Hi All,

After more than two years of jabbing things in the back or melting their faces from range, I finally decided to try out that whole 'Healing' thing everyone goes on and on about

My druid dinged 80 about a week ago and has been practicing healing on the regular 80 dungeons, and (now that I have a little bit of gear) also some of the easier heroics. I've pugged Vault of Archavon to see how I would hold up in the (imo) easiest wrath raid instance. So far, I've enjoyed healing a lot, even though it gets quite hectic at times when I'm also decursing / abolishing poison (here's looking at you, heroic Azjol Nerub)... I find that grid + clique really makes a big difference.

My biggest problem at the moment is tunnel vision... I'm healing just fine, but before I realize it, I flop over dead. Yes, sadly, I'm one of those healers that has a tendency to die in a fire.

Now, as a melee dpser, I'm fairly good at moving out of the fire / dodging lasers / running out of void zones etc. (because, lets face it... a rogue who doesn't get away from the bad stuff asap curls up and dies very quickly), but as a healer, all that training seems to go all out the window.

Obviously most of this is due to the fact that I'm brand-spanking-new to healing, but there was one odd thing I noticed about my problem. I end up tunnel visioning more when I'm using grid to heal as opposed to when I'm using my party unit frames (I use pitbull). That's something I haven't been able to figure out... is it because my eyes (and my mouse pointer) have to move less when I use grid, so that it becomes easier to ignore the rest of the screen? Has anyone else experienced this? If so, how do you counter this problem?

Any tips on this would be greatly appreciated... I feel that situational awareness is something that every group/raid member needs to have, regardless of his or her role in the group.

I moved my Grid frame up higher on my screen. It's now about center vertically and all the way right horizontally. This way, my eyes have a shorter distance to travel to see the flames/poison cloud (or whatever else I'm supposed to avoid standing in.)

Some other things I've found help me with my situational awareness and my own health:

1. Scroll your camera view back so you can see more of your surroundings.
2. Put your character frame low & centered over your action bar.
3. Take note of which frame is yours in Grid.

I recently turned up my spell detail as well. It helps me see the stuff I'm supposed to avoid. Some of them are difficult to see before it's too late.

Clique works with any raid frames. If you like Pitbull, try using those instead of Grid and see if that makes a difference.

Well, the first good thing is that you realize eary on that you have a tunnel vision issue. I know healers who have been doing this for years that still fall back in it, and I know it happens to me from time to time (took a Wave in OS just this weekend b/c I got focused on the drake tank).

I think the reason why you see this more from healers than DPS is because of the different levels of focus. When you are DPSing and into the "groove" of your rotation, it starts to become automatic. You don't have to spend as much focus on your abilities and so are quicker to notice when the environment changes. Healers are reactive, and spend a LOT of focus on the various bars (their health, your mana). There is so much focus that you tend to lose the environmental details.

Ultimately, there is no easy fix- be aware of it and keep working hard on it. Here are some things that have helped me:

1) Make sure you have a Scrolling Combat text enabled that shows when YOU take damage. Make sure that its in a prominnent area of the screen that displays no other messages and is not cluttered. Make it in an area where your normal line of vision will see it. That way, as soon as you take the damage, some part of your brian should trigger "I shouldn't see text there" and prompt you to move.

2) Make sure you have the center area of your screen clear, so you can see what's around your character.

3) Since you use Grid, make sure you have the aggro indicator turned on. I have it display a red dot in one corner when someone has aggro. If I ever see that dot pop on my box, I know its time to do something, be it windshock, alert a tank, or just run around screaming

4) On that same note, make sure you know which box is yours on Grid. Train yourself to flick your eyes over your own box regularly, so you can see your health start to creep down.

Good luck and keep working at it!

Can potentially mess about with scrolling combat text to only have any incoming dmg pop up in the middle of your screen.

Might not dodge the first tick, but hopefully you'll notices some big red numbers there and move (esp if you're currently using them, but losing the important stuff in toomuchdetail-spam).

Otherwise, also a function of doing fights over and over.

I agree with the tips here about making note about which Grid box is yours and routinely checking it.

I also have positioned Grid in a prominent location on my screen: vertically centered, and then about 1/4 of the way from the left edge. This puts it just to the left of where my character is standing on my screen. That way I can see what's going on immediately around my character without moving my eyes too far away from Grid. I've also turned up spell detail to max so that if something really bright, colorful, etc happens under my character's feet, hopefully I will notice.

Healing is a blast, but when things get tense and you're trying to save everyone at once, looking at where you are standing definitely can get lost and it takes a lot of practice to try to routinely check your own status.

Good luck!

In addition to the other good suggestions I like to use a HUD addon. ArcHud2 is my choice. The alternative is to move your player and target frame below your feet. I see a lot of UI's that do that but I prefer the HUD.

