Awareness

Awareness is the first thing a Healer needs to have to be successful. As a healer it is your job to be constantly aware of how the battle is progressing in terms of the incoming damage, how success your heals are at keeping the group up, timing of your spells and being aware of where the individual party members are.

Being aware of the amount damage a party member is taking will allow you as healer to judge which of your spells is most approprate in healing of that target. Say your fighting a boss with alot of AoE or splash type damage. The damage hits your tank for a fair amount of were as all the other party members are damaged somewhere in between moderate damage to small amount. Being aware of this helps a healer decide what spell to use on which party memeber and how well your healing is doing in keeping your party memebers alive and doing what they do best, be it either damage dealing or keeping the mobs focused on them. Also the timing of your spells is crucial because there might be times were you need to heal alot of targets like in the above example really quickly and in the case of a Holy Paladin you are restricted to single target heal spells so being aware of how long a heal will take to cast is vital in keeping all of your party members alive as well. Thankfully Beacon of Light transfers any heals you do to the beaconed party member, which is usually the tank.

Knowing where the party members are helps provent Line of sight issues that can make it so you cant heal party members. This should be job that everyone in the party should be taking care of. But there are times when this does become and issue and the healer will need to adjust there position to get back in line of sight with the party member. Although not at the expense of losing sight with the tank.

Skillz!

In my last post I stated that with a Holy Paladin it does not matter how skilled you are, if you dont have the gear/stats you dont heal as well. I wanted to clarify this a bit. Were as this statement is true in that if you dont have the right gear/stats you will not be able to heal the incoming damage as well as say another person who does have the gear/stats as well as the same skill as you. Were as the act of healing is very skilled based. So what makes a person a skilled healer? I think to true answer this question fairly I will have to go into more detail about what I beleave are the skills and traits involved in being a good healer in upcoming posts. In no paticular order; awareness, resilence and knowledge.

The Gear/Stat Conundrum

So I am really digging being a Holy Paladin. The only issue that I have with Ol' Skuldan here is that no matter what new gear I get it is not always a clear upgrade stat wise. My main is a hunter which in my opinion is more a skill dependent class then gear dependent, this was a farly big change to me. Now I have to make a conscious decision on what gear I take and to make sure any trade off does not hurt the over all package. Were as on my hunter it was pretty clear what gear would be an upgrade to what I had. Even in crappier gear a hunter with some skill can still be a contributing part of any group. Were as with a Holy Paladin it is just does not matter how skilled you are if you dont have the gear/stat you dont heal as well. Well I can always look at it another way, at least Im not a Tankadin. I pity them and there gear/stat juggling. Although I've been reading that with the new patch that some of the juggling has become easier.

Welcome

So this is my Blog about my Holy Paladin Skuldan. I would just like to welcome any visitor. This is basically a place were I can be able to rant and rave and more then likely ramble about playing a Holy Paladin in Blizzards World of Warcraft and about World of Warcraft in general. Please bear with me I'm no were near a good writer but hopefully with time I will become one.