You can do more than just get your shiny gear and that is what will be discussed here. Gemming and enchanting it to the best of your ability will make the gear even better and up your stats even more. Then you can use self buffs such as food and elixirs or a flask prior to an encounter to further maximise your stats. If you are particular about your stats and want an ever further boost, particularly useful in a progression oriented guilds, you could choose professions which would benefit you most stats wise. Finally I will touch upon glyph swapping and how that can benefit you for certain encounters.
Gemming
Keep in mind that orange, yellow or green gems can be used to fill a yellow gem socket to get the bonus, red, orange and purple can be used for to get the bonus from a red socket, while purple, green or blue gems can be used for the blue socket bonus. A prismatic gem can be put into any coloured socket for the bonus. You do not need to gem for a socket bonus, that is down to both personal choice and the usefulness of the socket bonus itself. However, make sure you always have enough gems to keep your meta gem active.
Below you will find a table of gem possibilities and what healing class would benefit most from each of the gems. I have linked to the epic gems as they are fairly easily available these days. All of the gem types are available as lower quality ones as well.
| Gem | Socket | Most common users |
| [Runed Cardinal Ruby]
- - - - - - - |
red
- red, blue red, blue - blue blue - blue, yellow blue, yellow blue, yellow blue, yellow blue, yellow blue, yellow - yellow yellow yellow - yellow, red yellow, red yellow, red - any - meta meta |
all
- both priests, druid shaman, paladin - all (except druid) druid - paladin shaman, paladin holy priest, druid disc priest both priests, druid disc priest - paladin druid, shaman both priests - all both priests all - paladin - all all |
There are various gem combinations that are useful for each class, but generally all will find use for spell power. The chain heal type of Shamans love their haste, while paladins still seem to favour intellect in their gem choices. Combinations with these types of stats may be what you would benefit most from. Majestic Zircon (blue) provide the least used types of gems, people who prefer spell power tend to choose Dreadstone (purple) gems, and those who favour intellect, haste or crit in their gems tend to pick Eye of Zul gems (green). The socket bonus can easily be ignored, just make sure you have enough of a colour to active your meta gem.
If you feel you are low on stamina and unable to keep yourself alive specifically because of this then there are combination gems, green and purple, available with stamina on them. This stamina would either be grouped with spell power (purple), haste, crit or intellect. It is generally not necessary for a healer to use stamina in any of their gems, however it’s good to know you have the option for those particularly hard heroic or hard mode progression raids.
Don’t forget that you can have an [Eternal Belt Buckle] made by a blacksmith, or purchase one on the auction house, to add another gem socket to your belt. You can put whatever colour gem you want into this socket. It does not affect the any potential socket bonus available on your belt either.
Enchanting
You can get a lot of your gear enchanted, some of the enchants you can purchase off reputation vendor (head and shoulder) and others you can get by either applying a scroll purchased off the auction house or have an enchanter make them for you. Healing leg enchants are made by tailors and are generally also available on the auction house. Some professions also have specific enchants available that are better than those you can obtain from generic places and they do not stack with each other. Let’s have a closer look at what is available to us healers.
There are two useful head enchants, [Arcanum of Burning Mysteries] comes from revered with Kirin Tor, while [Arcanum of Blissful Mending] is from revered with Wyrmrest Accord. Make sure you the correct tabard equipped for instances if you need to collect the rep for one of these. If you already have a level 80 on the same server with the appropriate rep you can purchase the desired enchant on that character and mail it to your healer as these enchants are now Bind on Account. Unless you struggle with mana and would like more MP5 on your gear the enchants with spell power and crit will likely be a better option than the ones with spell power and MP5.
The same goes for the shoulder enchants which are available from Sons of Hodir. You can get the lower level ([Lesser Inscription of the Storm] and [Lesser Inscription of the Crag]) at honoured and the best shoulder enchants ([Greater Inscription of the Storm] and [Greater Inscription of the Crag] at exalted. You can purchase the exalted version on another character with the appropriate reputation on the same server, the honoured ones are for some reason not Bind on Account. If you need to obtain the reputation it will entail a long quest chain a fair few dailies. The first quest is available in K3.
