How to Be the Best Druid Healer You Can in World of Warcraft

The first thing you should know about playing a druid healer in World of Warcraft is that it makes it infinitely harder to level up a character. This goes for any race, any class. My advice to you, honestly? Use a DPS (damage per second) spec (specialty) until you're able to dual-spec! As a druid., the easiest way to do this in my opinion is to use cat form to solo (solo means leveling by yourself). You can find plenty of gear since it's the same gear that rogues use, and it's pretty simple to do. This how-to is going to focus on being a Druid healer (Restoration spec) after level 40.

When you're getting yourself geared, the best thing to do is use things you get from dungeons. The best items for druid healers won't always be leather though, sometimes cloth items will have better scores. While I was leveling, I also stuck with using staves. Lots of good healing staves drop in dungeons as you level up. The most important stats on your weapons and armor are going to be Intellect, which gives you more mana (which is what you use to cast spells), Spirit (which makes you regenerate mana faster), and Spellpower (which makes your spells stronger). Regenerate mana is good, which will often look like Regenerate 20 mana every 5 seconds. When you're level 80, you'll also want to start looking for things with some haste, too, which will allow you to cast spells faster, but don't give up the other three for it!

The most important thing to remember as a healer is that your party is depending on you to keep them alive. In a dungeon, you will have one tank, one healer, and three people who are called DPS; it's their job to do damage. The tank is the person who stands in front of the bad guys and takes the hits so everyone else can kill them. They're going to be your main target to heal. If they go down, then you're probably all going to die - in WoW that's called a wipe.

There are some addons, which are small programs that run inside of World of Warcraft, that allow you to change how your screen looks. One that almost all healers use is called Healbot. This addon gives you a chart of the people in your party, and lets you program it so that when you click different ways (right click, left click, shift click etc) it will perform your spells. This saves a lot of time, and will make your life as a healer easier.

It's also very important to have the right build in your talent tree. You'll find that you get one point per level. Read what each one does before you select it! For example, there is one talent in the Restoration tree (that's the one you'll use for healing) that helps you save a lot of mana- which can be very important in a fight! There are many websites that teach you how to build a talent tree to optimize your healing.

Finally, practice will make perfect. If you can run mostly with people in your Guild (a group built in the game), then they will be more patient with you than PUGs (pick-up-groups, groups that are randomly put together). So pay attention, and have fun in Azeroth!