I understand quite well what the spells do, that's not what I asked. :P

Healing percentages are quite useful, I don't see why they wouldn't be. I wouldn't expect Prayer of Healing, Renew, etc. to have amazingly high numbers rivaling Greater Heal or Flash Heal, a simple variance of 5% though could show a marked difference in healing styles. I'd be curious to see your friend's healing numbers, for example, if he runs any parsing program.

For my part, though I probably only cast an effective PoH maybe 4 or 5 times in that 2 week span, they were all quite helpful. I'm not denying the situational use of the ability; it has amazing throughput under given conditions (imagine doing Vael without group heals..). In fact, I didn't make the post to prove that it was worthless or anything, that's just what gave me the inspiration for the post! Apologies if my wording was misleading.

All that said, I would be very interested to see someone with significantly higher PoH numbers (say 5%+) though and what fights they use it on regularly. I could see it being extremely efficient with amazing throughput on Curator, for example. Though our groups are always set up with all the casters in one group to take advantage of VT from a Shadowpriest, a Priest grouped with melee could do some amazing PoHing there.

I find I use PoH a lot in 5-person instances. Not just the obvious ones like Black Morass but also just as a general, three or more people have taken hits so I stand in the middle and heal them all at once. In raids I find that I use it far less both because my group is often a lot of ranged folks who don't take a lot of scatter damage and because I'm just not thinking in terms of "group" but instead in terms of "raid" and "MT."

The big thing about PoH is probably simply that there are encounters where it is almost essential, and no one else has it (druids have it on a multi-minute cooldown). (The archetypal example of this is Vael, of course.)

I find renew useful when I'm the lone healer healing (so I know that the mage I renewed is not about to be topped off, thus wasting my renew), when I have to move (I tend to throw out a bunch of renews to top people off while fleeing from Aran's AE), and when a tank who is usually taking huge hits gets a string of dodges or parries and thus I'm sitting there staring at a full health bar - I'll throw a renew since I know that will give me more healing in 5-10 seconds when the hits start landing and I'm chaining everything I have to keep the tank alive.

I don't find many encounters now where PoH is essential. I think Blizzard have deliberately moved away from the Huhuran/Vael type of AE healing encounter (sucks for us, because it's one of our strengths) in order not tocut hybrids out of healing.

But I still get a decent amount of use from it. Once you are 'tuned' to use it, you seem to find more places where 3 of the group need healing and it's the most efficient way. But there aren't many encounters where it's necessary.

I'd say places I've found it a bit more than just mildly useful:
Quagmirran on heroic
the phantom stage hands in Kara
Oz at the opera when it's going a bit chaotic at the start
some more of the kara trash that I can't remember the name of, the ones before curator if they do an arcane overload and someone doesn't get out of the raid in time

Just curious what the rest of you think of this. Please read fully before commenting:

I have been toying with the idea of having multiple spell casting procs. You can check out my gear on armory but the current procs I have include the Masquerade Gown, Insightful Earthstorm Gem, Blue Dragon Deck, Clear casting, Surge of Light, and Scarab of Infinite Cycles (though not my favorite).

Assume I had access to any gear possible I would like to grab that new priest trinket and the following procs would be in play:

2% chance to restore 300 mana
6% chance to proc clear casting
2% chance to allow 100% mana regen for 15 sec.
10% chance to increase spirit by 145 for 15 sec.
???% chance to increase spirit by 220 for 15 sec.
50% chance for instant-cast no mana smite (If the fixed this!)

So far I have them all but the new priest trinket (currently using scarab) and I really enjoy it. Seems every other cast something is proc'ing.

The problem is that your basing your character on random chance.

When you get lucky you will win.. If your decently skilled, and have some good guildies, When you don't get lucky, you'll probably win....

So what's the point of all those proc's?

I have a few of those proc's too, Blue dragon, Insightful earthstorm, etc. But I'm not going to build my character gear around them..

In order to get maximum efficiency out of all those procs, one would have to base one's healing strategy on procs .. instead of what the situation calls for.

If Clearcasting procs, obviously one would want to cast the highest rank heal possible. In some (probably most) cases, a healer will use lower rank heals more often than higher rank heals. If one chain casts heals, the proc on Clearcasting probably becomes apparent only after one starts to cast the next heal. This means the caster would have to cancel their current spell in favor for that highest rank heal. This obviously reduces your response time

If Blue Dragon Deck procs, one would want to chain cast short heals, or spam (low rank) renews around the party/raid, in order to stay well within the FSR (haven't done the math on this). This also goes for any increase in spirit. This means either a drop in healing output on the tank, or massive use of less mana efficient heals.

The 50% chance to smite proc means no heals for that global cooldown period.

All in all, if one wants to get the best mana efficiency out of these procs, and lets consider a raid setting, one's healing would become largely unpredictable, and purely based on procs.