Yes, we actually try to raid always with 3 paladins, not because of healers but because of the DPS, and we do have salvation pretty much always. However, there simply is not real need for it: if you land a huge heal on a moment when there's either aggro reset or new adds, you will get aggro regardless of the talents/BoS. You just need to know these situations, and use heals with low to no threat first: PoM that gives aggro to the target and Binding Heal that has low threat (if you are full hp and heal with Binding Heal, your threat is is calculated from your target healed amount only and it's basicly 50% less threat than flash heal of same size with increased manacost ofc).

Getting aggro after the initial moments means there's something wrong with the tanking, and you should affect it with missdirections or tell the raid healers to help with tank healing a bit in the start of the encounter to lower your need for effective healing. However, I remember 1 pull when learning Illidari Council when our mage tank was yelling on VT that I will get aggro soon because my effective healing was generating too much aggro and the mage tank target had spell immunity shield most of the time. I was spamming max rank gh on paladin tank because the other MT healer was dead, but I would consider this as an extreme situation that will not happen too often (I did not get aggro even with pretty much my highest theorethical HPS).

Also, PW:S gives aggro on the moment you cast it (for the absorb of 50% of the size of the same size heal, this might be a bit wrong amount though but the point is same), so it's easy to cast before the pull or before a known aggro reset. The actual moment of absorbtion will not cause any threat.

Binding Heal has been extremely useful since the patch where it's manacost was reduced. No other healing class can put same HPS to their actual healing target than us while keeping themselves alive. For example before Mother was nerfed, a priest could usually just stand on the teleport spot and Binding Heal the other teleport targets. At Illidari Council everytime you take damage or are forced to move, Binding Heal should be your first heal (ofc cast PW:S or PoM first on yourself while moving from Blizzard/Flamestrike). At Illidan p2 I cast a Binding Heal to target tank simply every time I take a fireball, we have had paladins to die because they healed only their tank and counld not heal themselves at the same time. Fel Rage ot Bloodboil: use Binding Heal ofc.

Agreed. If the heal is going to land before you can cancel and recast, let it run its course. My thoughts are in reference to the the heal Priests choose to cast after the completed or canceled GH7 (above in bold). What I am referring to is the split second decision after a GH7 has either landed or reactively been canceled, many Priests go to another GH7 on big damage. My point references the times when MT healers have canceled GH7 (or other heals), and the MT takes upwards of 16K damage. In these emergency situations, where you have the choice to cast GH7 or FH9 what is the heal that most Priests go to? I've found, based entirely on personal experience, that it's best for the Priests to play the stabilizer in emergency situations as our Flash Heals (2700) are the strongest and fastest.

I do NOT believe Flash Heal is the answer for MT healing - nor should it be used for MT healing in majority. I believe it is the best option in emergency situations, however, and Priests should not be afraid to use it based on all our discussions about downranking and efficiency. I suppose my definition of stabilizer was not clear.

I agree with Kass re: Flash Heal. In particular, if you just used a GCD for something like a Renew or PoM on the MT, often queueing up a Flash is the best thing you can do next since waiting to cast a GHeal gives the tank 4 seconds (GCD + 2.5 sec casting time) of no direct healing from at least one healer, and you really can't guarantee anyone else will cover that gap (of course they should, but stuff happens). I often do this and end up cancelling the Flash anyway if it's unneeded and going right back to queueing GHeal, but it really does give that extra margin of safety. I also use it any time where I'm just worried about heal coverage on the tank, like right after the healers had to reposition themselves, or when aggro shifts from one tank to the next. I can't count the number of times that I've queued up a Flash "just in case" during one of the aforementioned sticky situations and saw the tank's health suddenly plummet, at which point I found myself just doing my best to stabilize him until someone else could get a big heal off. In those situations, if I'd tried to use GHeal, the tank almost certainly would have died.

Even so, Flash is generally under 10% of my total healing done over the course of a raid. But I do think that its usefulness is sometimes overlooked in all of the efficiency debates.

Haha. There's a huge argument going on right now in our guild forums about this. Our raid leader wants all the healers to have Salv on any new boss with aggro dumps or transitions (Leo being the most recent example for us), and many of the healers aren't happy about it. Normally we have 3 pallies so it isn't an issue, luckily.

IMO the only time to use a flash heal is when the target may not survive long enough to see the greater heal land. This doesn't really seem to happen all that much.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't greater heal have higher HP/S?

Yes, in the long term. But the healing from Flash arrives sooner. Sometimes that is a critical difference.

I've been such an ardent hater of Flash Heal since my days in MC as a LHW-spamming Shaman. I throw it in now and again, these days, in the aforementioned OH SHIT moments, but I really hate doing so.

