A few nights ago, I decided to participate in a Heroic Naxx pug (and you know my thoughts on the subject). But I always go back to it since I like to use my Shaman to decompress.
Like most pugs, we stood around for 30 minutes (literally) for the lead to dish out instructions. The boss we were about to engage was Gluth. We were about to run through the pipe, but we had to hold off and wait for a Paladin.
Now you might think this is trivial. But wait until I tell you why.
“My HealBot is not working properly. I can’t heal without it.â€Â
As you can imagine, that sent a nasty surge up my spine. Here’s a Paladin. He’s been assigned to main tank healing. And he can’t heal without his Healbot?
Is it truly that difficult to do nothing but hit the Flash of Light or Holy Light keys at will?
After the 30 minute brief, we had to wait around for an additional 10 minutes (multiplied by 24 players and thats 240 minutes or 4 hours) for this guy to get his addon going.
Airline pilots have a wide variety of electronics and instruments at their disposal. Most of the time, they can toggle the autopilot. When push comes to shove, they have to take manual control of their plane. Sometimes emergencies happen. Perhaps there’s a circuit fried somewhere rendering GPS useless. They have to be trained to be able to make visual landings of their aircraft under extreme weather circumstances.
Lesson 1
Good healers use addons to heal. But great healers don’t have to rely on them.
Don’t get me wrong. I think HealBot is a good tool. As is Clique, Grid, and whatever else you decide to use. At the same time, the next time you go on a farm raid try toggling off and healing in vanilla mode. The point isn’t to see if you like it. Because I guarantee you, you won’t. The point is to see if you can do it. Blizzard will make patches and they will continue to update the game. Addons will break or error out on certain fights. Sometimes updates will come out days or even weeks later.
Would you delay raiding because a key addon you need isn’t available?
I should hope not.
I love my Pitbull as much as the next guy. But if I need to heal by pulling out the raid frames manually, I can. Sure it reduces my overall effectiveness, but at least I won’t be handcuffing the raid.
Lesson 2
Check your addons before entering a raid to ensure that they’re working properly.
This goes without saying. But a 10 second check saves 10 minutes of heartache.
As a healer who uses NO add-ons to heal, it’s refreshing to hear this.
O.O
/target tank
/cast Sacred Shield
/cast Flash of Light or Holy Light as required
…what the hell add ons do you need to do THAT?
I can even play Flash of Light Whack-A-Mole with the default raid frames if I have to. Hell, I used to raid with only a couple of CT add ons back in the MC/BWL days. I was also a total noob, but that’s beside the point…
I imagine it’d be a bit harder for other healing classes, but a holy pally on tank healing? No!
Practicing without your addons is good advice. We all need that practice for those dreaded post-patch days. 😀
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I’ve heard that same thing from Healbot users. I think the problem is that, alone of all unit-frames type solutions, Healbot modifies your primary mouse clicks only when you’re mousing over character bars.
Somehow it’s hard to train your body out of that.
All other solutions, like Grid+Clique, take more work on the user’s end to set up and customize. I find that when you understand how and why your addons help you, and configure them yourself, you’ve got the knowledge to do without for a day if need be.
I dumped Clique a while back for a series of mouseover macros. I like that better, and the fact that I have to rewrite them pretty frequently or change them up makes them easier to use. Healbot is ready out of the box, so the player may never understand the concepts that let you heal that way.
I will say, though, that without keybindings or mouseovers, healers are much, much slower. You don’t HAVE to use addons, but some kind of unit frames will serve you much better than standard blizz bars.
However, if you have to switch back to standard for, say, Maly phase 3? As long as you know what you’re doing it’s not a problem. Just…slower.
I get more annoyed at healers who perform sub-par because they refuse to use addons than healers who do use addons but have to troubleshoot them.
The quality of your healing without an addon is noticeably lower than with one. That delta for the 99% of the time that your addons work fine more than makes up for the 1% of the time you need to troubleshoot healbot or whatever.
I don’t raid on major patch days … this also helps. Sometimes it’s just better to postpone a night of raiding when everyone’s UI is hosed.
25 people with, let’s say, 20% reduced effectiveness is pretty significant.
