I’ve heard time and again of people who sing the praises of a particular addon that they just could not live without. I personally have played two different healers, a priest on the Horde, and a paladin on the Alliance. I’ve enjoyed both characters in their own ways. My priest had the ability to heal a lot of people with little effort, and my paladin can sustain a 16 minute Sapphiron attempt.
Abilities aside, do addons make the difference between a good healer and a bad one? I don’t believe they do. Yes, addons can increase performance in some players, in others, its simply a tool to be more aware. Awareness of surroundings, of distance, of performance are all great things to know, but I don’t believe they will make or break the player.
I chatted with my co-authors of this blog, particularly Matticus who plays a priest and Ithato who plays a druid. Both of them use the VuhDo addon that Ithato recently wrote about. Ithato in particular phrased what I wanted to say best in this article
Depending on your playstyle and reaction times they (addons) may make you faster, but they don’t really help your judgment any. That’s learned.
Knowing how to heal and use your character to the best of it’s ability without addons is important though. Addons break, patches get released, and some healers may remember the short lived ban on Decursive that sent many progression guilds into frusteration. Knowing how to use your skills without the addition of addons is most certainly important, and I do recommend that every healer take a break from thier addons to ensure they still have their basic skills.
Oftentimes, new healers in my guild come to me and ask me about healing, and my UI. It is no secret that I use HealBot for healing with my paladin. If you had asked me a few years ago about HealBot when I played a priest, I’d have told you, no, I don’t ever plan to use it. So why the change? To me, my priest just had too many darn abilities to find HealBot very useful. My paladin only has two major heals that I use on a very regular basis, those being Flash of Light and Holy Light. HealBot allows me to bind heals to my mouse, having a two button mouse and two heals to work with made the addon a great idea. (Please don’t misunderstand this, HealBot allows all kinds of bindings, I’m just a simple girl who likes a simple setup. I know a priest healer that lives and dies by HealBot and she performs just fine.)
Back in the days of my priest, I didn’t use any healing mods at all. I simply had CTRaid and dragged the raid frames out where I needed them to be. I used my 1-9 keybinds for my heals. Pretty simple stuff. Nowadays I still use my 1-9 keybinds, but other then Holy Shock, they don’t contain heals. I rely on HealBot for that. Should Healbot fail, I have alternate keybinds for my heals, and I practice using them all the time.
Now, HealBot is not the only healing mod out there. There is also the well know setup of using Clique with Grid, and as I mentioned, Vuhdo. I personally have never used Vuhdo, but healing mods all have one thing in common, and thats to help you get the heals out in the best way possible.
Some healers don’t even use Mods at all still. I have a druid in the guild that uses macros to help her healing along, and in the long run, they do many of the same things that the mods do. For example:
/cast [target=mouseover,help,nodead] [help] [target=player] Healing Touch
This is a mouseover macro for said druid. This macro will cast healing touch on mouseover. Its the same idea as a click to heal bind, it just eliminates the use of the addon itself. This druid is still one of our best healers. She doesn’t like addons, but she doesn’t just use the keybinds either. She’s a great example that these tools are here to help us make judgement calls faster, but they are not always needed.
Other healing addons that often are not considered would be casting bars. I’ve used Quartz in the past and I know others who still do. How does a casting bar help in the world of healing? It can show you the difference in cast time due to latency, and it can also help a spammer of a paladin (like me) optimize how fast I can churn out those endless supplies of holy goodness. This is one of those mods that I just feel like I would die without, though that is not the case at all. I could accurately get the same effect from watching my global cooldown, and generally, I’ve been healing with the paladin for so long that I simply KNOW the timing on my heals. This has come with practice and time, and all healers who really devote themselves to their roles develop it, too.
In the end, though I use addons to increase my judgement calls, response times, and evaulate my own performance… I really could do all those things without the addons. Practice and learning are what make me and others viable healers, and addons don’t change that one way or another. The druid healer who doesn’t use mods at all will outheal me every time, because she is that skilled, and because, well, druids are just that awesome. When it comes right down to it, the addons a healer uses (or doesn’t use) determines nothing about the healer at all.
