Healers

             For this entry I will expose the pros and cons of every heal spec in WotLK, enjoy.

Holy Paladin

Pros

• Best single target heal in the game in Holy Light.
• Strongest single target heal and an absolute tank saver in Lay on Hands.
• Best Tank healing buff (Beacon of Light)
• Absolutely huge mana pool, which makes Replenishment buff and other % mana restore effects restore a lot of mana.
• A reliable and easy to use passive healing effect in Judgement of Light.
• The Auras along with Aura Mastery can help in situations of extreme raid boss AOE.
• A one minute cooldown mana restoration effect.
• Avenging Wrath grants very powerful heals for 20 seconds.
• Survives more than other healers thanks to Divine Shield.
• Cleanse is very good, magic and disease are important effects to remove in 1 GCD.

 Cons

• Very poor AOE heal. Holy Light glyphed helps a ton, but the 8 yards radius restricts it to melee and tanks mostly.
• Holy Light is the main healing spell used, and it is very costly. Makes necessary to stack intellect through gemming.
• Because it requires a lot of intellect stacking, spell power is lacking which makes the scaling of Holy Light somewhat poor.
• Judgement of Light does a lot of the total healing done by a healer paladin, and it can be used by any Paladin regardless of spec; this makes the holy paladin not a must if you have another paladin in raid.
• Although Divine Plea restores a lot of mana, the chances of using it are rather few. The principle is simple: If you cast a lot Holy Light it means the raid is taking more damage than desired which takes away the chances of using your DP, if you decide to use it anyway it will put a lot of stress on the other healers and risk a wipe.
• No heals over time and only Holy Shock for an instant heal (6 seconds cooldown). It could be said Paladin can't heal while moving, which is a huge downside considering many bosses require a lot of positioning.

 tl;dr: Best tank healing and passive healing, bad AOE heal, low mobility.

Priests

Holy

Pros

•  Good AOE heal in Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending and Prayer of Healing. Divine Hymn can save a raid.
• Best life saver spell in the game in Guardian Spirit.
• With the right spec it can heal and move continuously, making high mobility boss fights rather easy.
• Excellent mana regen thanks to the high spirit stat and Shadowfiend.
• If spec'ed for it can be an optional single target healer with some AOE heal in CoH and PoM.
• Can continue healing for a while in case a death occurs.
• Body and Soul talent is extremely useful. 
• The Hymns are amazing.

Cons

•  The single target heals are rather weak compared to others. Greater Heal cast time is long even including talents, requires lots of serendipity stacks to make it faster cast but you would have to cast Flash Heal 3 times or Binding Heal 2 times beforehand.
• Sadly, the AOE heals of Holy Priest have cooldown. Even though the cooldowns are rather short (6 sec CoH, 7 sec PoM), the fact that you have to use your precious Global Cooldown for filler Flash Heal or Renew, cuts a lot your HPS (Heal per second). You could use Prayer of Healing while your other heals are in cooldown but it has the same problem than Greater Heal: 10 years cast time. Therefore Holy Priest is not a premier AOE healer either.
• Body and Soul talent is useless if a Discipline Priest is in raid.

 tl;dr: Not the best at single target healing, neither at AOE healing. Mixed healer.


Discipline

Pros

• Prevents damage in absorb effects, which is useful when healing reduction is present or for an incoming high damage effect.
• PW: Shield is a very strong protective spell for an instant cast, and can heal if glyphed.
• Critical heals often cause overheal, but Divine Aegis fixes that so they don't go to waste as much. It effectively converts 30% of your critical heals into a shield. Doing some math at 3 points it increases the bonus critical heal by 90%.
• High Mobility.
• Strong single target heal in Penance.
• The 25% haste bonus from talents makes reaching the haste cap an easy task, allowing higher investment in spell power and critical that other healer specs cannot give the luxury to.
• Excellent life saving cooldowns in Pain Suppression and Power Infusion.
• Still good Divine Hymn and Hymn of Hope to prevent a wipe.
• Prayer of Healing is reliable for AOE healing as long as you use it with a 25% bonus haste charge.

Cons

• Weakened Soul Effect will force you to use single target heals if your shield broke too early.
• Single target healing through Penance is good but the 8 seconds cooldown don't make it a very reliable single target heal.
• Flash Heal spam drains mana fast.
• Prayer of Mending has 10 seconds cooldown compared to Holy build's 7 seconds, reducing its potential.

tl;dr: Too good for reducing damage and preventing a death, bad for extended single target healing.

