Things your healer wants you to stand in

This post is, once again, adapted from a guide I put up on my guild’s forums. Hopefully it will help you and your raid clear up any lingering confusion about what all those colorful circles on the ground are.

Cataclysm has brought several new spells into all of our spellbooks and has given each class of healer some new tools for group healing. Unfortunately, many of these spells display as visual effects on the ground, which can make things a little complicated. (As pro raiders, I know that none of us ever stands in fire, so retraining yourself to actually run into ground effects may feel a little backwards at first.)

To help, I’ve taken some screenshots to show you what each of the AoE healing spells looks like.

Holy Word: Sanctuary, Holy Priests

This one is simple: Stand in it, get healed.

Lightwell, Holy Priests

Lightwell’s getting much more use in Holy specs since Cata and you may see it in upcoming raids. The lightwell can be right-clicked to give you a pretty powerful HoT. It starts out with 10 charges and can be glyphed to have 5 more. Click it when you take damage to help out your healers!

Power Word: Barrier, Discipline Priests

Barrier reduces your damage taken by 30% and prevents your spellcasting from being interrupted if you take damage. If you see this go up, you probably want to be inside of it.



Efflorescence, Resto Druids

Just like Holy Word: Sanctuary, this one is easy. Stand in it, get healed. It’s also arguably the most difficult to spot of all the new AoE healing spells. We are extremely used to green things on the ground being very bad to stand in. Look for the little floating leaves as a cue to know that, in this case, green is a good thing.

Same as above. Stand in, get healed. Healing Rain is the level 83 Shaman ability – no talent points necessary – so you may see it even if you do not have a Resto Shaman in your group.

Paladins always have to be special flowers, don’t they? The Holy paladin AoE effect to look for is not going to be on the ground. Light of Dawn shoots out in a 30 yard frontal cone. It’s not something you’re likely to be able to run into after it’s cast, but it is a good reason to be standing in front of your raid’s healadin, rather than behind him.