Image courtesy of djayo
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Been healing for 3.5 years and never used a healing or frames addon. I do use decursive 2 for quite decursing, but thats it. WoW is an incredibly simple game and I don’t see the need to make it easier.
It is hard for me to even acknowledge the existence of “healing addons” as such. Clique doesn’t do anything you can’t do with macros, the only thing it brings to the table is easy binding via a UI. Healbot is simply a configurable set of raid frames and, again, a UI to do the binding. I haven’t used VuhDo so I can’t speak to that but I doubt it’s anything more than what I just mentioned, given Blizzard’s addon restrictions.
Healbot and apparently VuhDo both do buffing and cleansing, but I consider that a tertiary function.
I guess I am basically agreeing with you. So-called “healing addons” don’t do anything that you can’t do with the default UI and a good set of raid frames, they just help you to set it up faster. So while healing with addons isn’t “bad practice” as such, it is also totally unnecessary.
That being said I’m a rabid Clique user. ;)
Clique is really the only “healing” addon I can think of, to be honest (I consider HealBot to be a unitframe addon, frankly). That being said, I have to agree, the only thing addons can help you with are response time (one click instead of a keypress and a click or two clicks or two keypresses), and “awareness” (showing who has a debuff).
The issue, as it has always been, are people that become too dependent on addons. Yes, I can heal without Clique… I’d just need time to make a bunch of macros, and I would probably get frustrated with the whole thing very quickly and stop being a healer. Making things unnecessarily more complicated just sucks.
I use Grid and mouseover macros.
Grid is again more of a unit frame but I have it setup (as it was designed) to provide what I deem to be useful information in raid.
I also use HotCandy to track my hots, especially when tank healing. Other than that my entire UI is transparent cause this is what i NEED to see.
Nice Post :)
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I use Healbot to heal. The addon doesnt make anything that couldnt be make by macros and stuff, but why should I waste my time doing all these macros if someone had done them for me? The addon is there and make my life easier. Why not use it? Just because that could be made with the deafult UI and a good set of raid frames? Using it doesnt make me a less skilled player than the one who doesnt use it. And of course, using it doesnt make you a better healer it just saves you some boring time writing macros.
I agree with Tekkub, making things unnecessarily more complicated just sucks.
I’m a little up-in-arms about this myself.
Healing is the only role that has functionality not supported by the default UI. The first things that come to mind are HealComm and clear numerical health deficits. HealComm is built into almost every unitframe addon and allows a healer to see if a player has an incoming heal, and an estimate of how much it is going to land for. Clear numerical health deficits help a healer USE the right heal for the right situation. I could guess, and I’d be a worse healer if I were guessing. If I KNOW that the tank is 9k down, and he has an incoming heal, I’m not going to risk a 100% overheal with Holy Light, and instead start a Flash of Light and trust that the other healer can make up the other 4k-6k.
A latency display in the castbar? This is a little suspect, because you can be stupid and mash your way to the same result. KNOWING when you can cast and move before the spell has “finished” casting can prevent wipes and make you a smarter healer. I use Quartz for this reason alone. Oh, and the E-Peen stroking of seeing .7 second FoLs.
Every other function has since been added to the default UI. I don’t need to use Clique, but it sure doesn’t muss up my keybinds like assigning a macro to my middlemouse button would. My unit frames are just larger and easier to read. My debuff and buff tracking lets me see who has debuffs and buffs relevant to me, instead of just MY OWN or ALL OF THEM. I’m not straining my eyes to jump from one corner to the other to the center to the other to the action bar to check a cooldown to the center again. I use Clique for dispelling targets and setting a new focus.
I do direct my hatred at a few addons in particular. VuhDo and Healbot. These two are meant for healers specifically. You can have them enabled on a Rogue or a Hunter, but the functionality is useless at that point. I use Pitbull, and I keep my Grid layout/buffs.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Recount is vital to a healer, too. Knowing what killed someone AT A GLANCE is so valuable in progression. Knowing that healers had a gap in 5 seconds of healing on their tank isn’t something you can usually figure out, but pulling up Recount’s “deaths” display demystifies the whole thing within seconds. Now you know you have to talk to these healers, figure out why they weren’t healing, and remedy the problem.
