Does anyone have any opinion on which particular meta gem would be more useful?

Bracing earthstorm diamond - 26 heal and less threat
Mystical Skyfire diamond - 5% next cast to be 50% cast time

The threat on the first meta is negligible - very few aggro sensitive fights nowadays, so it's basically a glorified 26 healing. A warlock friend of mine says that the skyfire procs a ton now, which I think would be very useful in certain situations, but I don't have a clue on how to go about getting some numbers.

Are there any mods out there that count your casts during a given fight and break down some stats? I know people use some sort of mod to see how much something procs, so it would be interesting to see. Anyone have the name?

My bad on the HoTs then, although the druid had a similiarly low OH rate when he was out of tree and casting HTs.

Our damage is not very low to my mind, although I can't tell you the numbes since I do't remember them (we would probably bring curator down to enrage during second evocate or beggining of 3rd with this group), but no, juliane isn't healing, and I even try to interrupt her damage spells most of the time (our rogue takes care of her heals so I can earthshock some other stuff). As for the damage being spiky - the priest is set on healing juliane's tank and people taking random damage in any case, not on romulo who actually does burst damage. Also since I am an enh shaman I have setup macros to dispell both of them without switching targets and so in general the buffs tend to last about a sec, 2 if I get resisted the first purge.

My question really boils down to essentially, do you feel it is neccesary to use flash for let's say 50-60% of your healing done in any encounter in kara (or specifically r&J), with a 40ish % overheal? All my previous experience as a healer tells me the answer is no, but like I said I don't play a priest anymore and I'd like to hear from people who do (although with all this I'm now lvling my priest to 70 quite rapidly).

I personally am going to be using:

Insightful Earthstorm Diamond
+12 Intellect & Chance to restore mana on spellcast

(the proc is 2% chance on successful spellcast to restore 300 mana.)

This gem is going to be awesome

Caveat: only had R&J once, spent 1.5 nights on them before winning, so take my comments with a grain of salt. I was the romulo tank healer (solo).

I would NEVER use flash heal on the Romulo tank unless I had already fucked up. Max rank gheal spam all the way (cancelling if he's only 1-2k down, etc). I flash heal people who got dot'd and are low or occassionally J's tank during phase 1, but basically I just stuck to R's tank like glue with gheals.

However, when healing Karazhan with an excellent holy paladin, I frequently end up with 20-50% overheal depending on our reaction times and what our group makeup is - mostly due to trash.

As others have said, overhealing only matters if (a) people are dying and/or (b) healers are running out of mana. On a number of the trash and bosses, it's just not a good option to be mana safe. /shrug.

Didn't think of that one mainly because of the requirements, 5 red, yellow *and* blue? I'm not sure if I have enough items with that many sockets.

Multicolor gems count as both for the color requirements.

no, on r&j I was basically the only healer on romulo and only used greater heal, renew and pom. Flash heal just doesn't cut it as MT healing and is really mana inefficient. The only fights where I use flashheal is aran and illhoof.
The only healing meter I remember since my swstats wasn't working before was our last illhoof kill. I had 210k raw healing with 180k effective and 30k overheal on a 5/6 min fight. another priest was a bit lower and the druid had about 140k effective healing.

well this gem has a 15 gem requirement and 2% is still pretty low.
I'd prefer the 26healing and -threat one because the requirements are easier to get and the gem is better imo.

for now I actually prefer a non metagem headpiece

I just got my gear socketed to fit that metagem (you'll see I've been a bit cheap on the gems, will replace them when I get the chance). So far I'm happy with it, but I'm not sure SCT is really showing all the procs so I'm never really sure what it's doing.

I decided against the -threat one because I don't really have problems with threat.

Hopefully this is on topic... <n00b alert>

My priest alt has a few bubbles left to 70 and I am starting to truly hate, despise, and loathe the Shadow spec for healing anything. I know I want to respec to something more instance-friendly, but I also will probably be taking her to semi-guild Karazhan raids. The problem is that I have a LOT of questing left to do to get all my keys and get my virtual bank account in shape.

Originally I was going to do a Shadow/Holy setup that would give me faster GHeals, lower mana cost, and so on (link - http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=rZfmt0cZxGTzMtRhtVo) but I really can't imagine this working in a raid or heroic setup. My other option was to go with a Disc/Holy smite build that still had a lot of the relevant healing spells in it.

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=dxT0zhxtbtZsxt0crcb

I am fairly confident that it will solo ok (though I'll have to start buying water again. Haven't done that in about 20 levels). I think that it will be loads better than my current 7/0/54 in light healing situations (5-mans).

My question is this - does this spec look at all viable for healing in Karazhan and the more challenging Heroics? Or do I need to just man up and get a true healbot spec and be bathed in the massive healing power it produces? I don't mind putting it off long enough to get the major key and gear quests done at 70 as Shadow, but healing the 5-mans is becoming increasingly painful.