Last night, I cancelled a GHeal and started casting a new one, and in that time period, our tank got gibbed. It was frustrating and I felt like it was my fault. If I had Flash Healed, maybe it would have saved her and we would have gone on to finish the fight. Flash Heal should never be our primary heal, but I agree that it is the best thing for emergency healing, unless you're taking damage as well..

If a tank takes consistent DPS and 1.5s won't be fast enough to heal him, PW:Sing him will just mean that after its GCD is up you will need to either shield again (which isn't possible, obviously) or let the tank die as he waits for the flash heal, as shield afaik absorbs less than a flash heal heals. So the only situation I can see shield being used is if you know the tank is going to die if he doesn't get healed in 1.5s but will either stop taking damage or get healed by someone else sometime before those 1.5s, but if someone else does land a heal is the tank really going to die? Possible but very unlikely. Of course this is very hard to really tell in an actual fight so I really don't see why you would use shield in any kind of "stand still and heal the MT" kind of situation. A situation where flash heal would save the tank but greater heal would get him killed I also see as not very likely to happen, at least not in a way you'll be able to predict and actually act based on it.

If I would've felt that frustrated I would've checked recount or the likes to see how the tank died and if it *really* would've saved him or if it was another issue. I've seen recount point at the problem quite a few times before, in a way I would've never seen if I didn't look at it. You can blame the whole world for maybe causing the tank's death, but often a simple look at recount (or better addon if one exists) points exactly what was the cause of the tank's death.
For example the boss could've parried and 2-hitted and crushed the tank with the hits being very close together to the point where flash healing wouldn't fit in between them - that you can blame the rogues for not being behind the boss or the sheer bad luck for the boss parrying the MT. On top of that even if flash heal could save your MT, you'd pretty much have to flash heal the whole fight as you can't really tell that "now is the time to use flash heal". Bottom line is look at why your tank really died and based on that tell if what you were doing was right or wrong.

Binding Heal is pretty amazing if you train yourself to use it. With all the reductions to its mana cost over the patches, it's quite efficient in terms of HPM provided both targets need the heal.

I honestly don't want to think about healing Vashj without using Binding Heal, because it simply trivializes most of the damage you will take during the fight.

If I have 3 people in my zone on a side on Vashj, I stick PoM on one of them, and Binding Heal the other if our side gets a Forked Lightning. 3 people healed up in 1.5s with minimal effort and solid efficiency. The combination of all the various Priest heals makes use extremely flexible, but you really have to train yourself to use the entire toolset.

I try to use Binding Heal any time that I personally have taken damage that needs to be healed. It's not hard to find another assigned target to heal, and the efficiency is very close to GH level, while also minimizing risk of people dying and saving another healer from healing you. It's simply more efficienct as the act of healing two people at the same time does save a cast for a healer somewhere, and thus buys at least 1.5s for someone in the raid.

PWS has its place, although I rarely use it myself. Sometimes it's really the only thing that will save someone from periodic damage, or to buy time while another healer goes at it. I find it very handy for periodic ticks, for instance there have been situations where a poison is ticking on someone (Vashj is another good example of this) and I know the next tick is coming very, very soon and they will not survive--PWS can often eat the tick, or save the person, then you have time until the next tick to fit in a Flash Heal (or Binding Heal) to start working on bringing them back up to full. It is highly situational.

Realistically, 90% of the heals I cast are GH2 or GH7... however, it's always good to know when to choose the other spells. Even though GH is generally a workhorse, Flash Heal, Binding Heal, and PWS are all very powerful tools when used correctly.

I'd say that Flash Heal and PWS have very diminished roles in TBC though. They simply don't heal for enough. Binding Heal and GH just have more throughput, which is usually what is required. Although they certainly have some applications, I don't find all that many situations where Flash Heal would actually be of much use.

As for aggro on pulls, teach your Priests (if you have multiple) to PoM chain. It helps a ton. Pre-cast PoM, re-apply PoM after the first one fades, have the 2nd Priest apply PoM after that one fades, etc... Both are safe to apply Renew after the 2nd PoM application (won't outheal the PoM aggro) and double stacked Renew + PoM chaining is typically more than enough to give the tank time to get control of the situation. Double-PoMing+Renew (which often leads to being PoM->PoM+Renew->GH2->PoM->GH7) is also a big hint to avoiding aggro in heroics. I've not had Silent Resolve in TBC at all, and never really noticed any aggro issues that would actually be solved by having it.