Addons aren’t required as a healer, Blizzard has added so much functionality to the default UI. But having addons does make you a more responsive healer.
I used to use Grid to show my frames and buffs/debuffs in conjunction with mouseover macros.
I do not find that the standard UI gives enough information for me to make an accurate judgement call on what heal to use and when. It also puts its information in positions that are uncomfortable for me to look at.
I know that I can comfortably heal without these tools…my overheal would just be a lot higher and my efficiency as a healer would be a lot worse. In a situation where I am the sole healer, that’s fine. in a situation where there are many other healers and I need to be mana efficient, Blizzard does not supply the tools I need comfortably on their standard UI.
I have swapped to VuhDo at some time after the last expansion however. The reason for this is that I can set it to show the same information I had on Grid and can use it to create mouseover macros that work with keybindings. The only difference in using this over Grid with mouseover macros in my setup, is that I can now use a Nostromo keypad to cast my heal spells.
Wenchie’s last blog post..Never Forgotten
A few good points but I sincerly disagree. I study even color codes and configure my ui accordingly to increase my reaction and judgement speed. I suppose I could say I’m quite the counter-thesis of this post’s conclusion :)
Is it all worth it? Yes! Johnathan Wendel has a special tuned mouse, keyboard, wrist support etc so he can train more and longer without physical strain. That’s why he’s number 1 for so long. Top performance + top gear = top results. Compromising one is compromising the results.
However, there’s a few considerations to be made as a healer:
1) It’s a teamsport and the impact of one player does not weigh strong against the team’s combined performance.
2) Performance is hard to measure. “The druid always outheals me” seems like a feeble meter oriented logic. Compare players with comparable class, spec, gear, healing assingment. I’ve done that in my guild. I’ve seen the results. The difference was day and night: addons made the difference.
3) Requirements differ. You cannot tell all healers they have to use addon X or default frames Y. But the default UI is insufficient for healers. Proof: the pletora of better frames out there.
4) WoW doesn’t always require ‘pro’ gear to play well. I suppose would lose little less than 5% of my performance without addons. Still, I would strive for that extra %.
One more note though: patches happen, addons break. Despite this age old argument, I did not sit out one raid because of it over the course of 2 years. Common sense, planning or management are powerfull tools to counter such weaknesses. In my experience, ‘broken addons’ are no excuse. You just don’t test drive your F1 during the race and expect everything to work out.
I have to agree with Zusterke. DPS, Tanks can get away with using he default UI but as a healer the default ui is insufficient. If it was sufficient then you wouldn’t see the multitude of unit frames and healbot-like addons. Like Zusterke I have never been benched because of a broken addon on patch day. Proper planning and common sense are the key.
The only other thing, is this particular topic is getting old. Its on the WoW forums, plusheal forums, and guild forums. Its always the same thing. Does using an addon make you less of a healer? Personally, if you use an addon then its your personnel preference/style. That shouldn’t have any input on whether you are a good healer or not.
I feel that what makes someone a bad healer is not using all the tools they need.
If you can heal using the Blizzard standard UI, with a minimal amount of overheal and still manage to get all the heals in that you needed to do, then that’s fantastic.
If you do need to be able to see the incoming heals from other healers to gauge which of your heals to use, or have troubles with mouseover macros due to the hardware or physical ability available to you, or need to see all the information contained in one place then trying to run with no Addons purely because other people are making it sound like cheating is foolish.
I think that anyone who can do a great job of efficient healing using just the Blizzard UI in all its uncomfortable weirdness is doing a fantastic job. They do however have an entirely different set of muscles, brain patterns etc to me. I tailor my UI to make it intuitive for me to heal ans to have the information I need to do the job well exactly where I want it.
I think it is a bit pointless to suggest that someone training themselves to get information from an uncomfortable UI layout like the Blizzard default is a better healer. Everybody’s experience of the game will be different purely because of their physical and mental experience of it. I have a problem concentrating on healing when music is playing due to a health condition. I choose to turn the music off. Does that make me a worse healer than one that plays with the music on? Hardly.
