Hi there,
I've generally played only ranged DPS throughout WoW, starting in vanilla. The group I raid with has recently lost one of our healers, so I volunteered to start learning it on my priest char. I've only played shadow with a bit of disc for pvp until now. We already have a disc priest in our raid, so I specced into holy. Healing is pretty much brand new to me, so I've been reading guides from various sites, and I did some pug healing in HFC normal last night.
My throughput really isn't good yet, but I know it'll take practice. I have a few questions if anyone here wouldn't mind helping me out.
1) How much spirit do I want to stack? Right now I have about 1500 and a Shadowmoon weapon enchant. I haven't found myself going OOM on fights (but I haven't really been into many challenging situations yet, just first 6 on HFC normal), but I was advised to spec out of mindbender into SoL. Do I want to stack spirit on every location it can appear on: both trinkets, both rings, neck, and cloak? Should my enchants be +spirit until my gear is good enough to hit a certain amount?
2) I'm unsure how to best utilize PoH since it can only heal the group members of the targeted person. With people running around during fights, especially pugs where there's not optimal organization, I'm not sure how to tell if group members are close enough together to make PoH work optimally or if I'm just going to be casting an expensive single-target heal.
3) Should I be Renew blanketing the same way Disc priests shield blanket? Even if the raid isn't really taking damage, just keep throwing out renews for overhealing, WoM stacks, and to keep CoH's cooldown refreshed?
4) Am I putting myself and my group at a disadvantage by going Holy instead of Disc? I would think multiple disc priests in raid doesn't work too well because of WS debuff, but it also seems like every priest is disc. I'd prefer to keep shadow for my offspec rather than having to run holy + disc for situational swaps.