Advanced Topics in Priest Play

[MongoJerry]

Class Defining for Priest...ok i'll state the opinions of myself and friendly guild members here...these are pretty much opposite of what most people think.

Flash Heal/Greater Heal/Renew: Druids, Paladins, Shamans all have a 1.5/2.0 sec heal fast heal, all have a 3.0+ big heal. Druids have an instacast HOT. They can all make one of the ~70% uninterrupted by damage via talents.  I know Priests praise FH as an "emergency heal",

Bingo. You think Flash Heal is an emergency heal -- the way other classes think of their fast heals. That's your error. Flash Heal is the priest's primary healing spell -- not their emergency healing spell. PW:Shield is the emergency healing spell and Greater Heal is used on occation to save mana (not really effective unless talent points are spent in Improved Healing). It is the fact that the priest has this fast casting normal healing spell that they can chain cast for a long time (due to their tendency to have a large mana pool) that makes them different from other healing classes.

but Druids can drop a 2.2k base heal as instacast with NS, just every 3minutes. If a group needs something faster than every 3min, it's not really an "emergency" at that point it's every pull.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. I can instacast shield each player for 942 damage every 15 seconds if needed. But we're not trying to say what class is better here -- just what makes priest different from other healer classes -- so I don't know how this applies.

POH: i don't have enough experience with AE Healing, so i defer to your experience that AE Healing is a Priest job.

You can see from the numbers above that once you have three or more people damaged, PoH becomes both the most mana efficient healing spell and by far the fastest healing per time spell. It's even better with Improved Prayer of Healing, and I've come to really love this spell.