Wenchie’s last blog post..Never Forgotten
I guess I’m not sure what you consider a healing addon. You say you used CTRaid to give you the information (and targeting) you used for healing. To me, that means you used a healing addon.
I’ve used Healbot, and am currently using VuhDo. I use them to tell me about the raid: health, who has my HoTs, how long until Lifebloom blooms, etc. My heals are cast with keypresses bound to macros, the same ones I use without any addons (mostly Mouseover > Target > Me).
When I first installed Healbot, I tried click-to-heal, and never liked it. Now, I only click on those frames to
- Target somebody.
- Adjust the frames (say move a high-interest target to my Private Tanks frame).
- I did use Healbot’s out-of-combat click-to-buff capability (VuhDo doesn’t let me do this for Thorns).
I am in some danger of running out of Macro room (number of macros and/or macro size). If that becomes a more serious issue, a might start relying on some “improved” raid frame to help with that issue, although I suspect an action-bar mod or macro manageer would be more appropriate.
What I’m confused about is why does everyone say the default raid frames is insufficient to heal with? I’ll admit it may not be ideal but it still functions well enough to heal with. I personally could never get used to defecit healing and don’t see how it is better. You can only set up the default UI to show buffs or debuffs and not both at the same time but this generally isn’t an issue since you are mainly focused on debuffs while in combat. It doesn’t show you incoming heals on the target but that is only an issue with effeciency and overheal and I would rather have too much overheal then a dead tank because 3/4 healers stopped casting their heal because the other healers were casting.
I mainly heal 10 man’s on my priest and run 25′s on my shaman where I switch between elemental and resto. I have yet to find that my healing is lacking in either case and haven’t found some portion of a boss encounter that was crucial to have a mod for. Blizzard has done such a good job in tuning boss abilities using emotes and obvious casting abilities that healing is fairly easy to anticipate. When I run into a fight that I am finding is impossible to heal w/o a specific addon then maybe I’ll be compelled to switch.
I’m not discrediting addons or saying people who play with them suck. I’m just trying to figure out why people feel the default UI is so lacking. I played for 1.5 years with a completely modded UI untill the day that my account was hacked. After having to totally reformat my computer to get rid of the keylogger/virus/whatever the task of rebuilding my UI from scratch was daunting. So I didn’t. I forced myself to play with the stock raid frames and w/o buff, cast, or even boss mods.
I currently use a bag addon to make my life easier and Recount to measure my performance. Other then that I heal, dps and tank with the default UI.
I am considering picking up pally power or something along those lines because buffing a raid on my pally and remembering who had what is a pita.
Wenchie, I’m not sure what you mean about VuhDo and Nostromo. I use mouseover healing and grid as well, but haven’t really had any problems. I have replaced the regular old heal spells on my action bar with mouseover macros, then mapped the keybindings to Nostromo as usual.
By the way, do you, too, set up your ‘action bars’ to mimic your Nostromo? I have mine set to blocks of 3 rows by 5 columns each using Dominos. Each block has the spells for one mode (green, blue, red, and none), then I use my rocker button to swap between modes. So intuitive!
Yes I do set my action bars to mimic Nostromo, Auntie Cail :)
I don’t tend to use the mode switching currently though as I hadn’t yet found way to get a bar mod to switch to the new mode with me. Every method I have seen has required another keypress to switch bars or has a tendency to go out of synch at the most inopportune moment. Unfortunately I need to see the icons I am using on the screen as I have a problem recalling the spell placement without it.
For some reason, using mouseover macros with keybindings always bugs up for me. I gave up trying to work out why as the macros were right. I’m guessing its just some buggy feature. When I found that it did work correctly if I did it through VuhDo I was sold though :)
Wenchie’s last blog post..Never Forgotten
I am using the G13 gameboard so my bindings are pretty easy and dont get in the way of my movement (which was always a prob for me prior) :)
I dont use the logitec macro stuff just a simple 1 to 1 mapping for keys 1 through 0 etc
i have lifebloom /swiftmend on my mouse wheel (up/down) and then regrowth, rejuv, wildgrowth on my three best buttons. NS + HT up-left, noursh up, trnq up-right.
sorry meant to give a link to my bindings:
http://upyursh.blogspot.com/2009/03/g9-g13-review-and-mappings.html
wtb edit comment feature :(
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Quartz is, by far and away, the mod I have that I consider most important for healing. The ability to see the latency difference has made a huge difference for me. I use clique+grid for raid healing, but in party its just keybinds for the party members and clicking the heals on my actionbar.