I’m positive I could heal without my add ons…but I shiver thinking of it! I REALLY do not want to! I healed that way for a long time. I did not use any add ons at all. Add ons just make me….faster. And I have more information at once. And I can put it where I want it to be. All of these things and more add up to me being able to do my job better.
Now if they broke I’d live, but I so would not like it! Also it would take me some time to fix as a lot of my ui is set up with my add ons in mind. Clique breaking would require me to pull my healing spells back out onto my key binds….now I have mostly attack spells on my keys. Anyhow I’m gonna go sing happy songs and try to forget about this post! 😛
The only addon’s I’ve ever used were Omen, QuestHelper, AtlasLoot, and X-Perl UnitFrames, and never have I felt the need to use anything else. I played a Discipline Priest [deleted my character today and cancelled my subscription] and have run every raid except Malygos 10 without feeling as if addons could have affected my performance in any way, and very rarely have tanks [or the raid for that matter] complained about my healing speed or efficiency. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m still relatively new to the game but I honestly have difficulty understanding the utility of healing addons as I’ve found that with experience, most of the nifty tricks they offer can come naturally.
I really enjoyed your pilot analogy and would like to add one I’ve often offered my friends: I was recently at a mechanic’s in Pakistan and was astounded when instead of plugging my car into a computer to read the diagnostic [as they do in the states], the man looked at my vehicle for three minutes and then explained exactly what was wrong and how he could fix it. I feel healing without addons is a similar experience but I’m speaking from an obvious bias as I started without them so I continued without them.
Oh, and by the way, even though I’ve quit WoW, I still love your blog Matt. Respect.
Good post, I hate seeing this. Same as the Circle of Healing comments that are going around, but that is a different topic
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Nice post… i actually /facepalmed when I read the pally’s comment. Good quote!
I am a UI addict. I LOVE making them. I love making them pretty. And to do that, I use Add Ons… I try to keep them minimal, but the AddOns I use are mainly for VISUAL effects, not changing my healing style. I did a post on this today actually.
Good information, Matt.
-Derevka
Derevkas last blog post..Derevka’s UI
I don’t mind Blizzard’s UI, action bars and partyframes but I would rather withdraw from the raid than use Blizzard’s raidframes (I might accept a 10 man raid). You don’t shove your letter through a papershredder and ask the recipient to read the information. The same goes for raidframes.
I’m obviously in the minority…I keybind and click the healing spells I don’t have readily available to the keybinds on my left hand. I use regular Bliz frames instead of an add-on, although I’m not opposed to an addon. We’re only raiding 10-mans right now, if I was running 25-mans I might change my mind I’m sure. I tried Grid one night and had to turn it off after a few pulls, it messed with my head so badly. I’ve never had problems with healing efficiency or complaints about my healing. I realized early on that you can target one person for a heal, press your key binding, and then target your next target and be ready to press your key binding on that one as soon as your previous heal completes…that you don’t need to keep targeting the first person until the heal is done, which is something I think a lot of beginner healers on my realm don’t realize.
I never want to use something that binds my heals to my mouse buttons…but I’d be open to other suggestions. 😛
I make it a point every now and then to turn off all addons and play for a day or two…then i see which ones I missed the most and only turn those on.
Besides becoming dependent on them, they can add a lot to load time. When it comes to addons and skill…it truly is “less is more”
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I don’t want to try to hamstring what seems to be your main point, which really is “come prepared to raids. Make sure your addons are all fixed and set before you start, not after.” I believe it’s horrible to come to a raid, pug or not, not prepared to do your job. I agree with this point.
However.
First, as many people in the thread (and you yourself) have said, addons possibly add a great deal of efficiency to healing. People only have a certain “attention budget”, and addons allow you to stop paying attention to things (whether they’re important or not!) and pay more attention to other things.
Addons that tell you when major abilities are coming? Addons that tell you if you’re standing in fire (at least sometimes)? Addons that show you when people need decursing/cleansing/whatever? Addons that tell you when your key abilities are on timer or need to be refreshed? Effective players track all of this, but the more of this you have to track with the default UI, the less effective you are.