What helped me there was mapping it to Shift + same button that my flash heal is bound to. All of a sudden it was the same for the keys as it is for the mind (flash with a difference)

Yes, this is actually what I do also. Works very well for me.

I have a /focus setup that allows me to focus on the main tank or the mob in question (for ones that change tanks, ex. Void Reaver). I accomplish this by making a macro for each spell similar to this:

/cast [target=focus,help] Flash Heal; [target=focustarget,help] Flash Heal

It works great, however I've now dedicated 10 macros for this purpose. Add in a shackle macro, some hover macros for buffing/CoH, and your run of the mill things like single-mount-button macro and I'm nearly full of character specific macros.

Has anyone found a better solution for using a single action bar to heal focus or focustarget depending on context?

Well, technically you can a bigger heal with Silent Resolve than without which is why I think its important to remember that talent advice is only so good if its in the context of the player's raiding environment.

If adds are involved, there are several "initial moments" during an encounter. Misdirect may be down, healers may be busy, etc. If I can drop a few talent points to make those initial moments go smoothly more often, that sounds like a win.

How about clicking off Salvation for a week or two and see if that changes your mind any? I'd love to hear how it plays out. I wouldn't mind shuffling off a few of those SR points into something else.

(edit) I note you also don't like Mental Agility. Another reason I like to put at least *something* into SR. =)

Anyone tanking a boss mob that deals non trival damage is going to have enough healers on them for several heals to land on them in the span of 1.5 seconds. It's not terribly hard to decide when flash heal is more prudent to use than greater heal. If the tank is left with ~40% life or less left after my latest heal land I throw him a flash heal or two instead of greater heals. Why? It's simple, synergy with other healers. There's always a few paladins on said tank and they are going to switch to Holy Light which provides far higher hp/s but with a higher casting time than Flash of Light. Healing the main tank isn't a solo job, it's a team effort and to give the tank the highest chance to survive this is clearly the best option. By your reasoning you might as well not cast any heals at all. Who knows if they are going to have any real impact? Most probably won't. But what any healer is trying to achieve is to minimize the chance of death. Both common sense and from looking through combat logs when tanks happen to die supports that Priests are best of trying to stabalize the target with Flash Heals in these situations while other classes take care of the big hits.

Oh, and most of you aren't giving PW:S enough credit. No, it's not a staple "heal" and it's not something you should use most the time. But after 2.3 it's going to be ~2200 pts absorbed with talents. Not a terrible big differance from ~2700 of a flash heal, especially if your tank might not survive the next swing. Bringing up PoM as a tank emergency heal is just wrong, he has to actually survive that next hit for it to do anything at all, and said mob aint going to swing twice in 1.5 seconds. (unless parried, but then a PoM is very unlikely to save him) Much better to throw out a Flash Heal or PW:S.

Salv for Leo? Why on earth would you need that? If you for some strange reason manage to grab aggro on leo after a phase change you can just fade. The only encounters in SSC/TK I had any need of salv for was Vashj and Morogrim and possibly Hydross. Healing aggro in this day of age is just a myth unless it involves a myriad of adds. Even on Void Reaver I've had no issues at all happily spaming away CoH on the rogue group ending up at twice the amount effective healed compared to anyone else in the raid without being anywhere near the tanks in aggro. Without salv.

Well, although it probably won't work for everyone (keybindings can be a very personal type of thing) I tried to translate some of my lessons learned from 2 years of MTing over to healing when I was setting up my hotkeys.

The primary thing you learn as a MT is simply: effective/efficient keybindings make a really huge difference. When time is of the essence--which it almost always is while tanking and healing--you need access to everything easily and quickly. "Clicking" is rarely an option, nor is spending time "searching" for a button down in the 7-8-9-0 range.

I use a 12345QERF setup myself, and Shift- versions of all of those, and I find it to be very handy while still allowing me to easily use WASD+Mouse turning to move around. The reasons for a key setup like this are two-fold: one is to allow easy access to all keybindings with minimal hand movement, thus making things faster, two is to allow easy access to actions while also moving the character, as movement is extremely important nowadays.

I see many healers that really de-emphasize the ability to heal and move at the same time. Especially nowadays, movement is a core element to any fight. So, realistically, it is basically impossible to move and also use any number key beyond 6 on the keyboard at the same time. Also, "clicking" results in the inability to mouse-look, which is the fastest way to turn one's character. (Although I do use Clique for raid healing.)

Of course, everyone has to find bindings that work for them...but don't be afraid to play with them to find something more efficient. Yes, it's annoying to change keybindings if you have used the same ones for a long time, but don't be shy to optimize things. It is a painful process learning new bindings, but if you can possibly save yourself time and precious seconds from doing it...you are probably going to save your or someone else's life in a raid.

Yup, can't do better than Flash followed by PW:S. GCD will be consumed by Flash so it's 4k+ guaranteed in 1.5 seconds flat for your tank.
Optionally followed by PoM 1.5 second later before resuming the GHeal spam.

QFT.

I never use Flash Heal on Boss fights. Again, not to mana effecient, and not good HPS. I do "Flash on Trash" though.\

:Edit Add: I also rarely use PW:S on Tanks in raid. Maybe here and there on Ranged/Melee during AOE on the ground SSC Trash / Lady V Phase 3. But I do use it in Heroic. I also haven't trained above PW:S Rank....9? At the time it just seemed like so much of a mana waste.

I don't think anyone is saying that you should interupt gheals that are already casting to start a flash heal, I certanly don't do that. As an example, last Archimonde I cast 62 gheals and 7 flash heals. And I doubt more than 3 or 4 of those were on the main tank, if that. What I'm saying is that to maximize hps during those oh shit moments it's better if priests/shamans switch to faster heals and paladins to holy light. The resulting hps is far higher though obviously not as mana efficient for either of you.

Well, I think you're taking a rather narrow, binary assessment. Clearly there are times when you can safely heal for >0. I think what we mostly disagree on is the number of times that one finds themselves in that situation. I still maintain that if the party doesn't outgear the encounter (e.g. T6 group clearing a Heroic) or is progressing content rather than farming content, Silent Resolve is helpful.

Which is really my point, its all about the context that the priest finds himself in. I know, for example, that 5 points in Spell Warding would be practically useless for me at my guild's level of progression but I hear its very handy in some BT encounters.

In conclusion, the true mantra is "don't out-threat your tanks" and you really only have 4 options:
-Get a new tank
-Get Salvation
-Get Silent Resolve
-Get an additional healer

If one doesn't work, you layer on another until you have a working solution.

Trust me, I've made this exact same argument several times now. The whole debate started because we only had two pallies for our first Leo kill and I requested Kings instead of Salv and was bitched out over Teamspeak for it, heh. Then the argument moved to our guild forums. Eventually I just gave up and accepted that the RL wants the healers to have Salv to make up for stupid mistakes that other people make. :P Like I said, normally we have three pallies so it's not really a big deal, not to the point where I'd continue to argue over it anyway.

PoM is really the solution to most aggro issues, though. It makes a much larger difference than Silent Resolve if you look at the numbers.

With my gear, double PoM opener heals for ~1800x2 = 3600. This is larger than the size of GH2, which is a typical spam heal with 2k+ healing. Not only does this generate no threat for you, but it actually gives negative threat in the sense that you are giving the tank additional threat instead of yourself. As this healing should be further modified by Defensive Stance/Defiance, you're looking at producing probably around the equivalent of 5k healing aggro.

At that point, the tank would have to be doing a dramatically poor job to be unable to hold aggro. Each PoM when modified by Warrior threat mods results in roughly the same threat as a GH2, meaning that if you double PoM on the pull and PoM 10s later, 3 of the GH2s you land in the first 10s are "free" threatwise. (Incidentially, you probably only have time to cast 3.)

In my case, some napkin math seems to show that:
pre-PoM pull -> PoM -> Renew -> GH2 -> GH2 -> GH2 -> PoM -> GH7
...will heal for roughly ~22k while only generating ~4.3k net threat in ~15 seconds, or 286 TPS for ~1.5k HPS. This seems to leave plenty of headroom, especially considering Fade (which would drop you from 4.3k to a measly 2.8k threat), for subbing in additional GH7s without pulling aggro from any competant tank. An additional 20% threat reduction is probably not going to make a large difference here if your tank is generating lower than 280 TPS (which is ridiculously low.)

Of course, you could combine the two, but PoM itself generally makes such a dramatic difference in early-pull aggro situations that Silent Resolve feels a bit redundant for such a large point investment. (5 points is certainly non-trivial.)

And, if we're on the topic of bad PuGs (which is the usual time for healers to pull aggro) PoM is super-great, since you can count on some other random PuG melee DPS to pull aggro and bounce PoM around for you for even more protection!

Learning to PoM smart is really a huge way to control healing aggro. I feel like it's something any Priest should try to get good at.

How do you do the stopcasting macro?

I tried what seemed obvious:

/stopcasting
/cast Greater Heal

On the first button push it starts casting GH. On the second button push it interrupts the cast and immediately starts a new GH. So far so good.

But on the third button push nothing happens. The second GH cast continues and the heal lands. No good.

What am I doing wrong?