I got my C++ game working, and am back at Warcraft, healing this time

So I spent a little time in a raiding guild, doing both tanking and boomkin stuff, but again, I can't bring myself to actually commit a time to play every week, so I've had to drop out of raiding.

I picked up on my shaman alt, and have started healing. For those of you who have never healed, probably you see healing like this:

Five people in a dungeon, tank's health bar jiggles back and forth all day, and then *bam* you are hit by some kind of strange aggro thing or an aoe. "Oh no!" you think, "the healer is targetting the tank, so how can he get a heal on me in time?" But, of course, as usual, the healer drops an instant cast on you within one or two seconds. "How on earth did he do that?" you think, "I barely had time to check the aggro table when I got hit to make sure it wasn't my fault, and he already targetted me, and healed me up!" "Healers must be very coordinated, I'm glad I tank/dps!"

Well, that's only part of the story. The truth is that healing requires addons that completely change the way that the player interacts with the character's abilities and the other characters around them. Pretty much any healer has to use either mouseover macros or some kind of raid frame healing interface.

The one I use on my shaman (Shamtrific) is healbot. I've set it up so that a left mouse click is lesser healing wave (my spam for the healing style I've chosen for five mans), Alt-left click is healing wave (the big one), Shift-left click is chain heal. My instant casts are all right clicks: Earth shield, riptide (alt), and cleanse spirit (shift). These six spells are pretty much the entire set of spells I need in the thick of things. Everything else is just on action bars.

The addon can be configured a lot of ways, but I found it easiest to use the "Alterac Valley" setting with a few modifications. I widened the health bars considerably, and adjusted the opacity so I could see how much health people have when out of range, but I still can easily see that they are out of range.

The addon IS the healer's primary user interface. I just put earth shield on the tank, then hover my mouse cursor over the tank's health bar. The addon tells me how much health the tank has lost (e.g., "-1245"), and I watch for it to drop to a certain amount lower before I cast a heal on the tank (earth shield does most of the work on the tank, glyphed). If it drops to -3000 or so, I'll put a quick riptide on the tank, and if it's still under -2000 after that global cooldown, I'll hit the tank with a lesser healing wave. The other party members' (and pets') health bars (and mine) are visible too, right next to the tank's.

If anyone else takes damage, and it's more than the healing stream totem will top off in 10 seconds (i.e., about 1200 damage), then I hit them with a riptide, if it's not on cooldown, or a lesser healing wave otherwise, unless they are melee. If a melee or pet is taking damage, I usually will cast a chain heal on them because I know they are standing next to the tank, and it sure doesn't hurt to top the tank off.