But you know that, and that’s not really what I’m here to nitpick on you about. I’m here to nitpick on this sentence.
“Is it truly that difficult to do nothing but hit the Flash of Light or Holy Light keys at will?”
Of course it isn’t. And any paladin that is just doing this is a paladin you don’t want on your squad, any more than you want the priest who is “hitting the Circle of Healing button key at will.”
Yes, at high levels of gear, most paladins spam Holy Light. Good paladins are also using a variety of abilities however… beacon of light (lasting a minute) so they cah throw holy shocks on the raid and still heal their tank. Sacred shield, to minimize spikes. Divine Illumination and Divine Favor, to maximize their mana. Divine Plea. Judgements to increase their haste. Arcane Torrent for more mana. etc etc etc.
The person who is paying attention to all of these instead of using addons to do it for them is more likely to lose their tank, and the person who doesn’t do them at all is likely to run out of mana (and then lose their tank), or not save people in the raid that they could have.
So, yes, by all means people should come to raid prepared. But don’t assume the paladin healing job is any less complex than yours. ^_^
Crutches: Absolutely I don’t understand as much about Pally healing as I would like (which is why I’m still fishing around for a Paladin blogger).
In any case, I’m glad to see such a diverse array of opinions on this.
I must still be the only person on the planet who heals with just Pitbull, Visual Heal, and Quartz with no macros.
Add-ons are wonderful but not at the expense of learning the mechanics of healing. You do need to be prepared if they break. I use a minimal amount of add-ons for that reason, and also so they don’ t strain my memory.
I use a lot of my own macros and keybindings, relying on the UI only to present the needed information.
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Allindra: that is exactly how I used to heal with the default frames. It is definitely a good way to use your frames and you can do fine like that. However… I find the default raid UI to be quite uninformative. I lack overview.
Without addons, you will technically be hand-cuffing the raid – your performance will be lower.
1. If your paladin is FoL/HL healing alone, he’s bad. I’m not sure you understand the full capacity of paladin healing – many non-paladins do. HS/BoL/SS are all key. If you have to BoL or SS via clicking, it’s a problem.
2. You can heal using the default UI with no addons, sure…if things go smoothly. Here’s the problem – you have less capability to make up for others mistakes. Often times it falls to healers when that add was picked up late, someone lagged, or someone made a blatant mistake (ie dps hitting taunt in Naxx). If you don’t have addons, you will likely wipe. I can’t count how many times my ability to respond nearly-instantly has saved a wipe.
3. I agree with one of the other commenters: healers without some sort of addon setup won’t be healing any of my raids…ever. Like mages/etc without decursive.
4. To the other commenters who healed Naxx without addons – try healing Sapph or Kel undergeared w/ 2 healers. You likely 3 healed all of Naxx. (OH – don’t take addons for a test run in a raid! Chain run heroics first to get adapted. The Grid/Clique set up, as mentioned, requires configuration).
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It is totally possible to heal without addons. But dang do they make healing easier.
There is no way I could heal as well in a BG without Grid. There is just too much going on and knowing right away which team members are in range and taking damage helps a ton.
The same goes for a Raid. Easily accessed information really helps a lot. You can do it without addons but it’s easier with them.
Great write up Matt. I am a modaholic myself, however when it comes to healing I keybind f1-f7 as my heal keys and click the frames. My other main is a pally tank, and I have run with people who only heal with healbot and when it breaks, and it does, they have no idea how to heal. This is a sad sad state.
Besides that, how exciting can using a mod like healbot be? I understand all the binding to mouse buttons, but please for the love of all that is holy, learn to heal without a mod.
And to @Allindra /salute I can not STAND the default unitframes as I do not get enough info. I use Xperl for 5 mans and Grid for raids. Anyone that can read those tiny green bars on default deserve a high five. That and I’m old and cant see anymore 😛
Great tips Matt.
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This reminds me of the time I disconnected during Lurker and Grid didn’t show up until I reloaded my UI after I was back. Obviously I couldn’t /reloadui in the middle of the boss fight, so I had to drag out the Blizzard raid frames and raid heal with those. Even CoH on dumb melee gets tricky when you can’t see how far away your raid members are. No one died, though, and it was a wonderful learning experience.