I use Grid and Clique for healing on my alt druid and alt paladin. To be honest, I’m not half the healer that I am without them.
The default UI is severely deficient for the purposes of healing in a raid. If you were to heal with the default unit frames a huge portion of your screen would be covered in the default raid frames. Apparently some people forget that we used to have 40-man raids, back then those default raid frames filled up about 2/3rds of your screen. Even with 25 man raids, why would you want to still use those large, clunky frames when you can use a mod like grid that puts your entire raid in a box that’s 3″x3″. Less mouse movement = more efficiency, especially for someone like me who is a clicker.
I’m the complete opposite on my main (warrior MT)- I don’t use any extra addons for tanking, I only have a few macros but that’s it.
Hello Everyone!
I am loving the discussion going on here. All of your feedback has been great. I wanted to add that before I wrote this post I healed without my addons, and my husband on his holy priest only has omen, DBM and recount for addons. He heals right on par with the rest of us, using his keybinds more than anything. As I said before I’ve been using healbot, along with a casting bar to see latency. As a Paladin, that latency bar is all I really rely on. I could do the same healing with macros, or even with key binds, but seeing that bar is what really helps me. However, I’ve played the character long enough that I don’t really have to SEE it anymore, I just kinda know.
The point of the post is simply that it is possible to play well without the actual addon, and there are other methods out there. Once upon a time you were considered a “crap” healer if you used an addon like Healbot, some said it was even cheating, crazy right?
I do believe that healing is the most difficult role to play with the standard UI. I prefer to use my addons and I would give a gigantic hug and a thank you to the people who made them if I ever got to meet them.
Having your addons though does not make you a bad player, I know we are better off using them, but I wanted to express that you didn’t HAVE to have them. See what I mean?
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“Once upon a time you were considered a “crap†healer if you used an addon like Healbot, some said it was even cheating, crazy right?”
It’s not crazy at all. Before BC addons could do a lot more things. Healbot was very different back than, it was simply “click who you want to heal and the addon will pick the right spell”. That lead to lazy, bad healers.
@Tekkub – Ya know, I forgot about that. I didn’t use Healbot until after BC, but now that you mention it, I guess it did use to automatically choose which spell, and what rank to use. I believe you could also set it up to heal the lowest person first. That is kinda cheater style isn’t it? Didn’t decursive work the same way? It would automatically detect and dispell curses? That’s what I get I guess for having played a Warlock through Vanilla WoW and through half of BC.
Thanks for the correction!
Andrea’s last blog post..Warning: Personal Opinions Below
Yup, before BC, addons could target and select spells, so all you had to do was click. That’s where the name “Healbot” came from really, all you did was mash a single key and it did all the “thinking”. Decursive was the same way, but in all fairness it was almost required. 40 people being cursed at once with a debuff you *need* to remove was a horrible boss mechanic. Thankfully they realized that.
@Saravid: if you prefer overheal rather than breaking off your heal (from seeing another incoming heal) and have a dead tank…. then continue your heal. Seeing incoming heals does not kill your tank. It’s how you chose to handle the information that makes the difference. That is probably my biggest concern with the default UI: you cannot chose or prioritize your information.
@Andrea: I agree that you can heal nice without addons. Wow is not a game of infinite complexity or where reaction speed and reflexes can infinitely contribute. But healing is about judgement. To make a judgement you require information and to weigh information. A UI unable to do that, is a UI that does not adapt to your needs.
In the end, it’s about how you wish to play the game. I want to perfect my techniques to their limit: I have that 80$ mouse with extra precision and speed, daily reflex training, theorycraft to get the most out of my gear and computer tuned for fluent FPS. I need a UI to match this.
