It doesn't if you take exact number, so you're litterally correct.
But the difference is very small.
Discounting haste (which will have the same multiplicative effect on both cast time), a divine-fury GH is 2.5s long. If serenpidity is stacked, that's 35% less, so it's 1.6s.
At the same time, FH is 1.5s cast. Difference is 0.1s, that seems quite negligible for me compared to the output difference (if needed).

Now, haste will divide both cast time by the same number, so the difference will be divided by the same number.
That leads to a difference of 0.1s with 0%haste, 0.091 with 10% haste, 0.83s with 20% haste, 0.76s with 30% haste. I can buy the "a serendity stacked divine-fury talented greatheal takes the same time to cast as a flash-heal" argument. It doesn't rigorously, but the difference is nearly negligible.

I don't understand this, could you elaborate? I am certainly very often one of the last people to die. Obviously, with low boss threat, ranged class and numerous spells like Binding Heal, PW:S, Desperate Prayer to save myself.

Concerning Anub Phase 3 and Spell Warding: I don't see where it's supposed to be useful there. We set up the raid in such a way that some totem or shadow priest heals the group vs the aura, AE heals are forbidden. The rest is all about landing any heal/shield before the first PC tick, rest is a piece of cake anyway. The first tick will kill me anyway if I don't get something, with or without spell warding. So where is it useful here? (Ok, except if you tank healing - where you should be disc skilled anyway - Greater Heal won't be very useful on this encounter, either)

Thank you for clearing that up. No, the cast times are not exactly the same. In typical raid gear, unbuffed, I run with 616 haste. At that haste level my Flash heal is at 1.26s and my GH is at 1.35s. Quartz reports both as 1.3s which is why I said what I said. For all intents and purposes they are the same cast time. My apologies for not being exact..

You're right, it is a small benefit for 5 talent points. Then again, so is 10% reduction in spell damage taken in my opinion.

Agreed. I'm not sure where his/her comment came from. In my opinion you are doing something wrong if you are one of the first ones to die as a priest. Priests have a lot of spells to help keep them alive.

For all intents and purposes it seems as if the conclusion is greater heal is good with 3 stacks of serendipity for healing incinerate flesh, and for healing tanks when it seems as though the tank healers are behind. O and on faction champs for when a target is taking enormous amounts of burst dmg.

I find greater heal useless because i never encounter these scenarios.

We have one Pally healer for all of TOGC (aside from anub) and on anub we use 2. This one pally healer is specifically on tanks for every fight. He alone sustains our tanks with our other healers just hotting and POM/earthshield on them. The tanks are never in a situation health wise that would demand a priest to throw a greater heal on them period.

The same gos for incinerate flesh. Our one paladin healer heals it as his primary job while the other healers maybe toss 1 or 2 quick heals at them and its off within a few seconds.

For faction champs its the same story. If someone is taking sustained burst dmg then the paladin heals them. In a case where that's not enough Guardian spirit glyphed is a 1 minute cool down and is far superior to greater heal for any and all cases where people are in that sort of danger. And if people are in that type of danger more than 1 time in a minute then your raid needs to learn situational awareness or the CC has been assigned incorrectly.

People are right in that we have a ton of spells and many of them are situational and a top notch holy priest uses each one accordingly.

However for me as a raid healer i find 5 spells in my arsenal that pretty much cover every single situation in this order. POM,COH,RENEW,Surge of light FLASH HEAL, and POH.

That does not set in stone that these are all that should be used but what a holy priest excels at is healing burst dmg to a raid. And these spells are what you use to do that.

I find it strange that so many priest do not use renew all the time. On most hard mode toc fights i find that renew,coh,pom, and poh generally share a pretty close percentage of my healing done for basically every encounter with the exception of anubarak.

If you are tank healing 70̀̀% of the time as you say, why not just spec disc?

Maybe just use GS on him in those cases?

Ayreons comment regarding speccing disc is a good one. Still, I am interested as to why you choose to run as holy in that setup. I have been only running 10 mans for some time now, and beginning with Ulduar hard modes, I have moved - reluctantly - from switching between holy and disc to disc only.

My impression still is, that in most places healing as disc helps a 10 man raid more than healing as holy - except if the other healer already is a holy priest.

This includes places like Freya+3, where 2-healing as disc in a 10 man equipped T8 raid in combination with a holy paladin sounded insane at the time, but ultimately turned out to be much safer than holy. Sure, overall throughput is lower, but death prevention seemed to be worth more.

That said, it is a long time since I have tried sustained tank healing as holy. Is your opinion/experience that this is now sustainable with mana pools in T9 content?

As Nid is currently pretty busy and unable to keep track of a new thread, I'm going to do some editing and repost a compendium thread for 3.3 - Icecrown. If there is anything specific you'd like to be discussed or included in the threads main post please PM me.

Hello,

My guild has started to work on Anub'arak in ToGC and I just had some questions about phase 3 mechanics. Now I have heard conflicting arguments regarding discipline during the leeching swarm - does the leeching swarm take Power Word: Shield into account when it does its percentage-based sap? Or does Power Word: Shield become extremely powerful when the shielded stabilizes at a low percentage health?

Power Word: Shield does not absorb the Leeching Swarm ticks.

Sorry, just wanted to clear this up for myself.

I'm pretty certain PW:S spam on Twins works, and works well. It just isn't displayed on World of Logs maybe due to the specific fight mechanic. But myself and the other healers can tell the difference when I'm not Disc on this specific fight (twins heroic).

I can see the shield's get absorbed via my grid, or by just simply looking at the shield fall off of my fellow raiders, shortly after applying it. I'm not sure if there's something else at play here, but i felt like i had to post because i wanted it clarified for myself.

We currently run 2xdruids/1xshaman/2xpaladins/1xpriest, and it's worked every week for us so far. But would i be much better of as Holy for this fight?