I heal with the standard interface, 1,2,3 keys and F1 F2 etc etc so don’t feel bad
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Heh, too bad I’m a shaman now. 😉 And boy am I still learning. Someday I’m going to have to relearn druids, then I’ll know everything. *snicker*
I do want to point out, to a lot of people… yes, you should be able to be at least minimally effective using the default UI. If you’re counting on your mods to be smart for you, instead of using your UI to help you be smarter, you’re going to fail.
But closing your eyes and saying “la la la I’m not going to use mods it’s cheating”, or whatever the argument is, simply makes you less effective. Being a good healer, or a good player in general, means using all your tools effectively, whether those tools are your heals, your smarts, or your mods. Or whatever else.
One click healing is faster and less error-prone that two click healing. There’s no getting around that. I healed for a long time by targeting a person then hitting my appropriate heal button. It took about a week to make the switch over to one-click healing but once I did, it was SO much easier. If you’re still healing the old way, please do yourself a favor make the change.
As a bonus, an addon like Grid gives you ALL the information you need to heal. You know who is cursed, poisoned, diseased, and magic’d. You can add boss-specific things like the encapsulate on Felmyst that require quick reactions to heal. You can add things like earth shield to make sure it’s always up on the tank. It lets you know incoming heals on the person so you don’t overheal as much.
Sure you can heal without this stuff but I feel like I’m healing blind and with one hand when I’m forced to heal the old way. There’s really no way you can heal as effectively.
This is a timely article: Our guild went into Naxx tuesday night and lagged so hard people were getting disconnected left and right. in the span of 3 hours, 3 people were disconnected 14 times. With all of the AOE, I couldn’t even log back in when I got disconnected, so I had to turn off all the addons except what I considered most important.
They were:
Grid
DBM
Omen.
Everything else, the unit frames, the bar mods, weren’t needed, but I just could not heal on the default ui. I mean, I could have tried, but I play the game to have fun, and no-mods wasn’t fun,.
Everything else was superfluous. I found out that I run almost 50 different mods.
You know guys, I have a macbook. At school, I frequently take my notes on it. It’s faster. I can keep up with what the Prof is saying. I can easily look up any terms or vocabulary that I don’t understand. With a WPM of over 100, I’m more than capable of taking down the important notes along with any anecdotes that a Prof slings my way.
But then I sign up for a class with an ancient Prof who doesn’t want people using laptops at all. No electronic devices, period. I have to rely on a good old fashioned pencil and paper to narrow the information down to what I need and what I can get away without.
Yes, addons help. Yes, they’re a boon. Yes, they’re a godsend.
But you should still be able to make some sort of an impact without it.
From what I’m hearing, I’m wondering if they didn’t change the regular WoW interface somehow…I somehow have mine set so that I CAN see if someone is too far away from me for a heal because it fades out their nameplate in raid frames, and I can also see debuffs (weakened soul, diseases, curses, magic, etc) next to their nameplate. Perhaps that’s how I’ve managed without a healing addon for so long?
I’m not opposed to addons, however I tend to lag on my wireless network and I have the minimal amount to survive right now. Questhelper when I’m not raiding, Omen, DBM (and not everyone in my raid enables this which drives me INSANE because they don’t know who Maexxna is throwing to the wall or what not), Dominoes (which I picked up after looking at people’s UIs on PlusHeal and I love), AtlasLoot, and Recount.
And I raid often with two pally healers…all one of them is flash of light, flash of light, flash of light, and very RARELY a holy light. It drives me nuts, he is stubborn and won’t take suggestions, when I know how much better he could be, the second pally healer is good and mixes flash of light, holy light, beacon of light, holy shock. I doubt very much either of them use addons.
I tried to configure Grid but it still confused the heck out of me. I’d be open to other suggestions.
@Allindra – the holy pally spamming flash of light and nothing else should not be raiding, quite simply. He needs to blend in at least HS’s as needed, and Beacon/Sacred Shield. HL can be almost spammed, once geared. He likely hasn’t spent any time researching his class/spec. Basically, if people aren’t interested in improving, this is holding back the entire raid.