And yes, I totally realize that Shadow Priests are viable and useful in Karazhan. But we already have too many, not to mention the fact that I _like_ healing more than I like using DoT's and Flaying my brains out.

karazhan is gonna be pretty hard with that spec seeing some fights require a lot of healing and your greater heals will heal for +/- 20% less. Heroics shouldn't be a problem :p

I took the Shadow/Holy setup, I think it works fine for me, though I've never healed a heroic, just Karazhan. I had a Shadow/Disc setup before but found the lack of Divine Fury to be a problem where I had to spam max rank GHeals to keep the tank up. I do have some mana issues on long fights, but I bring lots of pots to help. Since you said that your guild has plenty of shadow priests, going the Smite build might be the more viable option if you want more healing throughput. Only thing I'd probably change in that build is move 2 points from Healing Prayers to max out Spiritual Guidance.

I notice many people continually mentioning Prayer of Healing as a great boon of the Priest class. I decided check out my personal details on Recap over the past 2 weeks or so (not sure exactly when it was last reset). It's pretty interesting info to say the least, though hardly unsurprising. I'm curious if other Priests have similiar numbers to this, or if they vary wildly?

Remember, this is over a few week span, so it includes (a lot) of 5 mans, some Karazhan, some Gruul, a little soloing, etc. So results for a single raid may be completely different, though I'd be interested in seeing anything.

Anyways, here it is:

Greater Heal: 5505033 healing done, 72%
Flash Heal: 1319725 healing done, 17%
Renew: 547663 healing done, 6%
Prayer of Healing: 52459 healing done, 0%
Binding Heal: 38462 healing done, 0%

(yes, I realize that doesn't quite add up to 100%; I spared you the details of my healing potion, healthstone, desperate prayer, etc. usage)

I wish I could see the numbers including Prayer of Mending, because that truly is a great spell, even with the cooldown. I use it quite liberally in some instances/fights.

I recently decided to reroll a priest and I picked dreanei for obvious reasons. I know some priests have complained in the past about not having enough HoTs. Now Dreanei get the racial HoT every 3mins, I wonder if anyone did the math on that? For example at lvl 32, it does exactly twice the healing of renew, at 0 mana. Is this viable in a day to day use in raids?

For what it's worth, a friend has about 1400 healing and his racial heal ticks for about 450. My renew with similiar healing is ~630. My friend is a Paladin, and at the end of the raid, he generally has ~4k healing done with his racial. I suppose that's like 3 casts.

A free heal is always nice. As for being able to stack HoTs with it, though? It might be handy on a fight like Maiden, but for the most part you're better off just using regular heals than a HoT in the first place. As you see from my post above, Renew makes up a very small portion of your healing, and most of the time I cast Renew is because it's instant cast (i.e. while I'm moving). The cast time will cut into your chances to use it. I'd say if you don't forget about it, you could find a chance to use it a couple times each raid, but no more than that. Take what I say worth a grain of salt, though, as of course I haven't had a chance to experiment with it myself.

On the topic of meta gems. I've been browsing through wowhead and is it just me or does it seem like we have less possible socketed items than other classes? Seems hard to find them in both karazhan and 5 mans/heroics.

I'm a few gems short of that great mana restore gem =(

I almost certain that they don't view healing threat as "reduced" damage threat. Healing threat is just healing threat, which is equal to half the threat that would be caused if every point of healing were a point of damage. There's no reduction being made.

Also, all threat reduction mechanics are multiplicative now, period. So, even if you did think of healing threat as being multiplied by a modifier (50%), then a 4000 point heal would cause 4000*.5 = 2000 threat without the talent, and 4000*.5*.8 = 1600 threat with it.

I wonder if this Coronet of the Verdant Flame is viable for a priest? I am leveling priest to 70 to replace my hunter as my main and looking to become healing spec at the end. My hunter has mats to make that helmet, and btw that helmet has no armor type or durability after being made so should (and I use should loosely) have no impact on repair bills.

It's a 2% chance to recover 135 mana. That basically means that if you were spamming a 1.5 second heal, it's equal to 9 mana/5... Except with the additional requirement you need to cast spells to even trigger the mana regeneration.

Basically, it's not worth the materials.

PoH use varies a lot from priest to priest. Some almost never use it, while some use is a lot. A friend of mine notes that it is efficient if 3 people in your group are injured, and amaxzing of more are. He uses it all the time, and tends to top meters if given raid-heal duties rather than a single target. Healing styles vary a lot -- some people's style fit the priest's big bag of tricks better than others.

% totals like the above are not very good guides to what is good and what is not. Some spells like renew don't account for a whole lot in total if you are MT healing, but are extremely efficient in heal per cast time. Others are situational, but those situations are extremely important from time to time and prevent deaths or wipes. Also, each priest's style varies widely, and combined with the task they are given, the others in their group, and the specific encounters such totals mean almost nothing on their own.

Priests are simpley the best chaotic damage healers in the game. When damage is not predictable, skilled priests are better than aything. If its predictable and one target at a time paladins shine (but they are the worst for chaotic spread around damage).

Right, the great part about PoH isn't throughput, it's utility. How long would it take to get that many people healed up with single target heals or HoTs? Functionally forever.

Healing is about keeping bars from hitting zero, not about about how much you fill them up. A good PoH can top yourself and three DPS up while still delivering a little bit of healing to your tank, where using single targets you'd have to do some battlefield triage. PoH saves lives.

DID YOU ORDER THE CODE RED?