And… all these efforts combined make a difference: not infinitely, but it makes a difference.
“Having your addons though does not make you a bad player, I know we are better off using them, but I wanted to express that you didn’t HAVE to have them. See what I mean?”
Actually in some cases having Addons IS a necessity. There are absolutely hundreds of disabled players out there that make bloody good players in any role. The standard Blizzard UI is abysmal, (quite probably to encourage the Addon authors) and for many of these players the placement of the main UI features can make game play incredibly difficult.
Without the work of Addon authors to make things accessible for them, many players would miss out on playing entirely. Of course it doesn’t make them any less of a player…some people do require modifications to the default UI in order to play the game in a way that a large amount of players take for granted.
Wenchie’s last blog post..Never Forgotten
I use Grid, Clique, and Decursive for my healing. It’s mostly about reaction time, which is something that healers have to worry about far more than the other classes. A slow reaction time cleansing something could result in a wipe, for instance, and I think that’s one thing Blizz hasn’t really addressed. They haven’t created a way for healers to have an easy to see way to see if there’s a debuff on a mob that they can remove, and that can gimp a raid. I think Blizz knows this even, I remember a thread they did a while back asking healers why they used addons, and that was one of the big reasons.
In my mind, healing is all about awareness, judgment, and response time. Healing addons such as Healbot and VuhDo improve all of these factors for me SIGNIFICANTLY (well, maybe not the judgment bit). I’m a much, much better healer when using VuhDo than with the default raid frames, and I consider it’s use mandatory for me. Why is that “bad practice”? Good on you if you feel you can do as good a job with just the default raid frames, but consider me skeptical. :)
For me as a holy priest i couldn’t manage without grid + clique. I used healbot when i first started healing, which is great for 5 mans as you get some nice detailed information and big health bars, but for 25 mans and Wintergrasp i don’t like any of the options for the raid frames.
So i saw grid + clique is a popular combo and thought i’d try that, and now i absolutely love it. Grid is so configurable so i can prioritise the displaying of debuffs, hots etc that are on the target, see who has aggro, see incoming heals etc.
Using clique is amazing, as i have absolutely all my heals bound to my mouse. Standard left right and middle clicks are flash, greater and binding heals, then using shift for aoe heals (CoH, PoH, holy nova) and control and clicks for instant casts (renew, PoM, shield) then i have special abilities bound to my extra mouse buttons, like divine hymn, guardian spirit.
the awesome thing about having heals bound to my mouse is that:
1) i don’t need to target anyone, so i can keep my target on the boss and see his health at all times.
2) i keep the buttons on my keyboard bound to dps spells so i can easily chuck a few dots on the boss whilst not interrupting my healing at all.
If you haven’t tried the grid + clique combo i’d highly recommend it, very compact, very configurable, made my healing a lot better.
I also don’t understand the hate towards using healing addons. Grid can give you so much useful information, and a lot faster than the stock UI. At a glance I can see who has aggro, which of my healers have mana, and which people have debuffs that need extra healing/cleansing. I can also tell which players will be in melee range and will need extra healing due to cleaves etc. Having all of this information will make you more proactive, which makes you a better healer.
I don’t use clique, for the simple reason that it gave me terrible RSI (stupid FoL spam). It did allow for a lot of space to be cleared off my bars to give me easier access to cooldowns. Mouseover macros suffice for me, and have the added bonus of being able to be adaptable to different situations. For instance, you can use the mouseover macro in the blog above to heal the target of target. This is really helpful on targets that bounce around the raid, meaning that you don’t need to watch aggro monitors as closely, or watch the target of target window then try to find that person on your raid frames.
I can’t see the attraction in using the stock UI. It’s cumbersome, it gives less information, and it limits you as a healer. If it works for you, great, but I can pretty much guarentee that if you shift to a healbot/grid setup your effectiveness will go up. As for the people who like the “traditional” way of healing….it’s a game. It’s been around for what, 6 years? That’s like racing in the F1 with a model T. It’s traditional, sure, but you can do so much mroe if you expand your horizons.
@lotharn
woa you so good
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