How to start healing?

[dambros]

Hi there,

My baby paladin has reached 70 and I'm about to start Northrend so I would like some advices.

My goal with this alt is to be a healer, but being a DPS for my entire wow history I'm kinda lost. What do I need to be ready for heroics?

Also I always heard that it's good to level with a "possible healing spec" so you can do normal instances and everything. Like shamans leveling elemental so they can heal.

I believe leveling as Holy would be pointless and slow, right? So should I level as ret and focus to get all SP gear around? Would it allow me to have gear for heroics at 80?

Thanks in advance.

[Copain]

There's a Shockadin spec to help leveling, whcih consist of a half and half thing IIRC.

But it's not really to hard, I leveld as Prot, and always played Prot (save for some ret); I then Dual speced Holy, and with half raid gotten heal gear, and half Tank gear, I healed heroics fine.

IT's fairly easy since the Pally doesn't have a ton of spells to manage, once you get down how some spells work you'll learn how to work it fairly easy.

[dambros]

Kinda hard to spend 61 points in 2 tree and be effective I believe.

Maybe this spec with SP Gear?
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#sxAzxM0sVuZZVf0t0Ihb

[Sanguissa]

Get healbot and click, thats it.

[dambros]

What about gathering gear while leveling? Pointless? So basicly stick with ret?

[HavocZephyr]

your situation is very alike to my own case. little less then a few months ago i decided to try out resto druid. being a boomkin for so long i had an ample supply of crit haste and SP, so the transition in gear was pretty good minus a few pieces of hit gear i had to eventually replace. what my guildies recommended for me would prolly be my best recommendation for you. at level 80 start PVP healing. it REALLY REALLY gets your healing reflex's up. try and aim to keep everyone around 80% at least, its a real challenge at first but eventually it will give you the rudiments to do PvE healing.

I also recommend Grid as a healer, it gives you a very helpful organized relay of your raids health status, gives you auras for curses/poisons, its very very helpful for healing.

[Patthepriest]

You'll out grow a lot of gear you get really, i got to 70 (in BC) as a shadowpriest and ran instances until i had the gear to heal them. It helps if you can run instances with friends who are healers or healers that are overgeared for the place and won't need the drops, or just find some nice people who let you roll on the healing gear.

[dambros]

I don't want to reach 80 with a dps gear. I remember the terrible time I had trying to find instances as a lowgeared dps rogue :/ Now that I'm almost full Uld gear it's stupid easy, but that's not the case.

This is the main reason why I want to have a set of healing gear available when hit 80, so I can at least focus on normal instance healing to start with, but my fear is not being able to quest if I go holy.

[Absolutíon]

Paladin healing isn' so hard as another poster said. Once you have learned how the spells work you should be fine.

[Vashta]

http://www.wow-loot.com/paladin.htm

Click to only see caster gear.

Collect

???

Profit!

Or get someone to make you this...

http://www.wowwiki.com/Ornate_Saronite

[Xs]

Just level up as Ret, once you get to about 76 start giving Holy gear priority on quest rewards (apart from the axe in ZD arena)
Then do some looking on wowhead, try and find items with a healthy amount of stam/int/sp/crit and go for them, you'll need pretty much full blue gear to heal heroics as Holy, specially since you can't get all 4 of the stats said above on greens, bar very rare occasions
Remember not to exclude mail, theres quite a fair amount of it with very decent stats compared to plate with mp5/sp on as the other reward

[Bizarre]

Personally when Wrath hit I threw on my T5ish Prot pally gear and leveled prot. I chose prot pally quest reward items up to level 76. Once I hit 76 I started grabbing and building a holy set from instances and quests. LOL! I typed this up before reading Xs' post. We think alike.

[qwertyk]

Click holy light and holy shock.

[Xs]

Personally when Wrath hit I threw on my T5ish Prot pally gear and leveled prot. I chose prot pally quest reward items up to level 76. Once I hit 76 I started grabbing and building a holy set from instances and quests. LOL! I typed this up before reading Xs' post. We think alike.

Get out of my head :/

[Ronark]

"Rotation"-wise it isn't that hard.

If your an HL-spammer you'll want to try and use HS every cooldown or so for it's 20% Crit chance for HL (which saves Mana and heals for a lot). Keep Bacon up, know when to use DS/HoSac on Tank, etc.

As others said it isn't that hard at all to accomplish.

I don't remember what the "entering values" are SP-wise. I started getting into Naxx with about 1600-1700 SP, and into Ulduar at 1900-2100 SP.

[supersteve]

while i agree with my esteemed colleagues ( thats everyone who has answered this post) getting to 76 and start collecting gear seems best idea. on a side note there is a long and rather prestigious routine you must go thru in order to be considered a good pally healer. everyone will help you with things like getting healbot, decursive, omen (or another threatmeter) what i am going to share with you is the fact that you are entering a brotherhood (i know there are alot of female pallies forgive the digression ) where you will be ridiculed a lot. in order to be a good healer you have to rise above all of this refuse and prove them wrong every time you step into an instance or a bg you will always be considered lesser than other healing classes. all you can do to prove them wrong is keep them alive (some ppl still wont be happy). i like to heal with sunglasses on as plate is shiny and i heal better when im angry so i listen to alot of barry manilow. there are alot more secrets on healing that im sure we can all share but there is one universal truth to healing "as long as your assignment stays alive you are doing your job"
so unlike alot of pallies out there when you get enuf gear to make a solid healing performance 1600sp usually is a good starting place (nexus, uk,vh,drak can all be healed with 1200 with a good tank) start healing. that is do it rather than talk about it as you can always tell a bad pally cos they are the ones who tell you how much healing they could do only if they had valnayr or turning tide or that they dont need int or crit but gem haste.

ps forgive if this hasnt helped dude its not often i get to wax lyrical if it doesnt help ill post at a later date and be a fraction more serious.

[spf]

get xperl and bind every heal as a overmouse macro

#showtooltip Flash Heal
/cast [help,target=mouseover] Flash Heal
/cast [help] Flash Heal
/cast [target=player] Flash Heal

and enjoy

[Zhoke]

This link should help you with the gear side, I can't offer much advice on the playing side though. Pally healin' doesn't seem too hard though, Grid + Clique should be addons you wanna look out for.

http://www.lootrank.com/wr.asp?Cla=2...k7=0&k8=0&k9=0

[Xs]

That LootRank sucks, values SP and mp5 way too high and Int way too low