Restoration Shaman

 Pros

• Earth Shield is a reliable passive tank healing buff.
• Riptide instant and passive healing are very nice,  low cooldown as well. Makes your best heal Chain Heal stronger.
• Chain heal is the best AOE heal spell in the game; no cooldown, 40 yards range, each jump can apply Earthliving and gives stacks of Tidal Waves, which makes your Healing Wave an excellent tank healing spell. The mana cost is also reasonable unlike Prayer of Healing and Holy Light.
• Ancestral Awakening helps with your critical single target heals. It can convert your overheal into actual heal, which is amazing, and saves someone low health if no other healer could get to him/her in time.
• Cleanse Spirit removes curse and disease, the most important effects to remove in WotLK raiding.
• It can resurrect on its own if the worst scenario happens.
• Mana Tide totem is an amazing mana restore totem, 24% to each of the shaman's party members over 12 seconds. Assuming the shaman has mana users in the same group, that makes it an effective restoration of 120% mana, much better than Hymn of Hope because it allows the shaman to continue casting heal spells.

Cons

• Chain Heal has a rather long cast time. Many shamans stack 20 haste gems everywhere just to have it cast faster, but that also makes your heal per cast weaker.
• Because of the necessary Chain Heal spam, shaman lacks some mobility, similar to Holy Paladin.

tl;dr: Resto shaman too op.

 Restoration Druid

Pros

• High Mobility thanks to many instant Heal Over Time spells. 
• A 6% bonus healing buff makes everyone feel a little safer.
• Wild Growth is a decent AOE HoT spell, the cooldown is low enough and acquires targets regardless of the group they are.
• Tranquility is extremely strong, the best AOE life saving heal.
• Swiftmend is a very strong instant heal compared to most other instant heal effects.
• Nourish is fast cast and strong enough to focus your heals when needed.
• Nature's swiftness helps when your Swiftmend is in cooldown, just use it with Healing Touch in a Macro.
• Good for bosses with raid wide damage effects.

Cons

• Resto Druid is best at raid healing, when focusing heals on the tank it sort of falters because Healing Touch has long cast time and Nourish drains mana fast.
• Not exactly the best to save a low health from death, if Nature's swiftness is in CD and the target lacks an available HoT to use your Swiftmend, chances are that player will die.

 tl;dr: It's nice as long as a player doesn't take too much damage in a short spawn of time.

Summary

           As you can see every class has its ups and downs, although shaman seems to have the least downs, doesn't mean it is perfect. I didn't explain the how-to for each class because the objective of this entry was simply compare each class strictly on healing terms. Some classes didn't receive credit for the buffs they provide, this should be accounted for too when building your raid. Regardless of the Healer remember all heal classes can also DPS, in case healing didn't work out for you.

Fire Mage

          It's been a while since I last posted here, the reason should be obvious: I quit wow for nearly 5 years. Anyway, now that I'm back and I'm head of a guild again I'll post guides to help guildies get better with their classes. It should be obvious I got this knowledge from other sources (mostly elitist jerks), but I also know plenty from my own experience. One thing to note is, I'm no longer into pvp as much as I was before, due to many factors I will not explain. Being practical I simply shifted from pvp addict to pve, I still play lots of classes and try to master them the best I can.

As I'm returning to the writing scene, I'll take it easy and go with probably the best class I use as of today: Fire Mage.

The Drama - Why Fire is so OP?

 "Timmy is a master with Arcane Mage, he is top dps in ToC and Ulduar almost every raid. When 3.3 went live he began upgrading his armor and continued raiding in arcane spec. He noticed something strange: He wasn't among the top in dps charts anymore. "What's going on?" Timmy wondered. He noticed there were other mages there. "Wow, they upgraded their gear so quickly" He thought. As he saw the charts in detail he realized those mages were different. Timmy's face filled with horror as he noticed the spells said mages used.

From that day on life wouldn't be the same for Timmy..."

Patch 3.3 is old but players starting their WoW adventure might not notice the differences among specs, at least not at first. I'll just be perfectly clear: Fire is The Pve Mage Spec to go in 3.3.5. Sorry arcane, we sure had fun in previous patches but recently you just can't seem to pull it off, specially in gamer-district where trinkets are given to the highest dps and you're still behind all those Spriests... and you can't even roll for Phylactery...

