Originally Posted by
Halaberiel
No, you took a comment regarding a specific fight & extrapolated it to be a general statement, which it was not. There are no cases where it will go to who you do not want, because there are only two people taking damage: the Wind Step target & the tank. You will assign the other healer to the wind step target since you'll be spamming PoH half of your time.
That being said, using atonement as your primary method of healing does work for a great deal of fights. In fact I can't even think of any fights where I use greater heal in large amounts, Stoneguard & Emps would be two examples but I'm holy on both those fights. Feng you may need to use it a few times, but atonement is often enough. Gara'jal smite is king if you're 3 healing, flash heal otherwise + PoH. Spirit Kings you won't use outside of Meng Crazed. Elegon you won't ever use. Vizier is all just AOE. Blade Lord as I mentioned before. Garalon you'll use if you're assigned to healing the tanks + pheramone targets, otherwise you will not. Wind Lord, again outside of occasional huge burst tank damage it is not required, better to just DPS - plus in P2 smite will do more healing than GHeal anyway. Amber-shaper, only on debuff target if req. Empress you need somewhat in P2 at the start, but afterwards smite is fine. You use occasionally on Sha of Fear, although most of your single target will come from atonement.
You use atonement to heal the tank, you use PoH to heal the raid. For the most part I assign the groups & set up positioning so everyone is hit by one of those two spells at least. Sure atonement hits pets sometimes, but if the tank actually needs healing it will not.
In many ways this change will weaken the effectiveness of atonement. Before I could rely on it to heal the tank, now I cannot. If I'm on Elegon & the add just died, I don't want atonement healing some 20% HP raid member, because I know they won't take damage till a new add spawns at the earliest. However, I do know the tank can drop HP very very fast on this fight, and if he's 25%, or even 50% he's way way higher priority healing wise. Consequentially my partner will have to be more on the ball with regards to the tanks HP, not a problem if you're with a Paladin or Shaman, more so if you're with a Druid or Monk.