What part of "drift from my assignment" did you not understand? Let me detail it out slowly:

I am healing a tank - one guy. I decide to heal another target for any myriad of reasons. This means I am not healing my tank under whatever burden he is taking.

Let me put this into a realistic scenario for you:

Me and another druid are healing one of the Sacrolash tank. I decide to peel off momentarily to triage a double sear that I feel isn't getting caught. Thus our tank is missing one dedicated healer at the time. Considering I simply need to triage the double sear briefly (and draw attention on vent if I REALLY feel it's getting missed), there's really no reason to take an entire 1.7s to do this when I can accomplish my same goal in 1.3s and get back on my tank. You really don't want to leave your tank unchecked anyway considering the severity of a Confound+MH crush series and then the forced tank transition. Getting caught in between that is not exactly an optimal position.

For that lvl of encounters you mainly FoL with some HL. As paladin you will always have high overhealing, just don't bother with it. And when what rank of HL to use - you need practice to feel it, thats it.

Predicting damage is partially possible if you know boss abilities and have timers. Earthquake on Morogrim, WW on Leo, beast within for Karathress etc are times when you could heal with HL without much overhealing. But really, don't look at your overhealing, unless it is like 65% or so.

@ Silm I agree that crosshealing with FoL is viable, but is it justifying using Souls redeemed over Lurker libram?

Generally as a paladin healer you'll be assigned to "heavy lifting" healing such as the MT, generally you either have to have a ping of zero and the fastest caffiene fueled reflexes ever and stopcast heals if they're going to heal, or try to heal reactively. The problem with the former is that it's frankly impossible, and the latter is that your tank will die if they take a damage spike and you don't have some kind of heal incoming. Thus the most feasible solution is to precast heals and spam the tank in a sustainable manner. This is all terribly general since I've never played a healadin, but my impression would be that your overheal due to doing a FoL/Downranked HL rotation is fairly irrelevant since your position as paladin healer is to be the guy/girl that always has some kind of heal incoming because you can spam FoL all day and pop holy light as appropriate - as stated above like when boss abilities come off cooldown.

There will be some people that say "I get zero overheal and anyone else that gets overheal is bad", these people are either lying or all they do is wait for a tank to drop low and press nature's swiftness once every 3 minutes.

Heh, I don't recall him having Souls libram. Even so, losing 60 healing on Flash (assuming the target had light), is not much healing lost anyway.

I'm in somewhat the same situation, my main is a mage but I don't have large amounts of raid experience. I have run SSC through Lurker and of course Gruul's/Mag so here are my 2 cents.

One thing that helps with the overhealing is to make sure you have all your healers using mods that can talk to each other. That way you can tell if there's a HoT, someone else is also casting a heal etc... This really only helps when you are straying from MT since MT can take spikes and as mentioned earlier in the thread your best strategy is to spam heals. Every WWS I've seen across many samples shows Paladins overhealing in the 30-50% range. Obviously lower is better but the real key is did the tank survive without you going out of mana.

I'll let someone better qualified than me address the HL issue.

They're two different flavors of librams - if you have mana issues and are using holy light, then use the lurker libram. If you're not, use one of the many healing-esque librams with respect to what you're doing. Hell, change librams mid-battle if you want and can spare the GCD (e.g., we shift all paladins to raid healing once Sacrolash is down and leave the warlock healing to resto druids - I usually switch straight to a generic +healing FoL libram while dropping from the shelf).

[e]Correct, I still don't have the BoL libram from Kara (fuck that place) - but I would certainly cycle it into my options if I had it (especially when I have a shadow priest).

---

On the topic of overhealing - stop worrying about it if you're not running out of mana (this has been beaten to death in this very thread).

Any approach is valid if the tank doesn't die, but some approaches are better than others.

In both the reports you provided, you're doing more raw heal than Jaya but he's only doing 80% of your overhealing. That means he's placing his heals better than you are. He is also - unsurprisingly - raping you shitless on bossfights, particularly in the first half of BT where he's doing double your effective healing. Nor is he slacking off on the Cleanses to chase the meter, as he's doing twice as many as you are.

The last and most significant point, though, is that your overheal is not falling appreciably on the boss fights. That means he isn't spamming it around while leaving you to do all the work. He's only spamming it around when he knows he can get away with it.

Conclusion: by diverting as much of their overheal as they can safely spare away from the tank and into raid support, the extant guild Paladins are generating far superior results than you do with your "keep it on the tank" approach.

Newsflash: Paladins with SPs and experienced in the encounters (Jaya) rape Paladins who don't have SPs (you). Experience will lend you the manner in knowing when you can cross-heal and when you cannot - it'll come with practice in BT, and it'll continue to some small effect in SWP (although no where near as much, BT is kind of a joke like that).

Some red flags I see in your parse:

You're losing fel-rage targets. Digging deeper, it seems you're flashing some Fel Rage targets late in the fight, which leads me to believe you're hurting for mana at that point (Unless you're flashing just to flash, in which case that's giant red flag). If you are hurting for mana, you need to throttle back on your tank healing and let HoTs do more of the work. Keep in mind Gurtogg starts off low in the damage curve, and you can pretty much just flash your heart out without risk. Monitor the acidic wounds stack and ramp up if it starts to get too high (e.g., your tanks can't force the transition at the right times for whatever reasons). You really shouldn't have to do that much HL-oriented tank healing here if things are going right.

Your council parse looks to be about what I would expect for a paladin solo healer assignment on Gathios.

You had a lot of deaths on Mother, but it looks like a lot of FA failure/bad ports (I especially love the druid casting tranquility in the middle of FA while standing on top of the raid - whoops!), so I didn't dig too much here. Although you do have a saber lash tank death while you were healing with FoL. I prefer triaging saber lashes with a HL, usually taking one of the OTs and leaving the other for someone else; your other healers should be helping here too, especially chain heal.

Most of your other meters just show inexperience, but they're dumb easy fights that aren't really worth looking into. It's easy to see why the other paladin does so much more healing - because he's primarily raid healing in a lot of fights.

On a tangent, some of your priests are Grade-A fucking awful. It's a shame if you're the only one getting slaps on the wrist, because the flash heal spamming Priests are an even greater offense (some of them are literally flash-healing their bloodboil assignments, jesus).

To answer your original question, both styles are fine for BT if nobody is generally dying. BT is kind of a joke and because most of the tank damage is very predictable and not too variable, you can eventually adopt a mannerism in knowing when you can simply leave your tank and heal elsewhere. You'll see this in some places in SWP, but not too often. Considering you pulled a solo-heal assignment on the Gathios tank without splattering yourself, I think you're fine, but watch out for overextending yourself on tank healing and then leaving yourself tapped on your other duties (Gurtogg especially).

Silmeria, I think you've got your analysis spot on. I burned far too much mana on the tanks at Gurtogg and ended the fight with little more than flash and gift of the naaru for the fel rage target (something I hope to never repeat.) If I recall correctly, i was out of mana when the saber lash death occured for the the same reason of burning too much mana early in the fight. We've had some very bad tank deaths recently, such as phase changes on Illidan and the Gathios tank on council, so I've become unneccesarily trigger happy with my holy lights. You're right, I'm hurting from not having the experience, so I'll just give it time. Thanks for the help. Maybe I'll drop a line for the priests too.

Pro-tip: Don't heal yourself unless absolutely necessary, let others heal you so you get the mana back from SA.