Holy Priest Raiding Addons

[vakiller]

OK guys SO I'm currently working on gearing up ,to hopefully heal it up in some good ole Twilight guild raiding! but I've stumbled across a problem, seeing that i don't use any addons other then gathermate and dominos, I don't know what addons are helpful and what aren't. I want something that tells me when raidmembers are debuffed, etc. but i just don't know what to use. I found myself lost on curse.com having no idea what it is i need. Any assistance would be very helpful!

[Shadowwolf]

To be completely honest, you dont really need addons to heal. Some make it easier for sure yes, but truthfully the default UI has improved a lot for healing in this expansion. If you do want to explore some tho, you can check out some I listed below. I would strongly urge you to stay away from addons which basically try to heal for you. There are a few out there that try to basically do the job for you and try to tell you what spells to prioritize and whatnot, and those are a bad idea to use. The main reason is with every patch things change and also, an addon only works off someone else's idea of whats "proper" which doesnt always work for your playing style. Granted most of the healing in Cata is basically the same for everyone of a certain spec, but even still, its bad to rely on an addon to tell you what to do all the time.

If you use the default Raid/Party Frame UI, I would urge using SimpleRaidFrameOverlays along with it. It allows you to customize highlighting the bars of people debuffed with certain things because the default debuff highlighting is kinda bleh atm and doesnt do a good job.

I would have to say as any healer tho, Decursive is a must. Dispelling is critical in Cataclysm. Since in Cata you also have to be a bit picky about what you dispell, I run an addon called What Did I Dispell? to show me what I removed so in future fights and instance runs I can figure out if I want to waste mana keeping a certain debuff off the raid or not.

Clique is another good thing to have, because you can map keys and actions of your mouse/keyboard to different spells or macros.

ForteXorcist is a good way to keep track of cooldowns and hots and whatnot.

For keeping track of procs and different short cooldown abilities, a proc tracking addon like EventAlert or Power Aura's Classic may be worth checking out.

SmartRes2 is kind of handy but not really needed tbh for helping handle rezzing. It can show you rez bars of others so that there is less duplicate rezzing going on, speeding up the recoup process after a wipe, and it can also send random messages letting people know who your rezzing, but its not necessary.

I also use an addon called PIN (Priest Intelligent Notifier) on my priest which basically sends tells/chat alerts when you cast certain critical or important spells and abilities.

[Lord Entropy]

I strongly recommend VuhDo.  It's a mod specifically designed for healers and has a lot of customization options.  It's got a customizable raid-frame and assignable clicking for spells, plus a bunch of extra features like incoming heals, buffs/debuffs tracking, etc. all right on the raid frame.  It's what I use on my priest (though I'm disc). 

It has a ton of customization options, though it works pretty well out of the box.  All you really need to do is assign healing spells to clicks or keys.  These assignments only function when hovering over the raid frame member, which is nice.  For example, I have flash heal for left click, PW:shield for right click, greater heal for shift-right-click, POM for middle mouse, etc.  You can also have assignments for hostile targets.

Since I do a lot of tank healing, I also set it up to track tank survivability cooldowns - so if someone pops, for instance, shield wall, I see it on the raid frame along with a countdown.  It's setup out of the box to show all the major boss debuffs so that you can react to them.  For example, it shows when the tank gets eaten by Magmaw or what players got hit by constricting chains by Magmaw's trash mobs.  Anyway, check it out.

You will probably want something to help track your own cooldowns as well. Powerauras is good for this, though it can be pretty complicated, or you can get one of the many mods designed for that task.