For Grid, you should read articles on this for your class. A simple (aged) overview is here:
http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/01/22/raid-rx-unkicking-butt-a-grid-story/
A simple way to think of grid is a compact version of all the regular raid frames from Blizzard, which can display a lot of information in a very small area.
Here is an example of when the Blizz raid frames fail – you have a Mage in OBS, on decurse duty. There is also a hunter – who’s pet gets the curse of mending. Mage can’t find who’s healing the trash mob…
Chriss last blog post..Raiding Update
Honestly, the only mod that I would feel lost without is Clique. Unit Frames in and of themselves are really only an information sink. The better the Raid Frame the more information and better presented information.
I had to go to a Net Cafe, while moving house, for a few days and had to install mods every single time. I found that just having Clique, Omen and BigWigs meant that I had every single thing I needed to raid. oRA2 meant that people could get more info etc, but its not necessary. And I pulled out the standard blizzard raid frames. They’re lacking in info like health deficit and missing buffs etc, but they do serve you just as well as any other raid frames.
Clique is a speed and efficiency mod, rather than an information mod. I remember taking aside BC-baby shaman midway through BC after the RL complained about her DPS so much, and convinced her to try healing. After showing her Clique she became and awesome healer despite having hated it on her priest in pre-BC. She also told me that Clique was like cheating.
I agree wholeheartedly though about the “make sure your mods work” and “know how to do it vanilla”, though the best example I know is….
-: RANT :-
PALLY FRIGGIN POWER.
When its broken, nobody gets blessings. I mean what’s the issue with opening your spellbook, targetting a class and buffing it that way. But noooooooo we have to wait for 20 mins while the pets get every buff under the sun because pally power isn’t correctly configured.
-: /RANT :-
@Perrin – the pallypower rant took away what was otherwise a thoughtful post.
Different paladins have different specs. Some have ret, and therefore impr might. Others are prot w/ sanc. Holy has impr wis. Sometimes prot/holy OR ret have kings. Without pallypower, it’s difficult to specify who gives what to whom without detailed assignments. Pre 3.0.2 it was even tougher, with light/salv.
Nothing more annoying to a good holy paladin than people saying “give me might!” in a raid with 5 paladins. Pallypower = required, or you do not raid.
Chriss last blog post..Raiding Update
Drafting up a new post in response to @mattycus ‘s most recent. http://tinyurl.com/9jydeg
Note: Too lazy to read the above comments, so if someone mentioned it, I apologize ahead of time.
In regards to addons and healing, it is not impossible to heal if ones addons are messed up, but the same goes to player who use keybinds and for some reason, they were deleted. Players develop play styles and become accustomed to them so trying to do something outside of it is not easy. And with anything technical, problems arise. But just because a player uses addons does not diminish their ability any. But then again, with the internet, its easy to ridicule someone for doing something that ISN’T optimal.
I usually pimp out my UI, install grid/pitbull/etc. and run with a tricked out HUD and all that jazz about once every few months. Then I delete the entire addon folder and run “Commando” because a lot of what people used to gripe about Blizz frames has been taken care of.
I prefer to run as close to default as possible from old FPS habits. ONE GIG CONFIG~ NO THANKS.
The only add-on I find / have found that made me more efficient was the one from BC that updated health bars quicker than default. There are tons of addons that provide alternatives to Blizz Raid Frames, but it’s a far cry from necessary. Decursive is a strong argument for efficiency… but Show Debuffs Checked – click and cast has gotten it done for me for a long time. Efficiency in healing is forged by the person watching the screen, not the screen the person watches.
**DISCLAIMER** Default frames weren’t always playable. Vanilla raiding they were a travesty. They’ve developed a lot of good stuff since (or stolen alot of good ideas, depends on who you talk to).
I just found your blog today and coincidentally had to heal yesterday with my main addons not working.
I switched a couple of days ago from a pure dps class to shadow priest, but as luck would have it I was need to heal in 10man Naxx yesterday. For some strange reason my combat log was doing nothing (tried reloading and resetting with no luck, didn’t want to hold up the raid by relogging), this meant that all my combat log related addons stopped working.
