I’ve had some terrible co-healers too. I don’t notice them much in pugs (probably because I only pug content that I’m super comfortable with), but when I was in a casual guild I saw some pretty…interesting… things. Luckily, even in my casual guild, our healing leads were always very good.

Either way, I’m still deciding what my paladin is going to do. Ret, for leveling and PvP? Holy, because you can never have too many healers? Prot, because my guildies will need someone to tank while leveling? My druid will be first to 85 anyway, probably followed by the shaman… so I’ll count on some nice people posting new healing pally guides before I give it another try I do like the new flashlight spell…

/Agree completely on healing meters. For some odd reason a lot of the AoE healing classes are beginning to have more tank healing abilities, while you Paladin folk still more or less still have just your direct healing set up. I’m really not sure about where Druid healing is going, seeing as though apparently they’re making a slight shift towards tank vs raid healing. I also still scoff a bit at Resto Shaman who brag about tank healing…it just doesn’t feel like the classes’ place to be doing such a thing. I guess Blizz is trying to homogenize healing a bit, kind of like what they’re doing with DPS, but sadly Pallies haven’t seemed to quite hop on the wagon. Some of these new changes have definitely been odd, to say the least.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be apart of some pretty awesome healing teams (despite my certain lack of interest in the act…I love my wolves!), but I also have had the experience of “carrying” some pretty awful ones as well in PuGs. Those horror stories? They make me sad inside as well.

Integrate them one at a time: start with Aura Mastery.

Then move on to Hand of Protection.

Then Lay on Hands.

You’ll have it together in no time!

That meter picture is photoshopped, it’s not an actual shot ^_^. With World of Logs, you can see the absorbed numbers of a Disc Priests shield by mousing over the player’s name.

Healing meters always have been really fight and other healer dependent. After all, the amount you can heal is always capped by the amount of damage taken. Paladins shone when there was a lot of tank damage and druids/disc priests shone when there was a lot of raid damage. It’s just that from now until Cataclysm, paladins will look worse on the meters regardless, unless their co-healers are really, really bad.

It’s great when you can take healing meters with a grain of salt. My guild doesn’t consider meters much either (other than for joking purposes), but whenever I hear horror stories from people in guilds with weaker healing teams or from people who pug, I get very sad inside.

It’s been a while for me, since I too have been on a forced WoW vacation, but it’s always amazed me to see Holy Pallies catch up to or surpass the AoE healing power houses that have been Resto Shaman/Resto Druid/Holy Priest with their direct healing prior to ICC content. While I had been healing 10 mans though on my Shaman during ICC, I could easily surpass a Holy Paladin on the meters, seeing as though I was not only raid healing, but also keeping my shield and riptide up on the MT. Perhaps I was just a bit bored with the lack of healing to be done raid wise and ended up stepping on the Paladin’s job a bit. I did get my butt whomped on Dreamwalker though, pretty royally.

I suppose in my eyes I’ve always taken healing meters with a huge grain of salt, mainly because unlike the “almighty” DPS meter, healing numbers simply have too many factors to be able to represent a player or even a class properly. Timing, incoming damage, mitigation factors (Priestly Disco bubbles FTW!), and sometimes RNG factors themselves almost never seem to show properly. In my mind it’s more of “Did I do everything I could to prevent so-and-so’s death?” Though, I am curious, if that is a shot of one of your meters, what types of plug ins do you use to show Power Word: Shields effectiveness?

I really wish you had done this post about 6-8 months ago and I had stumbled upon it then! All of this info would have been incredibly precious for when I was forced to learn how to Holy Paladin heal, crash course style, in an ICC 25 (I was locked out of my account, I was supposed to lead a raid containing my guild and another, the boyfriend didn’t want to raid anyways…oh boy). All in all this has been a great read!