How do you learn to heal better?

I would say to improve your mana efficiency would be to use Penance more. Its amazing HPMana. Depending on how much total mana you have it can be worth while to keep PW:S up on two targets as well, as the returns from Rapture can exceed the costs of PW:S at higher gear levels.

I'd say you're definitely on the right track, and the only thing that really helps once you get to this level is actually going and trying the harder stuff. Most of the time in larger raids, or harder raids the person who tops the healing charts is the person with lowest latency and the twitchy-est trigger finger.

My best advice would be to pug a ICC 25 and see how it goes, especially if you're comfortable with the fights from 10 man.

IMHO, 2 ways you can go to get better,

Option 1. Do more ICC, you will never be confidant in your healing if you don;t do the things that are hard to you. I play a Restro shammy as a main, and i learned to heal by, trail by fire, sure I suxed the first few raids but after that I'm one of the best healers in my guild.

Option 2. Heal PvP, Get a 2v2 area team or do BG and practice keeping people up thur burst damg and keeping your self alive as well. I know PvP healing and PvE healing is two diffent beast but in PvP there always alot of "raid" damg, and burst damg. '

side note, healing rotation i find to be full of jack. Each run, Each tank, takes its own approach to healing, while some time a set rotation is good to keep a tank out, knowing how much damg your tank can take w/o dieing and how fast he die can help your mana greatly. Why use a big heal when a small heal will do, when in the fight can i take a 10 sec breather to let my MP5 work, you are a healer you control who lives and who dies, triage as well who need your heal and what heal to you is key, and know this you need to run and learn your raid mates.

I would disagree about the suggestion about healing PvP. PvP uses different healing strategies and tactics and even spells than PvE.

The only way to improve at healing is to heal things outside your comfort zone. Instead of 3 healing ICC10, 2 heal it. Run ToGC, Ulduar Hard Modes, anything that takes you outside of the farm-zone comfort zone. If you can run 25 man instances in guild, run ToC with 4 healers, or ICC with 4-5 healers. When you have to do more, you start to learn little tricks and tactics to optimize your healing.

Next, read, read, read. Find blogs and forums about your class and see how other people are healing. Find spreadsheets and learn. Learn about boss fights. Sometimes being a good healer is knowing when someone needs to be spammed and when they can be ignored at 60% health. You only learn that by knowing fights. Watch videos. People in your class can be your best teachers. Download and configure proper mods. Grid with raid status debuffs, DXE/DBM, possibly Clique or Healbot. Improving your ability to assess raid status and incoming damage will help you pick a better heal, will improve you.

Lastly, remember that healing is an art, not a science. It has an ebb and flow that you have to recognize for each fight or else it devolves into chaotic whack-a-mole. Also, if you're honestly trying to learn, make sure your guild/raid mates know that. Don't be afraid to experiment with new rotations or assignments, just be willing to admit if you make a mistake.

1. I'm going to disagree with the post saying NOT to heal in PVP.

• Arena is not going to help you practice raid healing, but Alterac Valley and--to a certain extent--other battlegrounds will.

• Set up all your healing addons, stick with the huge mass of players (most notably AV again) and heal. Unfortunately, you won't see that much enemy action in AV unless people decide to turtle, which is why checking out Arathi Basin and Isle of Conquest can also situationally be good practice.

• People will be taking damage in prodigious quantities when you run into the enemy, and if you stay behind the crowd out of reach of DK death grips, you will usually be safe to go into full raid-healing mode.

• Without the soul-crushing feeling of failure you get in raids when people die, I might add.

2. Are you trying too hard to heal like a holy priest?

• Remember that disc priests are more about mitigation than healing per se. If you have aoe healers in the raid, your niche is to "preserve" the dying people by bubbling them in order to give the resto druids, shammies, holy priests enough time to bring their health up again.

• Using Prayer of Healing is going to burn through your mana like a hot knife through butter. Try to save it only for special occasions. In fact, let the aoe healers handle it as much as possible.

• Rapture is your main source of mana--plan carefully. If several people are going to/ are taking damage at the same time (say, standing near Marrowgar and he's about to do his whirlwind), bubble them all at the same time. When your bubble breaks on them all at once, you'll get a ton of mana back.

• This video may help with your mana struggles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnGKkc4p6XA

3. What trinkets are you using?

Trinkets make a HUGE difference. Purified Lunar Dust and Solace of the Defeated are pretty incredible for mana return. If you're wearing pure throughput trinkets, you might want to swap to mana trinkets. It may hurt lowering your potential throughput, but remember, you can't heal if you have no mana at all.

4. Performance Measurement

Healing is always tricky to measure. Who is better, the healer who spammed hots on all the raid enough to buffer them against incoming AOE, or the healer who kept the tank up through monstrous 20k hits? What about the healer who wasn't top on the healing meters but who blew his cds exactly when they counted, and saved the raid from wiping from a tank death?

However, if you wish to see the concrete numbers for the amount of damage you're able to mitigate in a fight, you'll want to check out:

• Recount Guessed Absorbs: This is a plug in for Recount, and will measure the amounts absorbed by your bubbles.

• Skada Damage Meters: This is a complete set of meters which already includes a built-in bubble absorption meter.

Most of the previous posts have already raised the main good points. I'd like to stress and reinforce a couple of things.

Mana Regen

I'd like to reiterate the importance of Rapture (and the need to learn how to "trick" it, if you're having mana issues), and the chance you have to just change trinkets if you feel there are fights where you simply need more mana. Keep in mind that, in terms of regen, Int is actually as valuable as Spirit and mp5 if not more: Replenishment, Hymn of Hope and Shadowfiend all give you mana based on your max mana, so increasing your int will increase also all your sources of mana regen. Thus, Talisman of Resurgence is actually a great second trinket if you have no access to TOC25 (and much better than the Purified Lunar Dust, imho - but it does get into issues of personal preference).

Also, don't underestimate the "total mana increase" effect of Hymn of Hope. The consequence of that is that using the shadowfiend and then channeling Hymn of Hope will give you even more mana back than normal. Similarly, if you have two priests, channeling both Hymns at the same time does wonders (Mimiron phase transitions used to be great for this - any kind of big gap with nothing happening works though).

Healing Strategies and Tricks

If you're tank healing, especially in 10-man, don't underestimate Greater Heal. With Borrowed Time up, it's likely to be a 1.5 sec cast in ToC10 level gear. So, my rotation on a tank is something like Shield - Penance - GHeal - ProM - Renew - Penance - FHeal as a filler. Gheal has better throughput than Flash, even with little to no talents to support it.

Another "trick" involves shielding someone (the OT, yourself, a melee), and then using that borrowed time for the GHeal on the MT. Have your raid frames show who has weakened soul and who doesn't _ and target whoever doesn't with a new shield.

Finally, make liberal use of Inner Focus. Macro it to Divine Hymn and PoH at least - but also to GHeal if you find yourself using Gheal a lot. More crit = more Divine Aegis, and the fact that Inner Focus doesn't trigger the GCD means you can just put it in a macro straight, without any worry about castsequences.

Two Man Drills

To get better at healing and to help me and my favorite tank work better together we developed 2-man drills.

1. Hook up with a tank you raid with.
2. Enter a heroic you both know well.
3. Go as far in the heroic as you can with just the two of you.
4. If it seems to easy, remove enough gear pieces to make each pull challenging.

Remember it doesn't really matter how far you get or how long a pull takes. What matters is that you are both alive after the final mob from the pull is killed. In fact the longer it takes the more it will teach you about wise mana management.

We found that this was great for developing skills and getting used to each other's play styles without inconveniencing other players.