How does HealBot work?

[Xorgz]

Hey guys, I just started healing on a priest that's lvl 22 right now and I'm told I'm healing well in dungeons but i will need to use HealBot later on. Can someone explain to me exactly what it does and how it works? I would appreciate it

[Fandandra]

Pretty much all it does is saves a step from having to click on a persons health bar to clicking the spell. You use different mouse/key combos to use different spells.

For instance, on my priest, left click is heal, right click is greater heal, shift right click is bubble, alt right click is dispel magic, etc.

[Nathol]

It is really a preference you don't have to use a healing addon, even at higher levels. I know lots of healers that are very good without any of those types of addons.

All up to you, try some of them out and decide what you like better.

[Citaxis]

Healbot creates what are basically health bars inside of a clear frame that you can aesthetically adjust position and size, and allow you to use mouse clicks and Shift/Control/Alt combinations of clicks on the bars to use your spells to heal instead of clicking on a person's portrait and manually using your spells to heal.

Healbot is a very large, heavy addon that uses quite a bit of memeory, and takes up more space on peoples' screens than some prefer. However, it shows you pretty much everything you could ever want to know, such as other class' defensive cooldowns used, dispellable debuffs, and assorted other status effects that might be of interest to you. If you're not looking for "all the information", and would prefer a lighter, more flexible addon, the most popular alternative seems to be a combination of two addons, Grid and Clique. Both do about the same thing, in that they shortcut mouseover macros to specified click binds. Which one you use is a matter of personal preference, but healing addons are greatly helpful in giving you quick feedback on everyone's health and debuff status.

[Taryble]

There are alternatives to Healbot, as well, that do the same (or similar) things.

Vuhdo is nearly identical at the basic level - raid/party health frames with click-cast healing built in - but it's far more configurable than HB is, so you can get it to fit into nearly any UI design.

Grid is one of the most common raid/party health frame addons out there. It's roughly as configurable as Vuhdo, but it spreads out the configuration a little more, and is a little bit less easy to understand when configuring. It doesn't include a click-casting system, however; many users of Grid also use Clique, which allows them to set up click-casting for any unit frames addon.

[Mammoth]

Healbot and Grid+Clique do essentially the same thing. And they only take up as much room as you give them on the screen. The default for them might be rather large, but its easy to shrink.

They're a grid of coloured boxes / health bars, you can click on them with any of your mouse buttons and using modifiers like ctrl/alt/shift to cast specificly assigned heals. Essentially, healing becomes a game of click the box that isn't full to fill it up. Luckily Cata has complicated this so that you now have to know which heal to use also.

Personally I go with healbot, and would suggest that for a new user. Purely because its very fast and simple to set up. Later on, when you know what you actually want, you could consider swapping to Grid if it suits you better.