Guide to World of Warcraft Healing Fundamentals: Juking, pillar-humping and feigning casts

As a PvP healer, you're the combat medic. It's your job to keep your damage-dealing partners alive, and oftentimes a match comes down to your timing or your judgment in choosing which spells to cast, when to cast them and when to use your limited array of important cooldowns to maximum advantage in an arena setting.

But being a PvP healer is so much more than that. The sub-1500 teams are the ones with healers who view their role strictly as healing. The above-par teams who find themselves fighting through the 1700s and 1800s have as their backbones healers who think strategically and realize there's more to it than spamming their most efficient healing spells.

The elite teams, those that pour days and weeks into reaching the 2000-rating milestone, employ only the best of the best -- those healers who understand their job encompasses not only healing, but mana efficiency, feigning casts and expert line-of-sight manipulation. They know that in order to win against top-rated competition, they've got to do all the little things that take the opposing team out of its comfort zone and force it to play a different tempo.

In this article, we'll take a look at the things that separate the great healers from the merely good ones, and the small actions that add up to victories in ranked arena matches.

Though for some players it goes without saying, the most fundamental and important aspect of being an effective PvP healer is to employ an interface and hotkey system that you're comfortable with. This is paramount, because the healer who has to go searching for that lesser-used cooldown button will not be the healer riding a pro team to the upper brackets. The common view is that clicking is wrong, and in most cases it is, but for every player who has their entire repertoire bound to a pro gaming keyboard, there are others who make things work through a combination of keys and clicking, using addons like QuickHeal.

The rule of thumb for effective healing is to be comfortable with your set-up. You want to make sure that your response time is lightning-quick. You'll only have a tiny window of opportunity to interrupt that Mage who stacks so much haste, his cast bar moves like a cheetah -- but if that comes at the expense of overpopulating your keyboard with binds, consider other options to make yourself more comfortable.