Blizz was specially generous with fire spec in the form of the T10 bonuses, since high end gear reaches ridiculous crit ratings the 2 set bonus can be sustained for ~80% of the fight, meaning you have free 9% haste rating which is a direct increase of 9% in your total dps. Amont this, fire got other buffs which I'm too lazy to check for in patch notes at the moment, just take my word on this.

tl;dr:Arcane is dead.

Talents

The best fire spec is the following:

I will briefly explain the talents I believe could cause controversy.

No Flame Throwing: Yea, no +6 yards on those fire spells. If 35 yards is not enough for you, you should give up on ranged and roll a retri pala.

Magic Absorption: Two points give you 80 resistance to all schools. Let's not forget the only source of arcane resist is Mark of the wild from druid (75), which raises your arcane resist to 155. Plus the Frost resist from aura/totem, you hit 210 frost resist. It might seem negligible, but in Sindragosa fights you're gonna want to cast more spells and not die from Unchained Magic debuff. Remember Phylactery of the Nameless Lich? Those 80 extra resist could be the difference between stopping at 11 spells cast or stopping at 13, allowing you more spells per debuff application and therefore more damage. It also helps for Rotface fight, if you don't want to move from the slime spray (I shouldn't be saying this because you're supposed to move, but you don't want to lose that trinket either right? You know the other casters won't move from spray; hell, they don't even move from Ooze explosion...)
Even if you don't compete for a trinket, the reduced damage taken will make healer's job easier.

Student of the Mind: Most mages go with 1 point there to have 4% bonus spirit. If your gear has more spirit than usual consider getting 3 points there, even if the gains are only 11 or 12 crit rating. I'll take those 12 crit rating over 6 useless bonus range.

Only 3 points in Arcane Concentration: Use your mana gems and don't cry about oom.

The Rotation

Start of fight(If warlock in raid):

Living Bomb>Fireball until Proc of Hot Streak>Pyroblast>Fireball until proc of Hot Streak>Reapply Living Bomb AFTER it explodes.

If you don't have a warlock in raid just use Scorch after your first Living Bomb application, and reapply that 5% buff every 30 seconds.

You shouldn't wait for your fireball to proc Hot Streak, if the last Fireball you did was a crit. Let's say Fireball critted, but considering travel time you will probably be casting the next Fireball by the time you see the big numbers. That Fireball you're casting will probably crit, but you don't have means of knowing this, so as that Fireball is traveling you should be casting another Fireball. Never wait for procs, just spam Fireball and as you get a Hot Streak proc finish your current cast and use Pyroblast immediately; the reason behind this is Hot Streak doesn't cares how many Fireball crits you do past the second, if you crit 3 times in a row with fireball, you get 2 Hot streak procs (one proc after 2 crits, the second after the third crit) because Hot streak only checks if the last Fireball was a crit, if the condition is met Hot streak will proc again. Use this to your advantage: Next time you get Hot streak it will be when you're halfway through a FB cast, finish that cast and use Pyroblast fast, your Fireball will reach the target before Pyroblast and if it crits it will give you another Hot Streak proc. Each Proc of Hot Streak gives you 12% haste with 2 T10 pieces and lasts 5 seconds. If you have a Hot Streak avalaible you don't need to use Pyroblast if you still have 1 or 2 seconds of bonus haste, try to use another Fireball and use your Pyroblast once the haste buff is gone, this is done to prolong the bonus haste.

Never reapply Living Bomb before it explodes, unless you can't apply it due to the boss mechanics (i.e. when Sindragosa is just ascending, you can reapply Living Bomb before it explodes).

When to use Combustion: Your Spell casts gain the bonuses you currently have, when you apply a Dot it continues having that bonus even after its effect has worn off you. When you use Combustion your spell critical chance is increased by 10% instantly. If you want your Living Bomb to have a higher crit chance (Ticks will also crit more), use Combustion then cast 2 Fireballs and use Living Bomb when your crit bonus from Combustion is high enough. If your crit rating is already high, you might have to use Living Bomb with only 20% bonus crit chance from Combustion (every good move matters in that little cancer dps chart).

