Healing 5 mans as a Holy Paladin

I think that playing a holy paladin for as long as I have, I take for granted how new holy paladins have to deal with 5 man dungeons. If I think back on it, when I was first leveling to 80 and trying to heal dungeons with 16k mana and 1500 SP, it was difficult to say the least.

For a freshly dinged 80 paladin, it's even harder to heal heroics especially since you are more vulnerable to any fail/noob players in the group. Yet, what can you do? With patch 3.3, heroics are a necessity to grind for Emblem of Triumph so you can buy the gear you need to be able to get a start on raiding.

I'm assuming that your glyphs/spec are right for the task at hand. With that in mind, here are some tips for healing 5 man heroics.

Random Macros

There are many ways to heal, tank or DPS and it's up to the individual gamer to decide what kind of style of play they wish to utilize. One tool that helps players out are macros.

For me, I don't use many macros at all and prefer to manually click things or just press keyboard keys/key binds. The few macros I have are based off of basically 2 macro commands. I shall now teach this to you =)

/cast [insert spell name here]

/castsequence [spell 1, spell 2]

So simple, yeah? So for the /cast command, I use that when I want to combine using a spell/ability with a simple /say or /party or /raid or /rw or one or more of the above to announce its usage. If it is a spell that is cast on someone, I use %t in my announcement message so that whoever I am targetting at the time I use the macro will be announced as the target. Then the macro becomes:

/cast [spell]
/say [spell] used on %t


In addition, if you don't want to pick a completely new icon for the macro for your action bar when you first create the macro, just pick the question mark as the icon. This way it automatically makes the macro pick the normal icon of the spell that you use. If you want to mouseover your macro button and see the tool tip, which will help you see the CD too, insert this snippet above the beginning of the macro in the macro input box, like so: