There are two healing hurdles in any boss fight:

-1) Do the healers have the raw hps to keep up with the incoming damage to the raid? (aka "burst")
-2) Can the healers sustain that hps for the total length of the fight? (aka "endurance")

More raid dps helps healer endurance by shortening the fight, but you need better tank mitigation if you want help with burst healing issues.

Once you are over a healing hurdle, you are over it. A little extra margin to help with "oh shit" moments (and player mistakes) is useful from a practical point of view, but otherwise an additional 100% healing on a boss doesn't help you. It just bores the healers to death because it's so easy for them.

An extra 100% dps, on the other hand, means a fight that takes half as long. That means less time farming content you already know how to beat and more time learning content that you don't. (Not to mention that a shorter fight means less opportunity for everyone to make game play mistakes that wipe the raid.)

If you have healer endurance problems, killing the boss more quickly does, in fact, help. It also has a lot of other benefits besides helping healer endurance, and that's why the shadow priests don't normally go into the healing groups.

The best example of this that I can recall was our guilds' first Naj'entus kill. We had placed both shadow priests into healer groups that night because the fight was allegedly "one of the most healing intensive fights in Black Temple." What ended up happening? Most of the mages who didn't get a shadow priest (we had 4 mages I believe) did around 600-700 DPS (stamina gear didn't help either). In fact, I was the only mage to get a shadow priest during those attempts and I performed way above the others. The healers insisted on keeping the shadow priests, they claimed to be running oom, even with the shadow priests.

We nearly hit the enrage timer and Naj'entus still had a large chunk of health left (20-30% if I recall correctly).

The next day, after typing up a very large post about why the mages should get a shadow priest, the officers decided to give the mages a shot with a shadow priest. We two shot him, healers got 1 shadow priest and the mages got the other. We came nowhere near the enrage timer and all the mages did at least above 1000 DPS.

The idea that more dps = less healing needed seems to be true. Improving raid DPS is almost always worth it whenever possible.

That largely depends on what the fight is about. Most WoW fights are extremly focused on the dps aspect, and don't really have a control element - so it makes a lot more sense to pack the dps and slack on as much healing as possible. There are very few fights though where once you get everything stable and under control, then dps is hardly meaningful and you should just go slow and steady making sure to not screw anything up.

For the record, we went ahead and killed Kael for the first time last night, we had two shadowpriest in the raid, one was with 4 mages, the other was with 3 warlocks + 1 resto shaman.

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Here are the DM's of the kill. Mikofilus was wearing 150 FR or so and tanking the Astromancer.

This was the night I referenced in my earlier post. If i remember correctly, the mages were so desperate for doing any sort of dps, they were wanding. Most of our mages are arcane, and are pretty much hinged on having us in their group. What I also found for that fight, is that as a spriest, I could help my caster groups avoid getting killed by bursts, by keeping VE up the entire fight, and avoiding SW:Deaths (unless shielded). The extra MB burst healing, or potential crit from the burst heal is just an incredible asset to the raid. The biggest problem for this fight though seemed to be our poor strat, and our weak healing. I'm not sure if we can attribute the kill to either the PoH healing strat, or the fact we had like 3 more dps classes doing nearly twice their damage the night before. What it boiled down to was the fact that as we were (with 2 healing spriest group), we could not meet the dps threshold necessary for the fight.

We were trying on morogrim today. I was the only shadowpriest in the raid group at this time. We killed him two times before so I wouldnt really say we were still learning the fight. I was packed into a group with 3 paladins and a resto shaman. Of course I was asking why? The paladins with 11k mana each of them, were claiming they needed my regen because they do most of the heavy healing when the murlocs come. This fight doesnt even last as long as magtheridon and the paladins dont have any mana problems there either. Paladins only benefit from spiritual attunement if I heal them with Vampiric Embrace so I really didnt see why I had too be in their group for regen when the mages and warlocks needed me alot more.

I gave them the same argument as some of the people above said. Dps wins fights = less healing required and I really agree with that statement only my raid leader doesnt seem too think so.

What can I do too persuade him too put me in a damagedealer group next time? He is so focused on a shadowpriest only being good for mana regeneration for healers.

On Morogrim, you absolutely must be with the mages. The mana they expend during each AoE round is much greater than what the Paladins spend, and the Paladins get mana back from crits. Just run some simple numbers and you'll see that Mages need the mana regen far more. Even with a shadow priest, mages are generally strapped on mana. The sooner you kill the murlocs, the less overall healing the Paladins need to do. Hopefully the mana comparison numbers will convince him.

See here is a little nugget of information that will help a lot of you to slap your officers/healers around a tad. I began silently registering/logging "Gains" in assessment/WWS for our raids with 1 SP where our healers/officers demanded the SP go to healers and then saw how many manapots they popped compared to mages. Low and behold most didn't talk back when I showed parses of priests not popping a single mana-pot and paladins with their crit-heal NEVER needing any at all. They still don't always listen to it, saying a shamans totem is as good sometimes which it never is (aka 12k mana compared to 3k mana). But it did help tremendously in slapping them around a bit.

We have two mages who use potions, the rest never ever end up using them and claim they never need too, which is annoying as hell since recently we have been raiding only with one shadowpriest.

On all SSC/TK fights I've done done well, the mages didn't need to pot (except maybe morogrim*), but if you take away their shadow priest even potting won't cut it. Spamming pots is about 1/2 the mp5 of a reasonable shadow priest.

*On morogrim we have warlocks spam seeds as the murlocs run to the paladin, mages nova was they get to him and after the first seed pops they start IAEing. Whenever a frost nova breaks the next mage in the rotation recasts it right away. Blastwaves (and DB although not as useful for that strategy as by that time the mobs are too spread out) are saved for after all frost novas are used up. With this strat even on morogrim you don't need *too* much potting (although it still really depends on the raid's DPS) - with a shadow priest I was getting by with like 2-3 major/small combat mana pots. However without a shadow priest that fight would've been a complete disaster, and with other stats where mages get to do more AOE it probably just gets that much worse. And we even make the damn pallies keep JoW up on that fight 100% of the time.