I'm a healing priest. It's what I like doing, and though I hate to toot my own horn, I'm pretty darn good at it.

I've been in two raids. The first was a new made thing, and I somehow ended up in charge through a mess of circumstances. We had maybe 4-5 priests a night (possibly one shadow), maybe two druids (one balance), and a handful of DPSadins. Healing was tough. We strategized it, if it wasn't a boss and even on some bosses, I was solo healing the main tank.

I liked it, to be honest, and we did very well with it. We had good people, and great healers.

The one I'm in now takes at least fifteen if they possibly can, and will accept up to 18, maybe 20. Healers. 8-9 holy priests, 4-5 druids, 6-7 paladins, all of them healers, and most of them there every raid.

I don't do much, anymore. I tried doing what I used to -- what I liked. Anticipating damage, using GHeal and letting the tank take some damage, using renew a lot. It didn't work out so good. If anyone took even 200 damage, there is an imediate heal spam. HoTs are just overheal, even if not currently in combat. I couldn't get a heal in edgewise, and GHeal was entirely out of the question.

I have been relegated to emergency monitor spam healing, just like everyone else. It's killing me, slowly.

So here's the question.

Is this normal in raids? I mean, you hear about heal-botting all the time, but I had always sort of assumed that was mostly facetious. Should I just switch to my mage or warlock, or just deal with it, or something else?

What the priesting like in your raid? How do you deal with it?

We normallty run about 15 healers, approximately 5 priests,druids,pallies. We don't encourage crosshealing and frown upon emergency monitor spam. Healers are assigned to groups for a reason - To keep that group alive. The only real cross healing that should be happening is on the MT's and OT's.

So to answe your question: No that isn't normal

Up to 20 healers is unusual in 40-man raiding. 14-16 is more common, some guilds run even less.

More healing above what you 'need' to do the fight isn't contributing that much relative to the value of having more DPS. Healing keeps your side up, DPS brings the other side down.

That said, sounds like you a relatively new to raiding and I'll guess you are still gearing up. In multi-healer situations (any raid really), what kills tanks is sudden damage, and the basic idea is that between each attack from the mob, you try to heal tanks back to full. That way when you face a mob that can do special attack + normal attack/crushing blow combos that hit for 8-9k within a second, your tank survives because he was at maximum health to start with.

Regarding priest spells, when you first start out on MC and bluish gear, Flash Heal does a good job. As you add more +healing, spells like Rank2 Heal become a mainstay as well. More +healing changes the efficiencies, and will mean you can select the right spell for the situation.

What are you raiding? While you can get away with running MC and BWL with large numbers of healers not doing much, it's pretty hard to use that sort of healing in the more dynamic fights of AQ40 and Naxx.

It sounds like you have a good grasp on the fundementals of raid healing. The raid on the other hand doesn't seem so well set up. Tell your leaders to get less healers in the raid, it should make your clear times a lot better, or if that isn't a possibility then consider another guild or getting some people to respec as hybrids.

Most of the healers I talk to consider it much more involved and interesting than the mindless mashing of buttons that most dps classes do.

I have mostly tier 2, six pieces of what I would consider my best gear thus far in game. We down the two easy Naxx Bosses, working on C'Thun.

I take an alt to MC. Most of us do.

I think the biggest problem isn't too many healers, it's a complete lack of organization. They do a sorta okay job distributing at the begining, but tank groups always have three healers in them -- priest pally and druid, and sometimes other groups won't have any at all, they don't really rearrange groups after bosses, so you'll have two priests in one group and nary a paladin to be found in 5-8.

If all I did was heal my own group I'd cast a renew once in a while just to pretend the druid and paladin needed my help, and stand there while every rogue in the raid died a horrible nasty death. That doesn't sound any more fun than playing whack a mole.

I have the exact same problem and it all started when someone decided to make a swstats site and some priests became like the rogues at the core hound packs 1.5 years ago but for an entire raid. oh, and we've cleared aq and killed 8 bosses in nax so far. It's driving me nuts aswell. We still use healer assignment for bosses and stuff but I get the feeling that instead of watching their asigned tank a few of them are more interested in spamming warlocks which is yea, pretty lame. didn't see this one comming.

EM + chain heal (the shaman spell) is awesome for trash clearing

We usually don't assign healers for trash, we do for most bosses. The problem with trash clearing is that the number of tanks you need varies from pull to pull. Also for horde if you want to maximise your dps you want mellees all stacked in shaman groups. We have mellee groups set up as rogue rogue rogue warrior shaman usually, and sometimes that warrior needs to tank, so he needs people from outside his group looking after him at those times. It's too complicated to be continually assigning healers to tanks based on whether they are tanking or not depending on the pull.

DPS.

Pretty much the same with our groups. Healers are responsible for their own groups on trash, and assigned roles (and if EM duty is a delegated job if need be) based on the encounter. This'll promote less overheals and trash clears can go faster with less drinking/deaths.

I can understand the alliance folk saying 'healers heal their own groups', but what do the horde amongst us do? We generally run, as someone mentioned earlier, with groups optimised around shaman, so the MT group will have 2-3 tanks, a warlock, and a shaman. Melee groups are some combination of rogue / war / hunter / shaman, then casters are usually grouped together. So how do you organise healing in this situation - assign groups to keep alive even though the healer is in a different one?

I don't quite understand why you would ever want to put 2 tanks together in the same group for trash. We spread the tanks out, generally in groups with 2 healers. It works a lot easier than any cross-healing mechanisms.

For bosses, that's a totally different story. If you have multiple tanks in an MT group, then you have clearly assigned MT healers for one or both depending on how the mob works. In this case the "heal your own group" is only going to work for the ppl assigned to that, and you have another 5-7 ppl on MT heal or whatever other stuff is going on.