Getting Better At Healing Doesn’t Get Any Easier Than This

I have to hit the reset button from time to time when it comes to DYS.  And that means listening to my own advice.  You see I preach all the time that MOST people who play WoW are probably on the low end of the casual gaming part of the bell curve.

I realize that not every post is going to please everyone, and that especially means you pros who are so far to the right end of the bell curve you’re barely hanging on with your 1900 arena rating and Yogg-Saron hard mode attempts (+1 tonight – WOOT!).  But for you, you need to realize you’ve forgotten more things about this game than most people will ever know.  And in a sense, that’s not a good thing.

So today I wanted to cover the one mod that you simply must have if you plan on healing in dungeons and raids – ESPECIALLY if you’re a nub.  You pros keep your mouths shut about using Grid and Clique or any other combination of things.  There really is nothing else out there that is hands-down better than Healbot.  Maybe you can do more with Grid, but in the end the expanded functionality makes me chuck it in the trash every few days.  I love it one minute and hate it the next – but I have always loved Healbot.

For a little while – I resisted Healbot.  I liked being able to target anyone I wanted and use any one of my heals just on them and check the unit frames for any other information I thought i needed.  It turns out it was only slower, and that’s just 5 man stuff.  When I got into 25’s I knew targeting was going to be an issue.  (That’s when I tried Grid the first time, and, well, NO).

So I looked around a bit at UI mods for healing.  And Healbot was by far the most popular.  So I gave it a shot.  Right out of the box it’s better, and if you tweak it a little bit in the settings – there’s nothing easier.  Now I can’t imagine healing without it and I’m actually thinking of using even fewer keystrokes and going to more clicks.

If you have never seen Healbot I’m already too far ahead.  So let’s go back to basics.  You can download Healbot here: Healbot.  Once you get it installed you’ll have this new little panel on your screen.

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Left click the word “options” at the bottom of the panel to get this one:

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For those of you who just want the facts and then let’s get back to playing – we’re going to walk you through our settings “AH Mastery Guide” Style.  Since we’ve been using Healbot for over a year, we’ve been through just about every situation there is with it and have tweaked our settings here and there to give us maximum visual effectiveness with as few “GOD I HATE THAT” moments as possible.  Here they are: (just make each of your pages look like each screenshot).

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Obviously these are class specific, and this is where Healbot really shines.  With a 5 button mouse you can set it to do more than 25 different things.  All you have to do to customize it for your tastes is to select a mouse button with the radio buttons at the top, and then type in the name of the spell you want to use with that click.  Once you have them set, it’s as easy as hovering your mouse over the person’s name in the Healbot frame and clicking left for Rejuv, Right for Regrowth, Cleansing on the middle button, Wild growth on button 4 and maybe Swiftmend on button 5.  Since that’s about 90% of what I do I don’t even mess with the modified clicks much, but if you like having every single spell available with one click, Healbot makes it possible.

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Here is another class specific portion, but Healbot “reads” your class and the options you’ll see in the pop-downs will only be those available to your class.  This one uses wacky colors to tell you at a glance who has debuffs.  We set ours to only show debuffs our toon can remove.

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This is where you really make Healbot easy to read and see without getting it so large that it eats up your whole screen.  It’s not easy, it’s taken us hours of fiddling to get it just right.  You may not like it, but it’s a much better place to start than the standard settings.  Try these out for a while and THEN fiddle with them to suit your tastes.

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We skipped the Tips tab, since there’s nothing all that great in those.  You can hover a nameplate for the big tooltip, but reading it in the middle of a boss fight is kinda dumb.  So in the buffs panel just make sure that you’re not monitoring for missing buffs in combat and then set all sorts of nifty ways to buff different classes and subsets of a raid.  it’s not as good as Pally Power, but it works pretty well.

The rest is pretty self-explanatory.  You get yourself into a dungeon and start click healing everything.  Be sure to check the spells you have inserted before you start.  Normally we use a small heal on left click, a big heal on right click, cure on the middle button and then OH CRAP stuff on buttons 4 and 5.  Past that, you’re on your own.

What you will find is that after using Healbot for a few weeks you’ll wonder how you ever healed without it.  Even if it only makes up 25% to %0% of your healing, it’s still going to make your response time better than if you’re just button healing.  And don’t brag that only noobs use Healbot and you do just fine without it.  That’s like saying you get to work just as well walking as driving your car – it’s hogwash.  If you’re fast just pushing buttons you’ll be even faster using a mod designed to make things even faster.

Now, Healbot doesn’t work quite as well in Battlegrounds, where members of a raid all all spread out from here to the end of a zone, but in raid situations it’s almost the only way to fly.  while you can pretty effectively heal five mans with buttons, you’ll find it much easier to heal in a raid (especially as a druid or Priest) with Healbot.  Yes, there are other options (and I’m 100% certain we’ll hear about them in the thread), but you really need to start with Healbot, and if you’re not using it you really should.  It will help you develop into a truly Dominating healer.