Healers setup question

Hello, I’ve been maining rogue for years and years, and was thinking I’d like to try playing a healer on the side - except, I have no idea how people actually heal :slight_smile:

I was hoping some experienced healers could share some very basic info about their UI setup, like:

  1. Do you have friendly nameplates toggled on? And if so, how the hell do you see anything else on the screen beside, all the nameplates? :slight_smile:
  2. Do you keep your target on a friendly player, switching between them, or do you primarily target enemies, and heal teammates on mouseover cast? And do you mouseover arena/party frames, nameplates, or players silouette?
  3. If you keep target on a friendly players, do you use some modifier key, to cast on yourself?

I would imagine class is irrelevant for this basic UI stuff, but as I said, I know nothing about everything, so can you please post your class as well, so I can spot some patterns, if there are any?

Finally, I might not respond to each and everyone, depending on the length of the thread, but let me THANK YOU in advance for all your responses.

I have since MoP used Raid frames to watch for HP, and mouse scroll up/down for targeting party 1 and 2, and Shift up, for myself.

I use Gladius Addon (now GladiusEx) for Arena 1,2 and 3.

And both friend/hostile nameplates, with Nameplate buffs (Addon). Disable pets/totems.

Let me know if there is anything else you would like to know :smile:

1 Like

Yes. But you mainly heal by looking at Party Frames on the left side. With a BigDebuffs addon set up so you can see debuffs that you should dispel - like Fears, Pala stun, Sheeps etc.

Generally the best way of healing is via having keybinds / scroll for party frames + a self cast bind. I scroll up to target 1 teammate and scroll down to target the other. Because of this, you can target enemies to do things as well, because you can instantly switch back to friendly target via scroll. Example, I target enemy healer via Gladius, run up to him, stun him, then scroll to immediately target and heal my teammate that is getting low.

Most people use self-target binds for self casting, the default one was ALT as far as I remember. For example if your Flash heal is bound to 1, you’d do alt + 1 to flash heal yourself. Some other people have other binds, I use an extra mouse button to target myself which is bound to a macro that targets me, but that is a personal preference thing since I don’t like using alt.

Been using this for healing as every healer in the game, as I have played all the specs, recently picking up my last one which is Holy Pala.

Keep in mind that you will require more binds for some specs that have a ranged kick. For example, to play Resto Shaman or Prevoker efficiently, you need an arena 1, arena 2 and arena 3 Wind Shear / Quell bind (otherwise it feels very scuffed to manually target a guy that’s sheeping you, fearing you etc in time)

Some high rated healers also use party 1, 2 and 3 dispel to be super fast. This is definitely not mandatory, but could make a 0.5 reaction dispel into a 0.2-0-3 reaction dispel since there’s no targetting involved.

As a final note, a lot of it is based on preference and habit, and generally you need a lot of practice to achieve a healthy balance between looking at your party frames and looking at the game itself and what’s going on. If you permanently look at frames you will end up not paying attention to who is where and have bad positioning.

1 Like

Hotkeys for targeting party1, party2, myself, arena1, arena2, arena3.

I have a habit of switching the target and then cast instead of having multiple versions of the same spell bound, but thats very subjective.

Nameplates enabled for both enemies and party, but styled differently and disabled nameplates for pets with exception to totems and other deployables.

Big party frames on the left, big enemy frames on the right, big player frame with target in the top middle.

A mountain of weakauras and omnicd trackers in between. Cherry on top is gladiatorlossa for audio queues, it makes you a worse player but i grow old, i need the support.

I played dps first before switching to healer which resulted in my dps abilities be bound to typical 1 to 4 and modifier versions of that, while my healing spells are bound all over the place on the letter keys and modifiers of that. This is subjective as well but it was easier for me to adapt this way.

Kudos for switching to healer, we need more of you!

1 Like

Thank you guys - so far you seem to agree with each other, which is good :slight_smile: friendly nameplates on for players, binds for arena 1,2,3.

What do you do when you want to heal mythic+? You have binds for party 1,2,3,4,5 as well?

Yes. But for me it starts to get messi with binds.

I use the mousebuttons on the side for targeting. And it evolved to this bindings.

Party1 - mouse1
Party2 - mouse2
Party3 - alt + mouse1
Party4 - alt + mouse2
Self - shift + space

Arena1 - shift + mouse1
Arena2 - shift + mouse2
Arena3 - ctrl + mouse1

… it is as weird as it reads but i use it since legion and adapted to it. Find something which suits you - it could be a little frustrating in the start tho ^^.

As soon as i reach raid size groups i target swap by clicking the raidframes.

The posters above used the mousewheel for targeting, i use it for big cds in combination with shift, so i can still zoom. Mousewheel binds are easy to reach and you can spam them very hard, which comes in handy if the opponent leaves a 100ms gap between CCs.

1 Like

I use razor naga mouse. 1 is party 1, 2 is p2, and 3 is target self. You can use an addon to make sure you are always on the bottom of party frames. Or top if you prefer. Arena 1, 2 and 3 is alt+ 1, 2 and 3.
Targeting keybinds are the most important binds in my opinion.

Help/harm macros can be good to.

1 Like

I use clique for mouseover casting in pve or bgs. I like being able to heal while having enemies targeted.

Mouseover macros for casted cc is also good in random bgs, since most melee who train you dont bother kicking unless you are targeting them. So you can target someone else, then mouseover cyclone the warr thats in your face.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.