- Know, and learn to use ALL your available healing and utility spells. There is not one heal in the game that doesn’t have some great usage, even if it’s just situational (e.g. desperate prayer/binding heal). Use cooldowns often, know when they’re back up (there are addons that can help with this). Hotkey emergency heals (e.g. DP, DH) and utility spells (fade, shackle).

- Keep to a solid priority, even if you’re raid healer: You, and the tank(s) are nr1 priority, the other healers nr2, and the rest is optional (not really, but it helps to think like this). Don’t prioritize by lowest HP, don’t let low bars scare you, or change priority. Generally, I would heal a 70% tank over a 20% dps any day, unless I’m absolutely sure he’s going to be fine.

- Learn to expect incomming damage, a lot of it is predictable, pre-casting (and optionally cast-canceling) can be used on more fights then just the old loatheb. This is what makes HoT’s so great (they so are!!) on all classes btw, so if you expect damage: hot first, then precast!.

- ABC (always be casting) in heavy damage situations, every millisec pauze between casts that could be avoided by using bindings or addons can make an important difference. That’s why click healing (click the target, then click the healing spell) is unacceptable: even if you got all the other things perfect, this will destroy you’re output and responsiveness. NEVER clickheal (I’ve seen instructional video’s on internet where people clickhealed, not kidding).

- Check other healers. World of Logs/Wow Meter Online can teach you a lot. Go see the healers of good guilds, watch what heals are high on their list, preferably on the fights you’re doing. Check their specs/gear, but not for copying purposes, but to learn why they chose what they have (and then copy perhaps).

Also, I think knowing how the other classes play (by trying them out) helps healers understand a little better what they are up against in healing those classes. Aside from those two things, I heartily agree with the comments from Avalonna. :)

1) Ability to react fast: Priest have the most heals available, and knowing their strengths & weakness, and when to use them when most effective can mean the difference in your target(s) living or dying, and your mana lasting to see that they do.

2) Understand their class: Many priests copy a spec from someone they know, or from someone they see in a raiding guild. Like all classes, specs can be adjusted to benefit from certain raid makeups and content being tackled – If you’re just starting naxx, and you copy that raider working on a top tier hard mode, you might actually be gimping yourself. Learn your talents, and take the time to understand how they work.

3) Have thick skin: You’re going to screw up. It’s going to happen. And it might be a giant, raid wiping booboo. Accept it, acknowledge & figure what happened, and learn from it. Don’t be the “it wasn’t me” guy. Also, regardless if it’s your fault or not, people love to blame healing first. Before you start yelling back at the PuG tank with 25K health that he got instagibbed and there’s nothing you could do about it, show him logs or meters. Keep your cool & explain what happened. Maybe he could have done something different, and you can all figure it out together, rather than go make the 6845 post of “You know your PuG sucks when…” on the wow forums.

4) Arnt scared of a challenge: Don’t be afraid to do something because you’ve never done it before. How are you going to learn if you’re afraid to try? The worst than can happen is you wipe and maybe some tool gets pissed and leaves. His loss. YOu learned from it. Read strats beforehand, talk to people who have done the fight, and go for it.

5) Don’t stand in shit they shouldn’t: Self explanatory….a good priest doesn’t get perpetual tunnel vision. They dont stand in the path of a whirling melee mob, a giant glowing pool of crap, and know where thier targets are. Tunnel vision happens to all healers occasionally, but if it happens contently, you’re doing it wrong.

I have some funny stories…I’ll share them in a bit so this isn’t so long.