I have two sets of main action bars that I use. The first is my "normal" one, with some heals and my damage spells. My second bar is my healbot bar, with a wide selection of heals and no nukes...two ranks of GH (1 and 5), two ranks of Heal (2 and 4), two ranks of Flash Heal (3 and 7), as well as max rank Renew and PoH (obviously PW:S, Fade, and Psychic Scream are on there as well, on both bars). This setup allows me to choose my heals efficiently, in an attempt to perfectly match the healing to incoming damage. I'll use the healbot bar for most boss fights, and stick to the normal bar on trash and some boss fights (like C'Thun).

Having the tools laid out in front of you in all their variety will help you maximize your ability to heal.

I'm shadow the majority of the time too. In whatever you choose to do- do it well. One of our priests hit me up on a clear to Maexx and complained that one of our other priests was in shadow form and full dps gear and was blasting away on trash. She felt this wasn't fair because he wasn't asked to dps on the trash and had just made that decision on his own based on the required healing. She felt that the healer specced folks were being forced into healing while he was "having all the fun".

I briefly flipped through the meters and replied to her that, since he was out dpsing 10 of our "pure" dpsers and out healing 3 of our healers through VE- that he was MORE than welcome to manage his contribution to the pull in any way he felt helped the raid. She, too, was welcome to dps through the clear if she felt that she had the gear and/or spec necessary to keep up at a similar level as the other dps classes and felt that healing was being taken care of. About half of our healrs have effective dps gear, and about half refuse to dirty thier hands with it. She refused to grab any serious dps gear or talents- and so generally wasn't in a position to be asked to dps.

I don't care what you do on trash as long as you do it well, and I'm a big fan of off specs in raiding so that you can customize each pull with the necessary healers and dpsers. That said, if there are still too many healers along- by all means smite. But don't stand there doing nothing, trying to effectivly time giant heals on cloth and watching cartoons because someone else is doing your job for you. there are a lot of people out there who will sit on 75% or more mana because they're assigned to healing and they're either not willing to get thier hands dirty and compete for the healing there is- or they're not willing to do something else more productive for that pull.

The effective healing meter alone does not tell the story. A smart leader will use the information from effective, raw, and over healing as well as dps charts and individual summaries to make suggestions or tweeks in healing assignments. They'll also know when contributions from one affect the other and will accept someone who does so so on both as long as they're putting effort into it.

There is nothing as fustrating as seeing someone in 16th place of 16 healers, and 30th place on the dps charts and to go to thier personal summary for an hour long clear and see that they cast a grand total of 16 healing touches, 22 rejuvenations, and hit a mob with thier staff once. What the hell are they DOING? Why are we bringing them along? Blegh.

Meters are a tool, but a useful one in the hands of someone who knows how to use them. If all you're intending on doing is healing- you'd better back that up with numbers and heal like you mean it.

Wanted to thank everyone for their input here. We worked a lot on our healing style and assignments and managed to bring Emps down tonight after 31 total attempts (13 last week and 18 tonight.) :blink: I think the key for us was making sure people were on the ball and just trying to be conscious of how they were healing, with what spells, and paying much more proactive attention to timing. Once we nailed that down and got rid of all the other stupid mistakes, (Hello, Multishot!) the fight felt very smooth.

Now for the hojillion trash pulls so we can turn in Regalia before the server reset! :unsure:

Heal rank 2's efficiency scales the best with gear at the moment, anything lower than that recieves greatly reduced bonus from +heal. All 2.5 second heals scale equally in power with gear. Renew scales the best of any heal, but it is of course periodic. Flash heal scales the worst in both efficiency and power. Given these facts, I generally make the following spell choices (with +1k healing, no 8/8 trans):

For spot healing, renew >>>>* unless someone is in the red, in which shield or flash as necessary.

For main tank/offtank healing, I pick whichever heal is equal to the average hit that the tank recieves (5 second rule manipulation.) After every heal I let land, I cast renew (more 5 second rule manip.)

If the boss is easy and I'm lazy, I just equip darkmoon:blue and spam Heal rank 2 (also works great for keeping inspiration up)

Of course, these rules can go out the window if it will save a death.

When we are starting to learn new bosses, I just order our healer to heal as much as possible. Once you live trought the first few minutes of the fight and wipe first time due to healers being OOM, it's time to worry about it, but until you can't keep the fight going for that long, there is just no point in saving mana.

So, spend as much mana as possible to buy yourself as much time as possible to learn to control the fight. Once you are in control, it's time to start worrying about mana. If you can't control the fight, it's no use in having full manabars anyway.

We used this strategy effectively on Twins. (2nd kill yesterday) We spend only 2 evenings on them and got the kill on 3rd day, so I'd say that it was pretty quick, considering that it's the first "hard" fight in game.