The problem with holy priests isn't necessarily bad healing, but support and utility. They can heal well: between PWS, PoM, and their group heal they certainly can output the hps necessary to warrant their raid spot. For utility they have fort, res, and sometimes spirit. Guess what shadow priests have? Fort, res, sometimes spirit. Oh and great group mana regeneration. Holy priests don't bring enough beyond just healing at the moment. Where shadow get their group health/mana regeneration talents, holy gets lightwell and a targetted group heal - neither of which are very highly desired.

I'd like to take a crack at this, as I have a Priest in Tier 3, and now a Paladin in Tier 4.

Holy Paladins have a large repetoire of tools to use on raids. Such as JoLight, JoWisdom, BoWisdom, BoLight, BoMight, BoKings, BoSalv, HoJ for certain trash mobs, taunt for limited situations (as a holy paladin anyways), Cleanse, DS, BoP, Auras (Conc being the best, along with Devo for MT group) and limited burst DPS past 20%. However none of these stack with exception to HoJ/HoWrath and anything beyond 3 paladins in a raid is nearly unnoticed outside of the additional healing which in most situations isn't necessary past 6 or 7 healers at most. Alot of these tools are very specialized, and outside of the gimmick fights not much else is used.

Granted Holy Paladins have alot more tools but most are situational at best, and many serve no real purpose in ideal raid conditions. (I taunt to give our tanks anuerysms. And occasionally to save someone's pixelated life.)

Holy/Disc Priests however stack very well outside of the obvious PW:F/Divine Spirit/Shadow Prot - Mana Burn, Renew, PoH (1 per group plz?), CoH, PoMending, Inspiration procs, Light Wells, Psychic Scream (limited situations), Mind Soothe (limited situations), Dispel (offensive and defensive) and these tools with exception to Mana Burn, Psychic Scream and Mind Soothe are ideal for almost all raid situations you encounter.

I really feel that in overall relative "power" as a Holy Priest I had more utility to offer to a raid in regards to healing - which is why I am there. Sure there are those rare situations where a taunt or BOP saves someone, or for some ungodly reason I need to BoFreedom the tank, but those feel few and far between.

The power gap is greatly increased when you arbitrarily assign a Holy Priest to a single target - as this isn't the Holy Priests strength. Sure they can do the job, and do it damn well, but, a Paladin can and will outperform a Holy Priest on single target healing as that is our niche - whereas a Holy Priest will perform better in all situations outside of single target healing. Basic Raid Healing, Multiple target heals, Full Group heals, etc. Basically shoring up the loose ends of the raid healing wise.

I do however think Priests need a tiny buff, but thats easy stuff - all Blizzard would have to do is change the logic on CoHealing and make it more like Chain Heal in that it heals the 5 people lowest on health in the raid nearest to the target area/person within a given area. Past that, I really feel that healers are almost perfectly balanced now, small Priest buffs withstanding, much better than they ever have been.

The synergy between healing classes is by far the best it ever has been, and now I really do feel it when our Tree Druid doesn't log on, or when our Resto Shaman logs early. In Vanilla WoW I didn't even notice most of the time.

I can't believe you guys are still dealing with that crap

I'm not going to argue with you over the utility provided by a holy priest vs the PvE utility provided by Paladins.

If you don't understand the benefits of Blessings, Judgments, Auras, Cleanse and Divine Intervention in a PvE raid environment...there would be no point discussing it with you.

I am going to say currently, a paladin provides equal healing and more utility to a raid. In fact, a raid benefits having more then one paladin but an entire raid can get by with 1 Holy/Disc Priest and the rest are Shadow. That is all I am going to say about that.

Lightwell? I can't think of a time any of our priests even touched that horrible talent.

Illumination is the only healing talent that scales the mana cost of your spells, based on gear..Its increadible, and it is probably "too strong" for one 5 point talent. That said, if it does go to 50%, I believe paladins will need a regen talent lower in the tree and a small boost in the top of the holy tree, but, really, no one here can say that the talent, with current itemization in mind, isn't just crazy. The power of that talent needs to be spread around the tree, though, and other healers need to be boosted, slightly, all in all, the crux is thought that too much power was contained in just illumination.

As for utility? We have done raids, easily, with one holy/disc priest...Raids with one paladin, are exceptionally harder, though.

Devo aura, BoW, JoW and Salv are all so huge its rediculous, there is no other support class that is going to touch those abilities in their general utility, none..You could strip away every other ability and BoW/Salv+Healing would be enough to bring two paladins :P. This, however, doesn't include the plethora of other things the class can do, its just an awsome utility class, in those terms, I am sorry, a priest has got nothing on it, no healer does, really.

The possibility that the heaped hunter changes might be real is intriguing.