This meant no decursive, no proc warnings from combat text and no DBM warnings for boss debuffs (Thaddius and Laotheb were particularly fun).
For my first time healing a level 80 raid (and I never did more than Kara and a few 25mans at 70) it was a bit taxing (particularly when both other healers missed the jump for Thaddius). I was very glad that the other healers were able to pick up the slack for me (did I mention that I’m also undergeared for holy?).
I like my addons a lot, but I wouldn’t like to get to the stage where I can’t do anything without them. Most annoying ones I find when they break are actionbar mods as then I have to rewrite a load of macros for healing. I can’t believe I used to heal back at 60 with just the spell dragged from my toolbar =)
why you would get upset for someone who needs 2 mins to reload an addon is beyond me. especially when he will perform much better. i do understand what you are trying to say by your post; good healers should be able to adapt and heal when their addons fail. however, it seems like some people think that using addons while healing is lazy or that healing can be done just as effectively without addons. this is NOT true for many many reasons (i’m at work so i might post more later). can you “pull it off?” probably. will you be able to get the most out of your class/raiding situation? definitely not. i 2 healed 10-man naxx a couple of weeks ago with a resto-shammy. up until kel i would do between 60-70% of the healing on any given boss fight (holy paladins ftw!). i dc’d for the first phase of kel and my healing addon didn’t load right. i tunnel healed the tanks and kept the iceblock people up but for the most part that was all i could do. he ended up doing about 65% of the effective healing that fight. granted if i always played without addons i would get used to it and do a little better but you can’t raid as effectively without addons as you can with them. period.
apokteino-uprising-aerie peak
i read your entire post now that i have a little more time and do understand why you would be upset about the paladin wasting your time. clearly he should have made sure he was ready to go during the 30 minute wait time. however, it was a pug so i’m not that surprised something like this would happen.
my original point still stands, though. “Good healers use addons to heal. But great healers don’t have to rely on them.” this is simply not true. good healers use addons to heal. obviously. great healers rely on their addons to give them information they would otherwise not have (who has agro, who needs cleansed, who’s sacred shield is wearing off in 10 secs, is my JoW still up on the boss, does this dps needs salvation, etc. etc.). you need to know this information and having it available to you (ie relying on it) helps you tremendously. BUT (as you point out) a great healer will be able to “make it work” if his addons stop working. he definitely won’t be as effective as if he had them, but he should be still be able to do more than spam HoL and FoL on the MT (lol, i love the irony).
Whether or not you use and rely on addons to heal doesn’t make you a good or a great healer. Any healer that does great with an addon is going to do less well without it and have the sense to recognize that they’d be handicapping the raid without a replacement (by performing at less than their full potential).
Obviously, it would have been ideal if he’d taken care of the addon situation before the raid (or at least during the 30 minute preparation time), but who hasn’t been in this situation? I’d much rather someone address their addon problem just before a successful attempt than not say anything and contribute to a wipe, possibly repeatedly.
More than any other role, the standard UI is unusable for healing. Blizzard has acknowledged as much and hopes to make changes that will make it MORE usable, though they recognize that they cannot present the amount of utility and information that makes the best addons the best because it would overwhelm much of their userbase. To use myself as an example, until such a time that the default UI can tell me who out of 25 people has my various HoTs (with time remaining) or the Swiftmendable HoTs of others, who is poisoned or decursed in an easy to spot manner, and who is getting healed — without completely covering my screen in bars that limits my spatial awareness — I will continue to rely upon and benefit from addons (and, therefore, so will my raid).
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I really don’t get people being so sure of players being less effective if they don’t use addons. 20% reduced efficiency, really ?? I use in game raid frames, zero macros. My only addon I absolutely want to use is Decursive because I don’t have room to map a key for Dispelling. I know Grid or whatever addon has a decursing thing built in as well, but I don’t want that easy mode. I’m fine as it is, I’m more than efficient enough and I’m sure many players can do it the same way I am doing it. It’s just what you get used to.
Sinuviel
It’s related to overheals- addons typically alert you when your target is being healed or has a HoT on them. Once you start to do more content with more than one healer, you’ll notice the difference.
