So I finally healed...Follow

Yes, thats right, I finally got to heal last night. It was only Ramparts so it's not like it was a super hard instance. I will link my Armory:

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Steamwheedle%20Cartel&n=Naaryn

My biggest concern is that my heals were only around 800-900, I got the pants during last nights run, so those will help when healing. I realize that my build is not optimal for dropping out of shadow to heal an instance. Gear? Don't worry, I'll get it as it comes.

Is this what I should expect my heals to be at this point? It was fun, I enjoy healing but any tips to help me heal more efficient without speccing out of shadow would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

If thats your biggest concern, relax. I remember my lvl 61 Hellfire runs; healing with shadow spec with shadow gear and maybe 300 +healing is tiring. Gratz on getting the pants btw, they help. Also, remember your a bit low lvl, so you don't got the impressive gadgets the high lvl priests got (Prayer of Mending FTW, Walking-shadow-mana pot FTW)

Bottom point; NO you won't be getting impressive numbers, YES you're doing fine.

And Dada makes a solid point; keeping renew up should be a rule for all priests, no matter what lvl. Renew > not renew. Also, the Fishsticks help... but even without them, you'll be fine. Keep your eyes open for people doing free enchants; the +mana/5 one is cheap lvling, and some enchanters give it away for free.

To answer your question, I'm borrowing and editing from Nightshroud's FAQ from the O-Boards:

"increases healing done by magical spells and effects by up to X" less accurately known as "+healing" -- is a commonly misunderstood stat. The trouble comes from the phrase "by up to". It does NOT mean that each cast of the same spell gets a random Spellpower bonus within that range. For a particular spell, the bonus is identical every single cast. In general:

Increase per cast = Spellpower * Coefficient

Each spell has a "coefficient" percent which is how much of your Spellpower is used for that spell. For instance, Flash Heal has a 42.9% coefficient. If you have 100 Spellpower, it will heal for an additional 43 hitpoints. Here's the spellpower coefficients for Priest healing:

42.9% Binding Heal (per target)
21.4% Circle of Healing (per target)
42.9% Flash Heal
85.7% Greater Heal
16.0% Holy Nova healing (per target)
42.9% Prayer of Healing (per target)
42.9% Prayer of Mending (per charge)
30.0% PW:Shield
100% Renew
100% Lightwell (per charge)

Why such variety? The first reason is cast time. A 3.0 sec spell usually gets twice the bonus from Spellpower that a 1.5 sec spell does. Otherwise, shorter spells would get a much greater DPS boost from the same Spellpower gear. 3.5 sec spells get 100% and instant spells are considered the same as 1.5 sec. That's where Flash Heal's 42.9% comes from: 1.5 / 3.5.

The second reason is type of spell. AoE and group heals usualy get 1/3 the coefficient you would expect from the cast time. HoTs and DoTs will often go over 100% to account for how spread out in time their effects are. Some spells are just given a particular coefficient because the designers decided to set it that way.

Spellpower is also an efficiency stat. When mana cost stays fixed but damage/healing done goes up, efficiency naturally rises. Early on, casters realized that if you're getting a +170 bonus on a spell that bonus would be much more significant on a lower rank that hits for 200 than a top rank that hits for 1500. This is called downranking. Healers would routinely and severely downrank to take a moderate hit to HPS but a huge increase to HPM. Today there are two penalties in effect which still allow for efficiency gains by downranking, but these gains are much less severe than they once were.

* Pre-20 penalty. Spells learned before level 20 have their bonus mutiplied by this penalty: (1 - (20 - LevelLearned) * 0.0375)

* Scaling penalty. (NextRankLevelLearned + 5) / PlayerLevel
For example, Flash Heal Rank 5 is learned at level 44 and Rank 6 is learned at level 50. So Rank 5 doesn't start to be penalized until the player levels past 55. At level 60, the normal bonus would have to be multiplied by... (50+5)/60 = 91.6%.

So to answer your questions specifically:

* Your highest rank Renew will gain 20% of your total +healing every tick. It ticks every three seconds for 15 seconds, so that's a total of +100% of your + heal.

* Your highest rank Greater Heal will gain 87.5% of your +healing. That number is added to the random amount of your greater heal.

If you want rocket science, head over to ElitistJerks :P There's some stuff that goes on over there that I just boggle at. Something that comes to mind is spell resistance and elemental melee damage and whether it's a linear piecewise function, a set of cubic and quadratic equations, Berstein Polynomials, or B-splines. I don't even know what the hell those last two are.