More often than not, we get asked what addons we used to healing. Before, most of the people did not believe in us and satisfy with our answer. But now we avail ourselves of this opportunity to make mention of it in detail. If it stirs your great interest, you should pay more attention.
   Fist thing first, with regard to the addons, let us get one thing into straight.
   To large scale, addons make our job become easier. They provide us with tools to facilitate our game play and in some cases to correct an oversight or lack in the Blizzard default UI.
If you are incapable of playing this game without addons, then you are allowing those addons to play the game for you.
As you might guess by that opinion, we are very stingy with the addons that we use to heal.
As a matter of fact, there are only two of them, along with a pair of macros.
One is VisualHeal, it adds a little bar (much like a casting bar) that tells me only one thing if the only healer who has it installed, but other healers have it installed.
Rocking the addon solo, it shows how much overheal expect from heal that someone is casting. It's not precise, it's just an additional colored section on the cast bar, but when someone was Holy spec he/she found it incredibly useful, especially when healing DPSers whose health bars like the back of hand.
As Disc spec it's less useful for personal use. Not only did it installed for the times to cast a Greater Heal or a Flash Heal but also for the benefit of the other healers in raids.
You see, if multiple healers have the addon installed, the addon will actually report whether or not the healing already has an incoming heal.
The magic of the addon becomes clear. When we start heal on StabbityDeath, but it turns out he's already got an incoming heal from the shaman. The addon will, in an easy to use visual format, give the information whether to stop casting on Stabbity and focus on the suicidal enhancement shaman instead or maybe the ret pally who seems to cut himself even more often than the warlock does.
It's a great tool that allows healers in a raid situation to coordinate their heals and help each other keep the raid up.
Another is X-Perl, which is a unitframes addon - that means it replaces my target window, group window, and raid windows.
Using X-Perl for healing because it has an incredible, magic ability to miss whatever it is trying to click on in the default UI.
Health bars in the default UI are dangerously small. In truth, they're not small at all. It's just that some manage to MISS the health bars. X-Perl allows resizing them to something less likely to miss.
In addition, X-Perl is set up to fade out any characters that are out of healing range. It also highlights the group member in blue if they have a dispellable magic effect, and yellow if they have a dispellable disease effect.
It also has a counter for the number of HoTs on a character. To run with a tree druid, we'd piss him right off if we started flash healing someone he just Hotted up, and rightfully so. It's not a contest to see who can heal the fastest and it's a contest to see if our raid can defeat the boss. And wasting the mana of two healers just to show up higher on the healing meters is not helping us defeat the boss.