Advice beyond the guidesFollow

Mod requirements have kind of changed since vanilla. We still use mods for basically the same reasons (ability warnings and better raid frames than the standard ones), but they've become more compact. Nowadays, this only must is BigWigs or DeadlyBossMods, possibly along with GTFO (all boss-ability warnings), and Grid(+Clique) or Vuhdoo or Healbot or Pitbull (all raid frames).

Still pretty useful but more optional is Dominos or Bartender4 for your bars.

Macro-wise, there isn't much that's specifically good for priests. There's the good old Shackle Undead focus/warning that's basically copied from a mage's Polymorph, there's an unused cancelcast macro and there's the 'compilation' macro compilation, where you group heals and offensive spells together and make the spell cast depend on whether your target is hostile or friendly.

I recommend googling all the raidframe addons I named and seeing which ones you like most, aesthetically. Play around and try them until you find what you want. Once you've got raidframes and a boss mod, you're a long way already.

Edited, Jul 20th 2010 2:27am by Mozared

Moz said it all for addons.

I'd like to add that Clique (an addon that binds stuff to your mouse keys and automatically makes mouseover macros for those) can be replaced by writing macros yourself, but that's just a lot of work.

In line with using Clique, I have cooldowns I cast on others (Pain Suppression and Power Infusion mainly) as well as PoH as mouseover macros but bound to keys on my keyboard due to lack of space on my mouse.

You can always make an ******* macro, as well. This is mostly for level 80. It could look like this:

/cast [target=player] Power Infusion 
/cast Inner Focus 
/use 13 
/use 14 
/cast Divine Hymn

This will cast Power Infusion on yourself, cast Inner Focus, use both your trinkets and cast a loaded up Divine Hymn. Usually Divine Hymn in itself is so powerful that I tend to only combine it with Inner Focus (mainly because its mana cost is really high), but this would save you from almost anything.


I'd like to add that CT_mod has not been discontinued but is not nearly as popular as it used to be and I think some of the functions simply aren't available anymore.

There's also some UI threads in here that are pretty much up to date and suggest some other addons that aren't mandatory.



Also, be warned. Heroic dungeons do offer pretty good rewards, but I've recently reached level 80 on another healer. At the start (read: three days ago) she didn't outgear the places so much they became ridiculously easy like they are on my priest. She's been 80 for three days now and is actually already at the point where heroics aren't much of a challenge anymore. Not the ones I can queue for on her, anyway (and this includes one of the newest and hardest heroics). They do enable you to gear up for progression raiding at a staggering pace, and you can stick to 10man raids if you want to stay semi-casual, but they really aren't much more enjoyable than any other grind and for the most part far easier than any of the level 60 5-mans used to be.


For a lot of info on priest healing as it is now (if you can bear the mathy bits in there and the length of the whole thing), check out this.

I'm actually quite frustrated that they are so slacky about priests at EJ. I mean, there's a lot of info, but the resto shaman compendium seems far better.

:)

If I wasn't so lazy I'd adapt Pitbull (or any other raid frames that are less annoying than Grid) to have Grid's functionality. I can't live without that. But I also want my raid frames to look like I want them to (be black, for example).

Automated macro making? Sounds good. It's not really more than that; you can do the same thing manually, it just takes a lot more work.