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Being able to reliably keep Ancestral Fortitude up on the main tank with near-100% uptime is incalculable (well, it's calculable, but the benefit is MASSIVE). This is something that priests are totally unable to contemplate unless something changes in a fairly dramatic fashion, and it only just occurred to me an hour or so ago. Any thoughts here?
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Let's give both our Holy Priest and our Resto Shaman full WotLK healing specs. We'll give them +3000 healing, and the Shaman (but not the Priest) gets another 11% critical from gear. Both have 10% base critical.
With these stats, our Holy Priest can use Flash Heal to generate 4500 hps @ 6.91 hpm with 93% Inspiration up-time. We'll ignore the possibility he overheals (more than 50% wasted healing is a free heal for him) or ever lands a heal on a target below 50% (+15% healing, +9% critical). Greater Heal generates even more hps at better hpm, but the Inspiration up-time drops to around 87%.
Our Resto Shaman using Healing Wave with triple-stacked Healing Way will generate 4081 hps @ 6.71 hpm with 93% Ancestral Healing up-time. Lesser Healing Wave drops the hps/hpm preciptiously, but raises the up-time to 99%.
Of course, if we have 2 Holy Priests doing direct heals, the Inspiration up-time is over 99%.
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As talents stand, Shaman healers retain their role as the king of raid-healing,
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Don't be too sure about that. Flourish may well render Chain Heal useless.
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and if they decide to spec and gear out properly they become monstrously powerful single-target healers that generate a ton of splash heals.
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Take a look at the numbers I posted above. Now think about the fact that a Holy Priest's Greater Heal with the listed stats generates about 5300 hps @ 9.5 hpm. So Healing Wave has 33% less throughput and is 40% less mana efficient than the comparable Priest heal - even without counting the overheal and low-health healing benefits Holy Priests enjoy. If we speculate that 10% of heals are overheal and 10% are low-health heals, then the gap grows to around 35% more throughput and 45% better mana efficiency.