive, as well as kill the correct targets at the right time, is also a measure of their skill.

Total Effective Healing

Of the three skills listed above, how much total effective healing you can pump out is the least important skill, but also the first skill you must master.  If you can keep the people alive you’re supposed to and have the longevity/sustainability to keep it up, then your actual total effective healing (on the healing meter) is meaningless.  However, that doesn’t mean it is not important at all as a measure of your skill.  A static amount of damage gets dumped onto the raid every encounter and it all must be healed through (or avoided if possible).  If, for the duration of a fight, total damage is greater than total healing, someone is going to die.  How much total effective healing you can pump out is important, especially for those instances where damage is coming in very quickly.

Improving Total Effective Healing

Raw healing power should be the first thing you focus on as a new healer.  Once you’re able to pump out enough heals to keep up with damage, you can then work on pumping out those heals for longer as well as learning to save people in emergency situations.  But the first thing you need to be able to do is to keep up with all the damage coming in on a typical encounter.

The stats to focus on to improve your raw healing output as a  Holy Paladin are:

• Spell Power
• Haste
• Critical Strike
• Intellect

These four stats will directly improve the raw numbers of how much heals you can pump out.  The highest possible raw healing you can pump out is through the use of a combination of Beacon of Light, Sacred Shield, Holy Shock, instant Flash of Lights (with the new HoT) and Holy Lights as your primary heal between instant heal cooldowns.  Make sure to keep up your judgement for the haste buff.  Using all of these abilities will give you a huge amount of raw healing.  However, keep in mind that we’re talking about effective healing, so throwing Holy Lights out on people with almost full health will actually reduce your total effective healing since the Holy Light cast time is longer while doing the same amount of effective heal that a Flash of Light would (you’ll toss a smaller number of heals in the same amount of time).  Make sure to use the heal that is most appropriate for the job.  If you can do the same amount of healing with a 1.25 second Flash of Light that you can with a 1.75 second Holy Light, then use the Flash of Light instead so you can get more heals in.

Longevity/Sustainability

Once you’ve reached a level where you can consistently keep up with the damage coming in, you may find yourself starting to run into mana issues.  If  your mana runs dry before the fight is done it can cause the group to wipe.  Once you reach that point, your goal is to improve your longevity and sustainability while also maintaining or improving your total effective healing.

The stats to focus on at this point are:

• Intellect
• Critical Strike
• Mana per 5 Seconds

Improving longevity requires more skill than improving total effective healing does.  The reason is because unlike effective healing, you can actually do things to improve your longevity without needing to improve your mana regen stats at all.  Improving spell power can actually improve your longevity since your heals will be larger while costing the same amount of mana.  The key is to use your heals in the most efficient way possible.  Flash of Light is the most efficient heal a Holy Paladin has and it is very efficient.  Healadins interested in improving their longevity (outside of improving gear) should focus on replacing Holy Light and Holy Shock with more Flash of Light use.  Here are some tips on how to do that:

• Don’t use Holy Light when a Flash of Light will do the same job.  Don’t overheal unneccesarily.
• Don’t use Holy Shock when a Flash of Light will do the same job.  If the target isn’t in threat of dying immediately, Flash of Light may be better.
• Don’t heal at all when another healer already has it covered.  Watch for HoTs and the casts of other healers.  Don’t waste your heals when they’re not needed. 

The key is to slowly replace instances where you might use one of the other spells with a more efficient heal instead (or no heal at all).  If done correctly, your total effective healing won’t be reduced at all since you are simply reducing overhealing.  There’s no question that simply focusing completely on Flash of Light will reduce your total effective healing.  That’s why you need to determine whether a Flash of Light will provide the same results or whether a Holy Light or Holy Shock is actually needed.  This also includes finding the right time to use Divine Plea and not getting so focused on healing that you forget to use Divine Plea at all.  Use a good blend of Flash of Light, Holy Shock, and Holy Light for the best results.

If you’re finding that mana is an issue, you may need to decrease your effective healing.  If you’re mana is going down fast, you’ll have to switch purely to Flash of Light spam for awhile.  The measure of a healer is not just how long he can last but how long he can last at varying levels of healing.  A good healer can throttle his healing to meet the current demands.  You shouldn’t always be working at 100% throughput but instead you should be able to ramp up to that when needed and then throttle back again.

Keeping People Alive

Your job as a healer is to keep people alive, and thus, this is the most important of the three skills for you to learn.  Saying you can “keep people alive” is pretty general.  But the core of the idea is that the people you are assigned to heal don’t die, no matter what.  The stats to focus on to improve this skill are:

• Haste
• Critical Strike (for instant Flash of Lights)

Haste, Holy Shock, and instant Flash of Lights will help you save lives at the last minute, but skill is a much more important factor when it comes to healing the right people with the right heal when they need it.  You could be at the top of the healing meters and never run out of mana, but if you’re not healing people when they need the heal, then you’re not a good healer.  There is a specific moment, a threshold, for every person where a heal is absolutely required.  Healing isn’t just about keeping up with damage output, its not about numbers, its about healing the right people at the right time.  Your total healing could be well above the total damage, but if at any point, 3 seconds goes by where more damage goes onto a person then their health can handle, they die, regardless of how many heals you were pumping out to the raid or how much mana you have left.

