I think that's the biggest problem with most healers, being a 2 year veteran myself. Just like DPS, anyone can spam flash of light and keep their tank alive, but the awareness is what wipes a raid at high end content. Awareness is near impossible to teach/beat into someone, so sometimes you're just out of luck with a raider and you have to find someone to replace said bus bumper-eater.

I don't believe awareness is impossible to teach - fights like Sartura, Twin Emps and C'Thun really helped to install a sense of awareness in at least some of our raiders, though I do agree that some people are just naturally better at it than others. While some raiders may never have the level of awareness that others have, they can be taught, often through repeated trial and error, a level of functional awareness that should hopefully suffice. That being said, on fights like Faerlina, where an integral component of the raid rests on the shoulders of one person(in this case, the MC'ing priest), you'd definitely want to choose someone who shows a natural inclination to awareness, rather than someone who learned it slowly and painfully through repeated Twin Emps blizzard deaths.

Lack of spatial awareness is not just a healer issue. I believe that the WoW community as a whole lacks platforming skills.

Possibly true, but as someone who did have to hone my spatial awareness on Satura, (and I beat Ninja Gaiden, so I have at least some basic platforming ability) I think healers have a worse time of it than most, primarily because of UI issues.

Where's a DPSer looking? The mobs. Where's a tank looking? The mobs. Where's a healer looking? Health bars. And in most UIs, the health bars are piled up along edges and corners.

Getting a small raid frame like Grid and putting it somewhere central can do wonders for a healer's awareness.

I've noticed this problem much more significant in ranged magic dps and healers (hunters seem to be fine)... you look at fights from MC, you see ranged and healers moving... almost never. You look at fights from BWL, you see ranged and healers moving... sometimes. When you get to AQ and beyond, you start seeing more movement, but the fact remains that your typical fight has little or no movement for healers or ranged. Rogues who have rerolled mages tend to live much longer and be able to avoid AoEs and be more spatially aware than people who have been mages since the game launched.

Not to detract, but after looking over all the mods mentioned in first two pages, and my intent to move from hunter to Blood Elf Priest. I have to ask if any of the detox/decurse mods still work. What can I expect from them and are they still useful as before?

I use sRaidFrames right now and it is almost good enough to tell me who is getting incoming heals, who has debuffs I can dispell, etc..

BTW do you have direct link to Grid? I am not sure one I've found was what I was looking for.

Thanks.

This should probably go to the UI forums, but you can get Grid at www.wowace.com

This is what Grid looks like (standard, you can make it look very different): each person is represented by a square. Information pictured on a square is fully customizable, usual set up is class color coded name on black background in the middle (first 4 letters). The black background is actually inverted healthbar - it fills up as the person looses more and more health. The name text is usually switched for hp deficit number once the person lost certain % of hp (you cet up all the thresholds etc). You can set up indicators at the corners of the square and customize what the indicators are responsible for (there are addons on top of Grid that add indicators to the sides of the square as well). You can set up these indicators to show a ton of stuff - any HoTs, any debuffs you can cleanse, wether they have agro of a mob, their pvp flag etc. You can mark debuffs by group or look for a specific debuff. You can set up an indicator to watch for a specific debuff like "Web Wrap" was very useful for identifying people on the wall at Maexxna.

There's pics and its own forums at wowace.com as well. Setting up Grid the way you want it is a daunting task and would take you a couple of hours in itself.