While I’ll never argue that using addons means you’re a crappy healer, (if you have every healing addon in the game and noone dies, good for you), I will certainly agree that if you can’t heal without them, there’s a baseline issue.
I agree with Vonya (a trackback on her article led me here, lol) about VisualHeal being useful for not double-healing targets or wasting Tree HoTs, but really, if you “can’t” heal with the default UI, I have to wonder if you’re playing the game or if your addons are playing it for you.
Will you heal less effectively without addons? Sure. Addons give you more information than the default UI, making you more informed and therefore a better healer. But, if you lost all your addons tomorrow, would you be ABLE to heal your party or raid?
I don’t think anyone is saying you shouldn’t use addons. Just that you shouldn’t NEED them to heal.
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Great to hear this!
I have a healer friend who flat-out refuses to run addons. No Unit Frames, no custom UI, no Decursive, no threat meter, nuffin. Something about ruining the purity of the game and making it too easy … then again, the hardest things he’s healed are BC instances … I wonder if his attitude would change in a raid setting.
On the other end of the spectrum was a priest in Deadmines, level appropriate, saying he can’t heal because his addons aren’t working. It’s freaking Deadmines! The group I was with fell apart waiting for this guy to get his HealBot rolling … that’s just unacceptable.
Addons are good and all, nothing wrong with using them, but short of a raid or arena setting, I really think people should be able to function perfectly well without them.
I’ve been raid healing since the start of BC, covering Kara – MH and now im raid healing in Naxx, OS and VoA (all 10’s) The only healing addons i use is x-perl for the raid frames and smartdebuff for well debuffing.
I like actually having to play my priest and pay attention to every1s greens.
@ people who believe it is possible to raid w/o addons and still get the same results:
Nihilum vs KJ @ blizzcon last June. nuff said.
if you raid on a regular basis, find some class/spec specific addons. your game play will increase dramatically. if you don’t you are hurting your raid.
Airline pilots have a wide variety of electronics and instruments at their disposal. Most of the time, they can toggle the autopilot. When push comes to shove, they have to take manual control of their plane.
Yes, but they wouldn’t take off if they weren’t working. Emergency use only.
I have to admit I didn’t raid much so far, but I never used any healing add ons. Not that I disagree, just that I didnt feel the need of it. People have always been happy of the results.
Since we are working towards raids, Ill look into it! If I can be more effective, why not!
So, do you guys have any suggestions for a new to raiding? What would be the add ons I should get?
By the way, your blog is great!
I use Healbot personally. I really like the mod in the fact that it speeds my healing reaction time alot and makes raid healing alot more knowledgable and easy. Just wanna get that out the way first.
Recently I had to raid heal but was not on my computer so I was pretty much stripped of all my addons which sucked horribly. Rather than attempting to try to go download the addon to use it while where I was, I decided to just rough it and go naked WoW (its my term for no addons used). Was it hard? Comparitively speaking totally. I had to gauge health amounts differently, I couldnt easily access who had a debuff I could dispel, and unable to tell who was within range of me. Could I do it? Totally. Once I got past the initial foreign feeling of having not done this in a long time, I was healing back how I used to way back before I used an addon to heal.
The only differences I had were my reaction time was a bit different but not as big a difference as you’d think. The other players commented on how I allowed their health to dip more than I usuallyl do as they always comment on how comfortable they feel knowing Im healing and Im spot on. I was slower on dispel and such. But outside of that, no trouble at all. I was happy knowing I could without addons.
I think thats the point that you tried to make here.
I understand this write up is talking abt the pally. Thus it’s ridiculous to hear him say that he can’t heal a single target without healbot. However I feel that maybe he is the type who wants to heal other team members when the main tank is doing fine. That’s what many healers do.
As for addons, I’d be fine with healing 10man without addons. The challenge comes with 25-man. Grp healers will benefit a lot from unitframe addons like grid. Otherwise they will have to cover their screen with 25 (1cm by 3cm approx) unit frames from the default raid tab. Definitely won’t be a pleasant experience. This is unless of course the raid leader don’t mind having each grp healer in charged of 1-2 grps only.