Healing Way?Follow

Simple answer. Yes.

Use rank 1 HW to get a 3 stack before the pull, refresh with rank 1 if you want during the fight to keep it up if the tank isn't needing healed enough to keep the buff up (although this also means he probably doesn't really need the advantage of the buff either). This also gives you a decent chance to proc Ancestral healing with a crit to give the 25% armor buff as well.

Rank 1 HW is so little mana that your mp5 + mana spring will keep you at 100% even if you spam it before the pull.

Yes you will want healing way, even if you are only a raid healer. You do understand raid healing is not only chain heals. It is a mixture of everything. You will still be helping to heal the main tank and also the whole group.

Healing Way is a really good talent, when stacked 3 times my highest rank HW can crit up to 8200, when not stacked it only crits for around 6500. Which sounds about right considering I have 1900+heals.

Certainly, its your call you spend your talents, but quite honestly, its one of the best in the tree and I wouldnt recommend passing it up if you plan on healing end-game.

PS - not every endgame fight requires raid healing, so do you plan on sitting out those fights or helping to heal the tanks?

Well, I'd say the most common T6 resto build is 8/0/53. I manage to be able to keep healing way, but this means I have to drop totem mana reduction and no improved reincarnation. The -10% fire/nature/frost damage reduction is very important for some fights such as Illidan. There are other fights where improved reincarnation is more important (Azgalor/Kaz'rogal). There are some fights where Healing Way will be a waste of points and others where it has uses. I keep it 90% of the time just because you never know when you'll be that healer that is keeping up the main tank while others can't.

In short, there is no UNIVERSAL spec for all occasions and fights. There are simply too many good places to put points and you have to prioritize based on the fight you are doing.

I have it, for one reason:

When the smarty-pants resto druids or holy priests try to get in a "max crit" healing duel with me.

Seriously it's a situational talent, but one worth having; elitistjerks classifies it as "must have". Some 25-man resto shamans go for a CH-bot spec, sacrifice healing way, and only use healing wave with nature's swiftness under the assumption that someone else will heal-bomb the tanks. Conversely I like the versatility it gives me--I sacrifice totemic focus since 5/5 only returns 5-15 m/5. Healing way is great for tank healing, but not so great for everything else.

We're at a disadvantage: Healing Touch has a longer cast time and benefits more from +heal. Goodies like Essence of the Martyr or Tome of Diabolic Remedy can help you cheat though.

Very true, even Heroic's I was Chain Healing the tank to keep him up. I still took the talent, but looking back on it I should've gone 0/3 or 1/3 in it.

Not really. If it were just about strength--or the math part of healing--then there wouldn't be any debate. It's hard to argue with an 18% increase in healing. But it's just... not practical. Casting a down-ranked Healing Wave three times before every pull is not practical, and most of your time spent raiding will be raid-healing with Chain Heal almost to exclusion. And whenever you do switch to single-target healing, you have to cast Healing Wave at least twice to get any benifit from it, four times to get the maximum.

Once I started to actually look for how often the Healing Way buff was up on targets I was trying to heal, I started to notice how little I was actually getting out of it.

If you're really into mathematically optimizing your build for PVE healing, then yeah... keep taking it. However, unless your guild regularly uses you as a tank-healer in difficult raid content (and they shouldn't be), you can afford to put the points elsewhere.

It's useful even in raids for very specific times. Whenever there is little raid healing, healing wave (with healing way) will be the strongest healing. For instance, on Illidan phase 1, there's not much to heal... chain heal x2... then back to the main tank with healing wave. All the other shamans casting healing wave benefit from the +18% too. The real argument is .. are those 3 points spent better elsewhere? 30% reduction in silence/interrupts... depends on the fight. Reduced totem costs... eh... Resto shamans don't usually have to lay 4 totems, often only 2. The +18% is good for helping to counter mobs that use mortal strike type abilities too.

If blizzard were smart, they'd make Healing Way affect the bonus healing of other shaman spells too (or other healing spells) to encourage resto shamans to get out of the "chain heal only" mentality. But, that's what WotLK is all about. So many talents in our tree to encourage us to balance out what spells we cast.