World of Warcraft: WoD; How to Healing as a Holy Paladin

One of the most important part of becoming an effective Holy Paladin is to have an outstanding layout/keybindings. This will be your core that will shape the foundation of your Healadin skills. Determining your layout and bindings is, like with most of anything on World of Warcraft, subjected to preference. What makes your healing as a Paladin more comfortable, but some guidelines are needed, which I shall provide for you and I shall start with the layout of your action bar.

1. Priority moves: These are the moves you will be using religiously. Every single encounter, any time damage is being outputted. Place these moves on your action bar layout close to your movement key. You must be able to activate these moves with simple and easy movements of your fingers.
2. Try to keep priority moves away from shift-click bindings. The long it takes you to activate important heals, the greater chance someone will die.

This is really important to keep in mind. The clutter moves, as I call them, will really confuse you if you have them mixed in with your priority healing abilities. Especially if you are a beginner. This was the major problem for me when I was beginning, not knowing where to place my action-ready abilities v.s. my mobility/nonessential moves for raiding.

This is a VITAL part of becoming a professional Paladin healer. You must know when to use certain abilities at the appropriate time because if you do not you will fail time and time again. Nevertheless do not be afraid of failure, it is apart of the learning process.

1. Tanks always come first, when it comes to tank healing quick heavy heals are going to be used most often on them. Abuse your Beacon of Light as much as you can for tank. Flash of Light, Holy Light, and Word of Glory (Eternal Flames). You are required to be able to predict heavy hitting moments and react fast enough when you see a low healthbar.
2. Other heals are second when it comes to healing. The other healers help you relieve the stresses of damage. when you see your healers getting low, try for a quick FoL or WoG (EF). Also, this is one of those rare moments that AoE healing would be acceptable.
3. The DPS are last on the list. This does not mean they are not important, but the other two roles are top priority when things start to go wrong. Try to figure out who is your top dps and be sure to keep that toon alive for as long as you can. Try to avoid heavy heals because you must always remember you are not the only healer. Toss a light heal and if they are sustaining heavy damage then move into heavy heals.

• Your cooldowns are all situational, obviously. Such as "Speed of Light", if you had opted in that talent point, is a great CD when used to move out of the way and/or out of "fire" as it is put.
• Avenging Wrath: If you have it talented and glyphed correctly, such as I, then it needs to be kept on CD. It's only a 1.5 min cooldown when glyphed. Otherwise use this ONLY when it is a high damage period.
• 90 talent move (Hammer of Light or Holy Prism): These are probably the only truly effective and efficient area of effect (AoE) paladins have. HoL is 1 min on the cooldown so be sure to use it only when people are grouped up tightly, its AoE isn't large. While Prisme on the other hand is dependent upon who you attack. If you target a friendly then it will give a big heal while AoEing to closeby enemies while targeting an enemy initially will do a burst damage to the enemy and heal 5 nearby friendlies.
  
• Your bubbles: These are a paladin's best friend. Bubbldins are a great nickname for us. These are for your own defense. Once you've gotten comfortable with them you can really have a great advantage with your bubbles.

These are totally situation and I implore you to study what each talent does. This is so you can have an understanding and figure out when to use which talents on certain fights during a raid. This knowledge will come to you when you have more experience so do not get discouraged. Persistence is the key. Only a select few off the talent tree and glyphs will have to be manipulated so do not worry. You will not have to rearrange your entire setup each time.

This is just to give you a brief idea of what you need to be doing as a holy paladin. For example, the mentioned cooldowns are not all of the CD's, but rather the important ones. If you really want to get into depth with it you will need to visit more informative websites for World of Warcraft (WoW). But for beginners this should give you the guidance you will need to tread your merry way to being a profession, badass Paladin. Good luck my fellow Healadins, I wish you the best in your trials and tribulations.