Healing, A Paladin's Thoughts

I was sitting here today reading through my older posts and thinking about where I wanted to go with the blog. There are a lot of topics that I can cover in here that are related to WoW. Being the head of a guild naturally gives me a lot of perspective on WoW. I have several alts at or above 70, so there is a lot of experience that I can bring and share with everyone. I love the aspects of both PVP and PVE, more recently I have been longing for PVP and the excitement of trying to win those matches. If you have never participated in an arena match, it is worth the experience. It is so different from running an instance with a set strategy. At the end of BC the guild was starting to spread it's wings and venture into running raids, some of which were successful and others were not so. At the end of the day though, I truly want to focus on the aspects of playing WoW as a holy Paladin, which is going to lean heavily on the aspects of healing. This got me thinking back to when I first switched to being a healer. I always felt you stand there and do nothing but cast "a spell" to keep the group alive. How difficult could this be? I had so much to learn. I am lucky that at the time I was leveling, I had a core group of people, so I rarely had to PUG anything, which is probably good for the PUGs.

So as my mind is wandering through these thoughts, I am sure you are asking where this post is going. That is a good question to ask. At first I was going to do a rundown on the different things I have done as of late and share the experiences, which would be fine, but I decided to go a different way with this. I always get compliments on my heals when I group with people who are not members of my guild. (Some people do not appreciate what they have, until they do not have it, but that is a discussion for another day.) I actually had some really nice compliments the other night, which made me think, maybe I should do a series on what makes a holy Paladin a good healer. I can tell you that just having some spell power gear and spamming flash of light is not going to do the job like it did in the past, but we will get to this in time. I do not know how long this series will run, but I do think it is an important thing for both Paladins and other classes to understand what it is that we do for healing and how best to accomplish it. I am going to start the series in my next post and we will see how long this thing runs. There is a lot of information that can be covered and I will try to get to as much of it as possible. I am going to warn you ahead of time that the first few posts will be as basic as basic can be, but sometimes it is the basics that elude us. 

This post was originally published on January 20, 2009, on the original Holy Shock blog.