Remember using your mana gem often, there's nothing more sad than a mage going oom because he/she didn't use the gem. Use one when you are at 85% mana and the next one should be up before boss goes down.

When to use Evocation: Never.

Glyphs

Fire mage, unlike other dps specs, has three glyphs carved in stone that will never change.

Glyph of Living Bomb
Glyph of Molten Armor
Glyph of Fireball

Stat Distribution:

Hit until capped>spellpower>Crit until capped>Haste>spirit.

Your Hit cap is 17% but this number can go down thanks to those generous Boomkins that only exist to give buffs to other casters dps. Spriest debuff Misery works too. Considering these buffs you can down that number to 14%. If raid leader is your friend you can ask him to put a Draenei in your group to lower that number to 13%. If you're a man of many enemies like me, just go with 14%.

Hit is rather easy to get, there is a ridiculous amount of items with tremendous amounts of hit.

Regarding Crit, chances are low you will reach the cap without crit gems (Which is around 80% with full raid buffs) but if you reached that number you should start stacking spell power. Just try that every piece of gear you use has Crit.

Yellows: Hit rating if you need. If not, go with 12 spell power+10 crit.
Reds: 23 Spell Power.
Blues: You can go with 12 spell power+10 spirit, or 10 spirit+10 crit. I go with the latter.

The ancient debate regarding spirit (Or at least since 3.0)

"I won Frozen Bonespike today but leader said spirit is for healers and then he kicked me from raid after I called him a Zef Sider ninja."

Nobody ever said spirit is meant for healers. Spirit is indeed good for healers only IF they need the mana regen. Back in TBC spirit was only for healers, but Blizz wanted to make it useful for dps, so a few benefits from having it were introduced. Every good healer should know the right time to stop stacking spirit/mana regen and start weighting more into stats like haste-crit-spell power to increase the healing done (For example Back from Deathbringer25 has spirit-haste, a holy priest with plenty of mana regen is using the Back from Valithria25 with haste-crit, the holy priest knows there's no need for more regen so he/she passes the cloak). I'm not even gonna go deep explaining why some healers with high gear are low on total healing done. Spirit is good to reach that crit cap but if leader is irrational then little can be done about it. And yes, Frozen Bonespike is amazing for fire mage before Bloodsurge.

Spell power vs Crit chance.

Less spell power means weaker non crits (and weaker crits), but the tier bonus is so good, you're gonna love that sweet +90% uptime on that haste. Crit gemming also makes your mana deplete slower compared to spell power gems, because you benefit from that 30%  mana recovery every time you crit. In summary, when your crit is low, your mana will suffer and you can go oom even with mana gems and Evocation in long fights particularly Lich King.

Best Professions

If you're lazy you can go with Skinning, it gives you 40 crit rating without any effort involved. As your second prof you can go with Jewelcrafting or even Blacksmith to stack more Spell power. Engineering is legit too. All the other profs are underwhelming.

Best Friends

Your Best Friend will always be a Boomkin. Like that ugly friend you hang up with that helps you get laid, Boomkin will make sure you reach the top position while staying behind and watching you get the goodies only the top dps can get. Boomkin is your best friend, but that doesn't means you can't cheat on him with other classes, Ele shaman is the funny one every party should have, nobody takes him/her seriously but he/she always makes sure you enjoy your time. Warlocks might seem like they are there to help with Demonic Pact and Fel Intelligence buffs but they really aren't, they are very close to you in damage dealt and will take the top if you don't work hard. In the end Mages have to stick together, always trade Focus Magic to make sure mages take over the top.

Addons

I use classtimer to know when my Living Bomb goes off, as sometimes WoW ui doesn't update immediately. You can download a compatible version from wowace.com.

Macros

I don't use any macros for fire mage because fire mage is cheap. The only general macro I use when I have too many stacks of Unchained Magic or to survive an explosion is

#showtooltip Ice block
/Cast Ice Block
/Cancelaura Ice Block
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

This will use Ice block and cancel it if I press it again, it's good because you don't waste time right-clicking the buff, so your dps doesn't suffer. You also use a simple burst macro with /Cast Mirror Image /Cast Combustion if you're a slow clicker.

That's basically all I have to say regarding Fire mage. Remember knowing bosses is important, but knowing your class is just as important (And harder). I hope this modest guide was of some use to you. If you have anything to say feel free to use the comments section (There's no complains section so save them).