It would be, if it ever sent me to that graveyard when I died inside a CFR instance. Currently the only times I've been sent there are when I died near the meeting stone.

A shadow priest with spirit means they don't have VT, doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

As for holy priests, I think we are still perhaps the best raid healer around. That being said, diversity in healers is amazing. For some fights, chain heal is almost a must-have. For other fights, Prayer of Mending, a high HPS output, and PWS are far more useful. And of course, blessings are always wanted as well. I think paladin mana regen and efficiency is vastly overrated. So many fights have enrage timers, whether hard coded or artificial, you only need mana to last that long. Maintaining your mana as a priest just takes slightly more effort and thought than as a paladin. Things like using the click on bangle right after a clearcast procs, then using an inner focus after that for 2 gheals...sitting outside of 5sr for perhaps as long as 30 seconds, getting well over 500mp5 during that time. Who needs mana back on crits? Add in a pot now and then, perhaps an innervate from a feral druid (which actually does more than my mana bar atm), and you're fine. And yea, things like PWS are invaluable. I can't even count how many times I saved someone's life pre-nerf Gruul by PWSing someone who looked too close on a shatter, then seeing them live with <1500 HP (my PWS is 1900ish atm?). It's also very useful in other encounters such as Tidewalker, Hydross, Lurker, Blind. And Prayer of Mending is just as good. Being able to use 2 instant casts to burst pre-emptive heals on someone for 4k every 10 seconds is unique to the priest class currently.

This doesn't even get into the uses for PoH (which is much more situational now with every raid having chain heal, but still very good at times), Circle of Healing (which while limited, actually does have its uses), and the higher HPS output that priests have over paladins. Also, once priests can sit in 2pc t5, mana regen will be even less of an issue.

The only issue I have with holy priests is the fact that we ignore our 11 and 31 pt holy talents entirely. It's not that we're underpowered, it's just that it would be neat if we actually took what I guess most people consider to be the "defining" talents of the tree. Spirit of Redemption is only good for the passive 5% spirit really, but at least it's worth the point. While I could be missing something, I think -most- classes will take most of their 11, 21, 31, 41 pt talents, even if for situational use.

Paladins basically can't run out of mana if they play correctly, and they can accomplish this with blues/Kara/t4 gear. All t5 and t6 can offer them right now is lots of +heal for bigger heals, since they don't really need longevity. That's a problem.

Looking at a WWS parse from Morogrim last night...

I was #2 on Effective Healing, with low overhealing. I regained 10.6k mana from 4 Super Mana pots, 5.8k mana from Mana Tide, 5.3k mana from BoW, 1.5k from Mana Spring, and 1.5k from my Warmth of Forgiveness. I had mana oil, mageblood, mp5 food, etc., on me. I was completely OOM and running on fumes for the last 5%.

A paladin with objectively worse gear than me was just behind me at #3 on Healing. He got back 20.3k mana from Illumination alone, not to mention another 4.6k from Spiritual Attunement being healed after Earthquakes/Graves.

I consider that excessive. Even paladins in my guild agree it's not unreasonable. A paladin in a shadow priest group (due to the Attunement synergy) will still have infinite mana anyway. With the proposed Inspiration change, this paladin still would've regained over 10k mana from Illumination, and had to use fewer pots/consumables to equal my mana pool.

If your spirit spawned there it would be great instead you spawn on the east side of the lake (I assume the horde GY is the west side of the lake). That GY only works for the 5 man instances.

Gurg please don't forget that we don't regenerate from spirit as we don't have these talents. That's regeneration you don't parse.

We also don't have anything else we can bring to the raid, we are right now the purest of all healer classes.
I agree the shadow priest stuff needs to be fixed, Overhealing should not trigger SA.

And I can definatly run out of mana if I am doing Gruul HS healing with only 1 other healer. If a Paladin is always at 90+ mana, he's not healing enough (expect shadow priest). Or you've brought too many healers.

I've always thought the effectiveness of Paladin direct healing was countered by its complete inflexibility. There aren't a lot of options for a paladin to deal with AE damage for example, but they're awesome at keeping a one target up and that's really about it. A big problem is that once you aren't spamming Flash any more due to HP/sec needs, your large heals will eat your mana bar in very short order even if you downrank since they're more inefficient, and making use of your other talents to mitigate that is a big deal right now. I'm concerned primarily because there are 5 other talents that indirectly feed off of Illumination in the Holy tree, and slashing its effectiveness has a chilling effect on the rest of the tree as well. If you take away a large chunk of the endurance that a paladin has there isn't a lot left in terms of healing that makes them desirable over another healing class, at which point they're relegated to average healers and buff bots or sub-par tanks. I don't think it'll cripple the class to the point of unplayability, but it's really going to hurt.