There are two types of leg enchants to choose from as a healer; the [Brilliant Spellthread] with spell power and spirit and the [Sapphire Spellthread] with spell power and stamina. Generally you will find that as a priest or druid you want to choose the one with spirit and a shaman or paladin would prefer the option with stamina. Although there are rare quality ones available, the mats for the better epic ones are normally reasonable and therefore strongly recommended.
You can get an enchanter to enchant your cloak, chest, bracers, gloves, boots, weapon and shield. Although there may be a vast range of enchants available there aren’t that many viable options available at high level and the enchants available generally have spell power or intellect.
Food, flasks, elixirs and potions
To up your stats for specific encounters you can use buffs such as food and flasks or elixirs. To increase your stats once or for a short period of time you can use a potion. You cannot use a flask and an elixir at the same time. You can, however, use two elixirs simultaneously as long as one of them is a battle elixir while the other is a guardian elixir. Most healers are likely to benefit most from pure spell power buffs, but let’s have a look at what is available anyway. (Only the highest available items will be used as examples.)
Food:
- Fish Feast – these are always nice, but expensive. On the bright side it would feed everybody, not just you, so it’s a nice way to make a good impression and contribute with raid buffs. However, you need to have near max cooking skill to put one down and that can be annoying to level.
- Spell power and stamina (good for anybody): Firecracker Salmon and Tender Shoveltusk Steak
- Haste and stamina (good for shamans, paladins and raid healing druids): Imperial Manta Steak and Very Burnt Worg
- Crit and stamina (good for both types of priest): Spicy Blue Nettlefish and Spiced Worm Burger
- Spirit and stamina (ok for druids): Cuttlesteak
- MP5 and stamina (ok for anybody needing to up their mana regen): Mighty Rhino Dogs and Spicy Fried Herring
It you need find out what buff food you would personally benefit most from. If you are low on haste then that could be ideal, if you need to up your mana regen slightly, eat mana regen food and so on. It’s a good idea to keep a full stack of food.
Flasks:
- Flask of the Frost Wyrm – Spellpower flask which is decent for any healer type
- Flask of Pure Mojo – MP5 flask to increase your mana regen. Good for anybody in need of increased regen.
- Flask of Distilled Wisdom – Intellect good for paladins in particular. This is an old flask, but still has its uses.
A flask lasts for an hour and persists through death unless you are an alchemist where it would still persist through death but last an extra hour. Unless you feel the need to swap flasks half way through the previous flasks duration, you can simply bring as many flasks as the raids duration. If the raid is likely to last a little over 3 hours, you should bring 4 flasks etc.
Elixirs:
There are two types of elixirs, battle elixir and guardian elixir. You can use both at the same time, but only one of each type. Generally the battle elixirs increase a supplementary stat, while guardians elixirs increase a base stat. I’ve added various options of both types in a table to make it easier to see what you can use together. You can use one from the battle elixir column and one from the guardian elixir column at the same time.
| Battle Elixirs | Guardian Elixirs |
| Elixir of Deadly Strikes | Elixir of Mighty Mageblood |
Elixirs lasts for an hour or until you die. After each death you would have to consume new elixirs, so a full stack of each type you would use in a raid would not be a bad idea. You are likely to best know what stat would increase your performance, but my general recommendation to those who prefer elixirs over flasks is a spell power or haste battle elixir together with the intellect guardian elixir.
Potions:
Normally the most useful one of these is the Runic Mana Potion which will restore some of your mana (increased effect for alchemists and engineers who has used the Mana Injector Kit on a stack of mana pots). You should always keep a stack at hand for those emergency situations where you need mana as soon as possible for whatever reason.
Professions
There are no longer any crafted gear that is Bind on Pickup, although there are trinkets available from alchemy, engineering and jewelcrafting these are not much use at higher level of content. Therefore it is mainly the profession specific boosts that should be considered. Let’s have a look at what they are:
- Alchemy: flasks lasts twice as long and you can increased effect from elixirs and potions. You can also transmute an epic gem a day at 450 skill (and hope for a proc if you are a transmute master).
- Blacksmithing: you can put an extra socket on your bracers and your gloves, potentially giving you 46 more spell power or 40 additional intellect than without these sockets
- Enchanting: you can enchant your own rings and gain an extra 23 spell power per ring giving a potential boost of 46 spell power.
