try shadow pvp. takes an incredible amount skill. no scrubs allowed.

That's patently false. Most shamans only use 4 effective spells (lhw, ch, their cleanse, and earthshield) and they often forget to refresh the last. Druids in raid use basically 3 (LB stack on tank, rejeuv everything when wildgrowth is on cooldown, otherwise wild growth everything). Bad druids dont know how to keep the lifebloom stack up with going oom. Paladins use about 5 as well (holy shock, fol, holy light, beacon and cleanse). Most paladins are stupid as hell and either use only flash of light or holy light and dont renew beacon or cleanse.

A priest in each of her healing specs has over 10 spells she can use to respiond to any situation. In holy, you have coh, renew, flash heal, binding heal, desperate prayer, abolish disease, dispel magic, mass dispel, greater heal, power word: shield are just the tip of the iceberg. Look at any top priest and you will see each of these spells used in good proportion depending on the fight. Just because you are a bad healer doesn't mean that priest healing is "easy."

You never played a mage or most pure DPS classes if you thing Spriests are boring. I rerolled a spriest in BC because at the time it was the only DPS that wasn't a snooze fest. To max your DPS at shadow you can't just hit nuke, or load DoTs and nuke, you have to balance your cooldowns and cast predictively. It was the first mainstream spec with a "dual resource system".

The only other specs that come close to the complexity of the spriest are ele and enhance shamans.

Whats with all the hostility?

@Jellyphish: I've been thinking about it, but my PC is pretty terrible. All the effects down to Low and resolution set to 800x600 and I get 15fps. Pretty much exclusively why I don't pvp.

@Diogenes: I'm a bad healer because I said it was easy? How does that work? I'm holy, I keep 3 stacks of Serendipity up when it's necessary, Prayer of Mending on most every cooldown, Renew is always on the tank, I make sure to position myself for optimal CoH, specced for Desperate Prayer, Decursive for Dispel and Abolish. I consistently get compliments on my heals, including in Naxx pugs. Gemmed and enchanted out the wazoo, with all the relevant Tinkers.

Simply put, it's easy. Note that I didn't say boring.

Dude are you talking about Naxx pugs as being easy?

I can raid heal most Naxx pugs as shadow. Hell Rogues with bandages could probably do it. Healing Naxx as a priest is easy because Naxx is easy, not because priests are easy. Naxx is a glorified heroic.

Now if you are talking Ulduar it isn't easy because most of the time you are forced to use the rest of your arsenal.

I fail all the time in Uld when I have to off spec heal because I don't do it enough to have a solid grasp on all the utility of a priest. My shaman is a hell of a lot easier to heal on.

@Diogenes

You're obviously showing bias towards your priest, to say a good priest uses all their healing capabilities, while a druid only uses three.

As a raiding tree, Lifebloom/Rejuv are our main weapons, just like Renew/Flash Heal are yours. But it extends to our Wild Growth, Regrowth, Nature's Swiftness, Swiftmend, Abolish Poison/Curse, Nourish, etc. A good druid uses all their tools just like a good priest.

I think any healing class has their group of tools to heal effectively, but to say your priest is the most complex/best is easily showing favoritism/fanboyism.

"Most shamans only use 4 effective spells (lhw, ch, their cleanse, and earthshield) and they often forget to refresh the last."

Most BAD shamans. If a Shaman isn't keeping Earth Shield up on the tank AT ALL TIMES and at least two Riptides rolling (in a raid at least), they're a BAD shaman.

Also: Of course bad players suck. What are you trying to prove here?

Priests have a lot of spells in their arsenal, yes...but I've seen shitty priests who do nothing more than spam Renew and Flash Heal.

@Adam - I'd have given the award to a druid before when they had to manage 4+ lifebloom stacks on the raid at once. I play each one of the healing classes in a high-end raid or pvp setting and I believe the priest is the most complicated. Druids are a close second but paladins and shamans aren't even close. Whats sad is that even though they are easy to play, most people completely misplay them. Most paladins do not refresh beacons, do not judge every minute to renew their spell haste and don't time their divine please well and beg for innervates. Shamans are even worse. Most don't use healing wave at all (even though its inefficient you need to heal a person if they are low). Most don't renew earthshield in battle and most importantly they do not renew water shield in battle.

As for a druid, I'd say its more subjective but I stick by to my statement that a priest is more complicated. In a high-end raid setting all the druids have to do to top meters is spam wild growth and rejeuv. Yes they swiftmend and use nature's mending and all that jazz but you can fake good druid healing in a raid setting simply by spamming rejeuv and wildgrowth. With a disc priest buying time for hots to heal up and effectively prehealing the entire raid with a stack of hots for fights like ignis or iron council, druids top the meters with little effort. There's little conscious healing where you pick what spell to use except when a druid is put on main tank healing.

So all Shamans suck because a few do? All Paladins are incompetent because just a few are?

Have you ever rolled another class besides your Priest, or are you just making assumptions based on what you read/heard without the personal experience to back it up? It certainly sounds like the latter.

@cyana. You make a good point, most wow players just suck period. Its just easier for bad paladins and shamans to make it into a guild because their healing is simple and if they spam certain spells it allows them to top meters. Its almost impossible for a priest to top a meter unless he/she knows what she is doing. The same for druids who have to keep a tank up. You can test players fairly well with the hot'ing classes, not so much for the direct healing classes.

Honestly? I laugh my ass off at healers who are concerned with topping the meters or of any guild or raid leader that uses the meters as a method of judging healers. The only effective metric by which you can judge a healer is by whether or not the raid/party is dead through no fault of the DPS or tank. If the tank is kiting the boss where it needs to be, and the DPS are killing the adds fast enough, then if the group wipes, it's the healer's fault barring any sort of freak occurrence. If everyone's doing their thing and the healer is keeping everyone topped off, then the healer's obviously doing his job right, heal-per-second numbers be damned.

HPS is such a flimsy metric because it relies on so many other things besides just YOU. If your tank is overgeared for the place, he's not going to be taking as much damage, so your HPS drops. If the DPS is overgeared and burns the boss before he does anything, your HPS is gonna drop. If you're the third healer in a raid, and the other two healers are overgeared for the place? Your HPS is going to drop.

The only time Recount is remotely useful for a healer is to check individual numbers (when you open up a person's recount report and see how much of their healing was done by a particular spell, for example). It happened the other night in our guild's Ulduar run. We had a new healer with us, and he was only managing Naxx-level Healing Done, forcing myself and the other healer to work harder to keep everyone up. So I opened up the meter after the fight, saw what he was doing wrong, and coached him on it.

Leave competitions about topping the meters to the DPS, please. Healers don't need that kind of e-peen measuring contest.

"The only other specs that come close to the complexity of the spriest are ele and enhance shamans."

I play a raiding enhancement shaman. They use a VERY straightforward priority rotation. Not only that, but even if you were to do it completely BACKWARDS, you would lose relatively minimal DPS. With gear in place, it takes talent to do poor DPS as an enhancement shaman.