I'm archaic and I know it. I use the blizz raid windows in the center of the screen and I look through them, simply adjusting my visual focus, to see what is going on. I don't know how this compares to healing UI's. However, I did have a similar problem when I first started. What I did to counter that was I made sure to pull my group's raid window out into the screen like all the other groups, and consequentially was able to heal myself like any other party/raid member.

If grid works this way where all people are pulled out onto the interface, then you have two things to worry about. 1) is just the placement of the UI, as listed above by several people. 2) is time, the double-vision of healing, bars & picture, takes time to get used to. The more you run instances, the easier it will become. Also, the more familiar you become with certain places, the easier it is to anticipate... and that will make all the difference in the world.

One thing that can help with things beating on you is to have aggro warnings. I know that pitbull can color any raid member who is the target of a mob with a red health bar. Another thing is to use the damage indicators on the raid / party frames to flash when you take damage.

You could probably find something that would flash your full screen when you take damage, but that would get annoying fast, especially on those fights with a constant stream of small hits.

viewtopic.php?p=12627&f=10#p12627

This is my UI. I found the easiest way was to clear as much space on the display. Perfect raid is really good too, because you can see *through* the raid frames.

I found placement of the raid frames to be crucial for me not tunnel visioning. I have grid set up center bottom (below my avatar), along with the unit frames. The other thing that I do is to place the raid boss on my focus target so I can see what that sucker is doing/casting. You can predict tank or raid damage that way too, and become a better healer. I also am very audio in what the boss is doing, and have my sounds on when raiding. Each special ability of every boss has a particular yell or sound associated with it. Once you learn the fight you can predict what's going on next based on the flavor text or yelling.

If all else fails you can use either deadly boss mods or bigwigs or power auras to do either screen shake or whatever sound you want depending on what event to make you move. Nothing like the littleredridinghood yell of RUN AWAY LITTLE GIRL RUN AWAY to make you realize the flame wall is going to happen in sarth for example.

Healing is great. You have to know what the boss is doing, what you are doing, who to heal/triage, and what everyone else in the raid is doing, and where they are. I'm hardly ever bored (as compared to playing dps).

I must admitt I suffer comparable problems sometimes. Having configured Grid to show me all relevant information about my raidmembers and using it for all interactions with them has greatly improved my UI. I further extended this with UI mods to centralize all my information. In many ways this is considered 'good' by UI designers...

The downside is that it tunnels my vision to the Grid box and the 2-3 boxes around it to such an extent that I missed the polarity timer at Thaddius twice in the last raid. Mind you: that timer is a huge bar in the center of my screen.

I am looking into this, experimenting both intuitively and using structured analysis to see if I can aleviate this problem. Currently I'm testing if color reduction on my UI will help: obscure or dampen most information while keeping bright or contrasting colors for urgent matters. Next to giving a better overview (which saves observation time) it seems to increase the comfort of the ui and give 'normal' ui information a more or less background feeling.

As for my partyframes: they stand next to my character which works very well. I noticed putting my raidframe higher on the screen helps but it's not practical for a large raidframe.

How do you all feal about Healbot?

Wow, lots of nice tips... thanks everyone! I'm definitely going to mess around with the positioning of Grid... I'll try out the various suggestions in this thread and hopefully will be able to settle on something that feels comfortable.

I would agree that healers have to focus more on their job than a dpser (on average). How some healers manage to effectively lead a 25 man raid while still keeping up on healing is still a wonder to me.

So far, my experience as a healer has been a positive one. There is a certain amount of satisfaction that you get when your healing ensures a smooth instance run. I guess tanks probably feel the same way.

It's good. All around it is a top notch addon. Never the less I prefer Grid and there is little Healbot can do that Grid can not (with the proper extensions).

I am sort of confused on how to expand the grid frames. Is their a way to make them bigger? I just recently started using addons. I healed the whole way through BT sans addons, and boy do they make life easiar.

Frame -> Advanced
- Height
- Width
Unfortunately, both are limited to a maximum size of 100 (unless you edit the lua code).
You can also edit the scale. This makes sense when you use the UI scale feature from Blizzard. It scales down Grid as well and using Grid's scale feature you can regain some of their original size.

What dimensions do you use?

Im prob one of the worlds worst at not watching my own health..I couldnt tell you how many times an off healer had to stop and heal me. but now in big drawn out fights, I tend to throw a renew on my self, just to be safe.

Depends. I used width:100px and Height: 30px with horizontal bar orientation a lot. Horizontal bar orientation + vertical group orientation used to be a pretty good combo for group-heals. With the changes to CoH this is less relevant. Now I'm toying with a new visual style with 70px-70px and vertical orientation. It's not better but I like the larger boxes... I'm just eager to experiment these days