Saving lives while raid healing is all about fast reaction time.  Its about taking advantage of the emergency abilities you have, like Holy Shock, instant Flash of Light, Hand of Protection, and Hammer of Justice.  Its about following directions, staying focused on your assignment and trusting others.  Throwing a heal onto someone else’s healing assignment could save someone’s life, but it could also mean a wipe if you neglect your own healing assignment.  The skill comes in knowing what you can handle and what your other healers can handle.  Stay on your healing assignment and practice developing a quick reaction time to improve this skill.  Your User Interface, Add-ons, and Hotkeys also help a lot to develop this skill.

Comparing Healers

So how do we compare the skills of two healers?  There’s one tool a lot of people use to compare healers:  Healing meters.  But healing meters can only help with one of the three measures, total effective healing, and then only in very limited cases.  If you are not using healing assignments and no one dies at all during the duration of an encounter, you can check the healing meters to see who was actually doing the most effective healing.  If one healer is well under another, you can probably assume that the top healer is better at pumping out a lot of heals.  If this continues to be the case over multiple encounters, then you have a pretty good idea of which healer you’d rather bring to future raids.

However, things change substantially once you start using healing assignments, or once people start dying.  If you are using healing assignments, then healing meters are meaningless.  You are artificially limiting the amount of healing some people can do.  The primary measure of skill with healing assignments is whether the healer keeps his assignments alive for the entire encounter.  In this case, you need to be very aware of what happened during the fight and whether it is something that could have reasonably been healed through.  Another good comparison tool is to switch assignments over multiple attempts to see which healer does a better job keeping those assignments alive.  If one healer is repeatedly struggling to keep his assignment alive while another does the same job with no problem, then you have a pretty good idea of which healer you want to put on that assignment in the future.

Even if you’re not using healing assignments, if people are dying you can not use healing meters to measure skill.  In fact, if you don’t have assignments and people are dying, its very difficult to compare healers at all.  There’s no way of knowing which healer may have messed up when healing is free-for-all.  You could have one healer at the top of the meter, but if he ran out of mana early and caused a wipe, then he’s a bad healer.  You could have one healer at the top of the meter but if he’s letting people die anyway then he’s a bad healer.  Healing meters can only measure total heal throughput and only when there are no deaths and no healing assignments.

Comparing Classes

How can we use this information to compare two classes in general, or the same class before and after changes?  To do that we have to look at the balance between the three measures: total heal throughput, longevity, and our ability to keep people alive.

Where Holy Paladins have excelled and will continue to excel in Patch 3.2 is in the first area:  Total Effective Healing.  With Holy Light and our instant heals, we can pump out a ton of healing.  In Patch 3.1 we could heal at this high level at almost 100% output for a very long time.  Patch 3.2 actually improves our throughput even more.  With overheals counting toward Beacon and our new HoT, we’ll be able to pump out an absurdely large number of heals.  However, we were nerfed in the longevity area, and the balance in these two arguable equals an overall nerf.  We now have to heal at less than 100% capacity in order to conserve our mana.  This gives us a little more flexibility though because we can now throttle our heals for the situation.

Where Holy Paladins are weak and continue to be weak in 3.2 is our ability to keep people alive.  Holy Shock is our only on-demand instant heal and it is single-target, manually targetted, and on a 6 second cooldown.  To make up for this limitation, a Holy Paladin has to have very fast reaction times and precise clicking skills to get our Flash of Lights off on as many people as possible who are in threat of dying.  We also have to be constantly casting in order to prevent those people from getting low in the first place.  A good custom UI is very important for Holy Paladins.  Our strength is in the sheer amount of heals we can pump out, keeping many people at nearly full health all the time.  We can focus-target large heals exactly where they’re needed.  Even Flash of Light is a relatively large heal compared to HoTs and AoEs.  But if at any time enough damage makes it through our bombardment of heals to threaten someone’s life, we have very few tools to save those lives, especially if 3 or 4 people are in dire threat of dying at the same time.

To succeed as a Holy Paladin, we have to ensure things don’t get to that point, and rely on other healers for when it is unavoidable (like during a tantrum or a vortex).  By constantly casting on those people most in need of heals, we can keep everyone up before it gets to the point we can’t handle where multiple people are in threat of dying at the same time.  Our heals are very large and very quick, but they need to be cast immediately and often to keep up with damage.

Summary

Every healer has a balance of three skills:  throughput, longevity, and on-demand life-saving heals.  In Patch 3.1, our balance of skills was something like 40%-40%-20% respectively.  In Patch 3.2 our balance has changed to something more like 50% - 25% - 20% (the less than 100% represents a slight nerf).  Make sure while playing a Holy Paladin that you take advantage of your healing power by casting on the people who are most in need of heals and never stop casting.  You need very fast reaction times and a good UI.  While it may feel like whack-a-mole at times, playing a Holy Paladin with this kind of balance can be also very fun and exciting if that’s your style.