Quote:I could ask why your guild has trouble holding onto healers, but that may be diverting the subject too much. Suffice to say that if a guild has trouble keeping its healers, its often times the fault of the guild culture and not the healers themselves. Guilds with members who often blame healers for their own ineptitude (because the guild leadership lets them) or who have prohibitive dkp rules that stop healers from getting off-spec gear (for those who seek loot) will typically have a hard time keeping quality healer players.It can also be Blizzard's fault as well and not the guild's. Raid healing has almost none of the art of healing in it. Heroics and five mans have so much more of the art of healing. Raid healing is almost always more just brute force. The best advice you give is queue-and-cancel healing. That isn't an artform. That's brute force healing. "Spam until it's not needed" is brute force healing and boring as hell. I really, really enjoy healing. And I've raid healed with some fantastic folks, but raid healing is simply boring as hell. There are very few fights where you have to push the balance between throughput and mana conservation because they've added in so many enrage timers to make sure the DPS is performing as well as the tanks and the healers. Raid healing has simply lost its fun for me anyway and it has absolutely nothing to do with the guild or the loot system. It's pretty much completely how blizzard has set up the raid encounters that has ruined it. My healer is my shaman and I got just bored to tears raid healing with her, even on FFA healing. The priest is more fun, but really, healing hasn't changed since release. You've gotten new tools, but healing is still healing - you balance throughput, mana conservation, threat and timing. It's been that way since the beginning and it'll probably always be that way. For some fights, you rate throughput over mana conservation; other fights threat is more sensitive than mana conservation. That is the basic rule of healing and one that really doesn't change regardless of what class you are playing and what encounters you're doing. The fun of healing, the art of healing is knowing when to shift the balance around and in raid healing, there aren't nearly as many times when you are shifting the balance around.
That being said, it really is about the UI you use. It does make a big difference. In addition to what Bolty said, make sure you get some way of tracking not just your HoTs, but all those beneficial gains on players as well. Track the druid HoTs, track holy shield on your pally tanks, track inspiration/ancestral healing, track last stand. By seeing all of those, you can better predict if there's going to be massive spikes or if the tank is going to be easier to heal for a short time. It also allows you to see if there's already a lifebloom on one of your DPSers and if you know that the DPSer probably won't get hit by the incidental damage again, that lifebloom will more than likely top off the DPSer so that's someone you don't have to worry about. Find a person who isn't taken care of and needs healing. I generally have my combat log set to show dodges, misses, parries with the tank so I know if they've gone on a streak and to make sure I'm not asleep at the wheel when the avoidance streak stops. You don't have to have a ton of mods to do this now. There are some who swear by grid and clique and having pretty much every other mod under the sun and there are some minimalists. The default UI has been much improved over the years, but there are still some holes missing. The mods I use to fill those holes are Natur's (shows me the pretty little gains I mentioned), Unit Range Check (adds a range finder to the default UI frames, only supports the healing classes), and MendWatch since you're a priest (that's a link that will download it directly). Natur's does also track Prayer of Mending gains on folks, but mendwatch does show how many jumps there are left and Natur's doesn't. I do agree that you have to find what works for you, but I wanted to give you a bit of a headstart on healing mods.
To sum up, healing is about gathering as much pertinent data as quickly as possible and being able to process it and use it as effectively as possible. That's why your UI is so important and why you have to tailor your UI to you. Everyone processes information differently so how the information is presented usually should be different as well.
Side note to Bolty: About time you stopped gimping yourself by target healing. ;):D
Edit: Oh, and in case you are a minimalist with mods, you can also set up your default combat log to show different things in different colors to parse the log more quickly on the fly as well. Depending on your reading speed, you may find this helpful. I live by the combat log. :) You can set up multiple windows and set the filters to only show specific things in each window. Color coding the text is immensely helpful for those times when the combat log is just getting spammed. You can also see if you need to put shadow prot up (if it's a fight you aren't used to). That's how I would cheat on my shaman in new fights to tell which totem to put down and when - reading the combat log. I don't do as much on the priest as I did on my shaman, but I also knew the fights better when I took my priest in.
Intolerant monkey.