- Engineering: you can enchant your gloves to give you additional haste for 15 seconds with a minute cool down, a crit bonus for your boots and add spell power to your cloak. These do not stack with normal enchants.
- Inscription: you can enchant your shoulders with a greater enchant than those available from exalted with Sons of Hodir. There are both crit and MP5 versions available to an inscriber. These shoulder enchants provide 46 more spell power than the exalted shoulder enchant from Sons of Hodir. These do not stack.
- Jewelcrafting: you can have 3 better quality gems cut into red, yellow or blue as you want, I have used the spell power and intellect options for this comparison. By using all spell power gems here you would gain 48 spell power, or as a paladin you could gain 46 intellect if that’s what you prefer.
- Leatherworking: you can add fur lining to your bracers which will give you 48 more spell power than the highest spell power enchant on bracers. These do not stack.
- Tailoring: you can add spell thread to your legs for hardly any mats at all, but the stats are the same as the spell threads available to everybody. Additionally you can add a Lightweave or Darkglow embroidery to your cloak for either a chance to get 295 spell power for 15 seconds or a chance gain 400 mana when you cast a spell. These do not stack with other cloak enchants.
The gathering professions have minor benefits and are not as beneficial as the various professions listed above. As illustrated, all of the possible professions have a useful buff for any type of healer. However, a paladin choosing to stack intellect over spell power will find it most useful to be either a blacksmith or a jewelcrafter.
While levelling you might benefit most from having two gathering professions to make gold you can use to purchase gear or mats for when you reach max level. However, keeping these gathering professions will not help boost your stats. If you would still like to keep a gathering profession to keep earning gold off selling mats on the auction house at 80 then that is perfectly viable. You may however find a good balance in having one crafting profession for boosting your stats and one gathering profession your best choice. In a top end raiding guild you are likely to want two professions to boost your stats on your main character, while having another character for grinding mats.
Glyph swapping
Some glyphs can be very useful in one boss encounter, while another would be better in the following encounter. An example of when glyph swapping could be useful is when healing a tank as a restoration shaman you might prefer the Glyph of Riptide together with Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave and Glyph of Earthshield, while when you are healing the raid you are likely to find Glyph of Chain Heal more useful than said Riptide glyph.
You can easily swap glyphs before a boss encounter, simply put a new glyph on top of the existing glyph. You can also shift + right click to remove your current glyph if you don’t want to replace it with anything else. Do make sure that you keep a few spare of the two glyphs you would be swapping between so you don’t find yourself without either when you would really like to use it.
Does it matter?
Yes! Imagine you have 10 empty sockets on your gear of various colours which would yield no bonus at all. However, by just choosing to put one type of gem in them all and ignoring all the socket bonuses, you could get as much as 230 spell power or 200 intellect or even 200 haste. It is not quite that easy to get your gear its optimal stats as sometimes the socket bonus is worth considering and you should certainly ensure your chosen meta gem is active. The bonus you can get from enchanting your gear is equally significant. You don’t have to put the highest level of gems or enchants on lower level gear, but showing that you have put some effort in is generally appreciated by those you do dungeons with. When you do top end raid content you will certainly benefit from having your gear as optimal as possible, even if it can get expensive if you purchase everything in one go. Buff food, elixirs or flasks are generally a good way to show you are trying to be the best you can be and they do help.
Professions and glyph swapping is less significant, however they are worth consideration. The bonus gain from various professions are generally fairly equal these days unless there is something specific you are after. Glyph swapping is a very quick, easy and often cheap way of modifying your strengths towards whatever encounter you will be up against next. It could prove to be just that little extra that makes the encounter easier for you.
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Before we move onto the next chapter we’ll have a look at useful add ons for healers.
Tags: buff, druid, enchanting, gear, gem, glyphs, healing, paladin, priest, profession, shaman
Just a quick question on the Kirin Tor and Sons of Hodir BOA enchants. So I am to understand that the toon does not have to have any rep with them just the toon that purchases it from the Quartermaster? Wow when did that happen?
I still like the quest chain though.
That is correct. This is from the 3.3 patch notes: