Efficient Healing as a Holy Priest!

With the introduction of Cataclysm healers have had their job difficulty ramped up to eleven. With the increased mana pools we, as healers, have also encountered a completely different style of healing than we're used to. Gone are the days of Renew spam, flash heal as the main heal, and foregoing the use of Heal, Greater Heal, and other such spells. Yes, our favorite and much love Flash Heal is one of the worst heals in the game for efficiency, if not the worst!

As a Holy Priest your job is going to be raid heals, with a touch of tank heals as needed. Chakra & you should become best friends, proper management of this powerful spell will lend to tremendous changes in your mana efficiency. Understand the boss fights you are going into so you will know which Chakra state will be most beneficial for that fight. This will allow you to fine-tune your healing on the go.

The main concept you want to understand is why a spell is better than another, this is a multifaceted answer. As a healer you need to have developed good reflexes to where you understand what spell is needed when. The interplay of cast time, amount healed, and mana cost all work in tandem to dictate what spell you should use when. All of this must be taken into account with attempting to reduce the amount of overhealing done as much as possible, for every point you overheal you have wasted the mana that it costs to heal that 1 health point.

For a more in-depth overview of healing as a Holy Priest I highly recommend reading up on Elitist Jerk's forum article on gearing and healing as a Holy priest. That post has helped me to no end in understanding the ins and outs of healing with my spec after Cataclysm's launch. You can check that out here! I'll do my best to update this post with all the tips and tricks I come across healing. Here's to lots of successful regulars, heroics, and raids!

As a Holy priest your main goal is going to be raid healing, as opposed to tank healing –we are the epitome of AoE heals!—, the Holy tree is built around being able to put out large area-of-effect (AoE) heals that will hit many people at once; however, with the introduction of Cataclysm our job has become exponentially more difficult.

The main issue you will run into as a Holy priest is going out of mana (oom) quickly and often. It is with this in mind that I am developing this thread to help potential Holy priests understand the class and not be scared over into discipline due to its mana efficiency. Learning how to conserve your mana and heal efficiently is an important, if not vital, concept for any current-content raiding.

With the introduction of Chakra states recently the Holy tree has become completely restructured, in that concepts such as ‘Renew spam’ and constantly relying on Flash Heal as your main healing spells is no longer the best way to heal, or even possible due to mana constraints. As a Holy priest you will need to develop an understanding of how to maintain your Chakra state and to know boss fights before you go in so you will know what state is needed and when in order to properly conserve your mana.

The above explains how stats relate to your actual throughput of healing, how a stat contributes to your overall healing. Understanding this concept will greatly increase your ability to balance your stats as a Holy priest, to maximize your mana through making each healing spell more effective which will alleviate the need to continually spam costly spells such as Flash Heal.
Do keep in mind that the mathematics themselves are very theoretical and you will have trouble matching the theoretical numbers in-game but the math will give you a general concept of how to build your Holy Priest for Cataclysm raids by maximizing what you’re given!