Anything to bring to a raid as in? If you mean utility, then I have to disagree, you bring the most utility, of any healing class...As said before, just their blessings (Discluding aura and cleanses ect) will see to that.

Buffs aren't utility. They're raid-wise power enhancers, yes, but it's no substitute for having a more difficult game-time decision than "big heal" or "little heal". Even with this change, in terms of power a paladin at the very least the equal of any other healer in a raid, but in a 5 man there's really no substitute for a group-ish heal on an AE boss, even if you can only blow it once or it only hits 3 people at a time. That's utility, not a 15 minute buff.

Ironically, raiding erases much of that flexibility by focusing the damage in a single place.

Without factoring in illumination, on a target with BoL, HL is the single most efficient single target heal unless you are comparing it to healing wave with a full stack of healing way and over 2k healing.

With illumination factored in, no heal is even close to approaching it for mana efficiency.

Continueing with the patch notes, here's another warrior dps nerf!

I wonder how long they will keep reducing the coefficients of our dps; as they will always have to. Rage doesnt seem to be 'normalized' at all, it's still a linear function of damage dealt, just a bit flatter. 5% cut from flurry will just make the curvature smaller, but the big picture doesnt change a lot.

also, those patch notes are most likely fake, why are people panicking so much about them?

The problem is that the usefulness of most group heals is much less than it would seem. Prayer of Healing hits everyone in the group for like what...1.7k or so? With a three second cast. So in that time you can pop off two Flash of Lights or 1.5 Holy Lights for much greater mana efficiency. The only time Prayer of Healing wins is if 3-5 people in your group need that entire heal, and even then spamming FoL is almost as good. Flash of Light and Holy Light combined with Illumination and high crit rates are just so damned good that they outdo nearly everything else in nearly all situations. Paladins don't *need* other heals because the two they have blow everything else out of the water.

Huh? How did you get this "fact"? I just compared with a paladin in my guild, same amount of +heal roughly, he does about the same as my gheal for 140 more mana (240 more if I get my 2pc t5 and it tops the tank off)? And if PoM bounces back to the tank even once, it completely destroys both of those, if it never bounces, it's still nearly as efficient and takes 0 human reaction time/etc.

2k on PoH, takes 1k mana... You can do ~5 flash of lights for a little less mana, probably 1 of which will crit (between 1 and 2 avg). So you spend over 2x as long, for a little mana efficiency? Now let's not forget that any fight where I may PoH now and then, I will inner focus it, so I heal 10k HP for 0 mana. Oh, and if it's constant AoE dmg (Sapphiron) downranked renew -still- beats both

Bear in mind there may be broader mechanics changes that make this necessary. If they made changes that boost all melee DPS across the board, then maybe in that new environment warriors really did need a tweak or two. Wait and see the whole picture.

Part of the problem with that is it requires BoL which probably means giving up Kings in a 5-man, which can be the difference between insta-gib and not on some fights. Theoretical efficiency aside, a bad run of non-crits and you'll blow through your mana faster than any other healer. BoL is a flat amount applied after the rest of the modifiers, which means you can downrank Flash and still receive full modifier on it. I haven't run the exact numbers, but I'm pretty sure there's a point at which Flash is still more efficient. Anyway, that's a theorycrafting thread and this isn't.

The "fake" patch notes named the 4 Darkmoon cards exactly and also nailed some specific changes to SSC that have been confirmed by Blizzard. Chances are pretty good they're at least mostly legitimate.

But then again you can be hit while healing. As a priest my biggest problem is actually survivability on trashmobs. If I have to heal for 8k after 3 secs in a fight, I have to do this and will get the mob on me and instantly die, granted I have fade but on multipack trash without much CC it isn't going to save my ass. But that's 5 man content, in raidcontent a paladin brings just as much utility as a priest imo.
As a priest I use renew, greater heal and pom in raids and flash heal in very few encounters.
I might not be objective but I do think priests might need some buffs, mainly some changes in the holy tree like a decent working circle of healing some alternative for soulwell and maybe some extra mana efficiency or "emergency" talents. And ofcourse there's the horrible itemization which will hopefully be fixed in 2.1.

I'm well aware, but at the serious end-game raiding level (and by that I mean, "Tailored" level), my gheal is more effiecient than any paladin's holy light. And we don't even bring enough paladins to always have BoL on our entire raid.

Once I have 2pc t5, I think even with illumination taken into effect, I will be more efficient with gheal, than paladins will be with holy light. It's already 140 mana cheaper than max rank holy light.