This is spoken by someone who has never played a healer. People overheal because a lot of times you do not have the option of healing for perfect efficiency. Take Magtheridon for example, he can cleave for 10k and melees for 6k. I cannot afford to cancel a heal or downrank a heal hoping the tank will take a round that won't kill him 90% of the time, because the 10% it does kill him wipes the raid.

There are a few fights where you can have low healing %, but most of the time you simply cannot drop below 20 or 30% without significantly increasing the likelyhood of a tank death. Implying that since healers have 20 or 30% overheal you can afford to cut healing by 20%, or you can optimize healing more is incredibly naive.

The class you play also matters from what I understand. If you're a paladin isn't there less of a penalty for overhealing with illumination and a high crit rate? Our paladins were consistently the highest on overheal %, but they also had remarkably high effective healing amounts (not percentages, absolute values).

Totally agree on the first statement, thats just a waste of a trinket/potion.

For fury wars and enh shamans +12agi will be the enchantment of choice for the best dps cloak they have, i bet. Fights without aggro problems are usually a dps race and the maximum dps is very much needed.
Good raiders would have their 2nd cloak enchanted with -2% threat and actually switch the gear, but i doubt alot are doing that (or have a decent 2nd cloak yet).
The same should apply for warriors, 2nd gloves with +threat could help some instead of the armor patch/agi enchant they usually use. I doubt it makes much of a difference for druids as agi still provides a nice crit rate for them. Alot of fights with aggro issues are not really the encounters where you have massive survivability problems.

Correct. Paladin healing basically scaled stupidly well with crit rate, becaue crits made the heal free. Eventually you could reach a point where with consumables/shadowpriest you could spam max-rank holy lights all day every day and never run out of mana ... and if you're spamming max-ranks, even if you have horrendous overhealing you're going to put up significant numbers on effective healing done as well.

(We still do rock healing meters on live, but that's being reined in in 2.1, instead of crits being free they'll be 60% refunded, basically whacks 40% of the value off spellcrit ... and 40% off the value of the bottom half of the holy tree for paladins, but that's a different rant.)

I might be strange here but this does sound odd to me he needs to do so, i dont use KTM so cant tell threat values, but i wonder about 1 thing, does your lock not have salvation or does he forget to soulshatter?

Void reaver is a glorified broodlord. You can tank him longer than the enrage timer for guaranteed no-aggro loss essentially. But the key is in the number of tanks you use, when you soul shatter, and BoS (obviously).

I made a post about how this stuff works at conquest a couple years ago... and its important to understand for void reaver. The way we do void reaver he doesn't move an inch the entire fight... he doesn't even consider moving.
If we were to say, remove a warrior, he'd be all over the room - and tactics like the soulstone trick (again, seen first on broodlord!), would be most useful. Most people don't consider threat appropriately when kb's are in play - and silly stuff like, "I do more threat than so and so," actually get considered in strategy, when they mean almost nothing with the dynamics of multi tank situations.

Heroic strike more often is a bad thing ?!

As for the OT overheal stuff, its hard to heal reactively anymore and as a paladin cancelling a flash of light is near impossible unless you cancel it as soon as you've cast it which kinda negates starting casting it - it also costs no mana. As for holy light, if your healing someone who has taken 4.5 damage and you crit (22%+ of the time) you will overheal 30%+ .. overheal really isnt a problem unless ofcourse said healer is oom.

I'd have to disagree with the slow weapon comment. Snap aggro and subsequent hits are critical - and HS is matched to weapon speed last I checked. Devastate is handy, but it never decides a fight like HS/SSlam does. I can pump 1k-1.2k threat per second rather easily, and I can't say devastate is a big part of my rotations. It just isn't a big part of max rotations. You need that swing ready to go - and an extra swing before the boss goes and eats the mage often does decide things. Cause you almost always get 2 with a 1.6'er.

I tanked in BWL for a long, long time with that 2.6 delay mace... and going to the sword from faerlina (1.6) was night and day in terms of response time (not just the actual threat involved in the base dps). I guess I can't describe it in words so much, as a feel of the weapon.

This thread wasnt about snap aggro afaik, but sustained high TPS. If you can easily do 1.1-1.2kTPS then i really need to L2P though, so i cant comment on that. Heroic strike always was, and always will be a poor ability when it comes to threat/ragecost. Its nice when you want to dump rage, but should never ever take priority over shield slam / devastate / revenge, and since you cant HS every swing in almost all the fights in the game the argument about faster weapons being superior due to more HS / s is not valid, the one thing that faster weapons have over slow though is that the rage you lose on your HS is less due to individual hits granting less rage(heroic strike doesnt only cost the tooltip ragecost, but also you lose out on the rage that the white hit would actually granted you on the subsequent hit).

Unless you're rage starved, there's no reason to worry about efficiency. TPS is all about dumping as much rage as you can into a mob as fast as you can. If you're fighting to stay below 50 rage in a fight, efficiency doesn't matter.

A faster weapon has a significant impact on your ability to dump rage and generate more threat over time (it's 208 extra damage before armor and 193 bonus threat - that's a lot). I doubt you'll get more than that out of 2 devastates in 6 seconds. We're still limited by 4 GCDs in a 6 second window and 2 cooldowns on our bigger threat generation abilities. You do not want to be limited by slow swing speed too.

I think you were misunderstanding me. I have indeed played a healer through mc/bwl/aq/naxx/etc etc. A paladin/priest/druid.

I know and completely and wholeheartedly agree that overhealing is perfectly fine and good for main tank healing. There is no wiggle room! I was talking about RAID overhealing. Sorry if I was not clear.

Take for example morogrim's earthquake. The thing that can kill people is EQ followed by watery tomb, or EQ followed by murlocks hitting people. But look at this:

If you top off every low hp (7000-9000) person, and rejuv/renew everyone else, even if someone gets watery tombed the WT healers will have plenty of time to top them off in the 3s it takes to activate.

Instead, this often happens:

EQ hits you for 6000
You gain rejuvination
XX's chain heal heals you for 720
XX's greater heal heals you for 4700
XX's flash of light heals you for 580 (1000)
XX's holy touch heals you for 0(4000)
...
^^ The above overheal is the one I was talking about that could be more efficiently managed, not tank overhealing.

Threat reducing abilities reduce the threat removed by those items as well so its a straight up ~900 damage more you can deal.

This is just not true. HS hits almost every single swing on boss fights. There was a post earlier by Hand on page 1 that describes tanking differences in rather precise detail. TPS is all about appropriate rotations and synergy.