I raid as Disc and my guild's lead healer (a holy priest) tends to gush about how much easier healing is with me around. That's because, in additional to helping keep the tanks up, I am _always_ shielding the raid as well. In ICC there is raid damage in every fight, so my shields are never wasted, really. I don't gem that carefully but tend to gem for spell power and spell power/crit, as I share some pieces with my Shadow set and these stats are useful for both specs. For healing-only pieces I do throw in some gems with +int.

One interesting facet to Rapture is that it can only happen once every 12 seconds, BUT that simultaneous absorptions of shields (as in a large AoE) all count. So I have, in the past, received 5-7 shields worth of mana back at the same time. (OBLITERATE! -yum mana-) Sadly with the exception of encounters where you know damage is incoming at one particular point, it's hard to do, and still depends on random chance of timing (that you haven't had a shield used fully in the previous 12 seconds).

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