Since healing in cataclysm isn't a walk in the park I thought about opening this thread here to discuss various aspects of healing.
Please share here your issues , enlightenment and frustrations and perhaps we can share some tips for class/encounters.

So I'll start with the basics so far:

1) Spirit is your best friend at these stages until gear will start to make things easier. Reforge anything you have without spirit.
2) Cata is about triage healing and not topping everyone/spamming everyone. Ending a boss fight with zero deaths is considered good enough, don't expect to finish a fight with everyone on 100%.
3) Healing no longer covers up for players mistakes (like standing in void zones). If you will insist on rescuing every suicider... you will find yourself oom pretty soon.
4) Know the bosses abilities so you can split cooldowns efficiently. You can quickly find yourself in a bad situation that forces you to spend mana on faster heals.

For disc so far :
1) For your own sake, take off that Flash Heal button off your main healing click. (For clique users). It will eat up your mana in seconds. Try to get used to Heal or GH.
2) Smite is working ok (Especially when it crits) but keep your eyes for pets. If a pet gets the healing instead (due to low hp %), consume your archangel and switch to heal instead.
3) Barrier can make tough situations a piece of cake. I usually Barrier + PI + PW:S (Tank) + PoM/PoH Spam for some really heavy group wide damage.
4) Don't use Archangel on cooldown. 5 stacks of evangelism can make smite and penance pretty much cheap so you can last longer. Surely if you know some damage spike is coming then use Archangel to get more throughput.
5) Build-wise I am currently speced for Atonement/Archangel/Inspiration which is 33/8. And I plan to move to 31/10 to include surge of light when mana regen issues are less critical.

totally agree with this.. atleast healin as druid with normal dungeon gear.. rejunevation which used to be nice spam heal for grp healin takes now bout 8% of mana pool.

FOR DPSERS AND TANKS: if u have druid healer and u not full when ever u see green area on ground bout 10yard size go on it. i heals u. if u have holy priest with u. if u see light well click it if u not full. healing from these helps alot healers mana probs.

and pls all dps lvl ur first aid if u havent yet and start to get used for those.. 32k heal in 8sec cast. it heals more and faster than any of druids heal except instant ones. and ofc we want to save instnat heals for somethin else than gettin dps full if they like 70% hp example.

edit:::; question for all healin classes.. how much mana ur dispel curse/poison/disease/magic cost? for druids its 3.2k which also bit much for some bosses which spammin removable debuffs.

My Cleanse Spirit costs about 2k but it also heals the target for about 6k if it removes a debuff. For resto shammy, u really want to be casting something the whole time it seems to me. Either casting Healing Wave (cheap slow crap heal) if people need it, or lightning bolt to help u regen mana (via telluric current talent), only move to Healing Surge (Fast decent heal) or Greater Healing Wave (Slow big heal) if ppl start dropping below about 60% and you know more damage is incoming. Healing Rain (Blue patch on the ground) gives a nice heal for up to 6 people before it starts lowering healing per person, but the graphic isnt very clear (with my gfx settings at least) and people usually don't stay in it, and it costs about 8k mana.

Just as an illustration, from full mana (70k+) if i spam heal my biggest heals on ppl in the fire etc. I can go oom in about 15-20 seconds, so far in normals I have just about been able to save the odd dps who stands in the fire a bit, but in heroics / raiding that really isnt going to be possible, so I just won't bother trying and will let them die.

Turk

After some gearing up. And being on 332 ilvl I finally feel that Normals are becoming trivial for me.
Mana issues are gone more or less for normals,
usually need to drink only 1-3 times during the run and fiend is being used only when things get out of control due to various fails by players or myself.

This is with ~2.95k mana regen and ~1.95k combat regen.

It is a good thing to show your group members how your new shiny abilities looks like so they know what to look for.
Like throwing PW:Barrier and tell em...
"This is a 30% damage reduction and no cast pushback zone... it is very good to be inside it."
- surprisingly they will indeed run towards it next time rather than out of it.

Disc specific :

- Try to always keep Envangelism up, shouldn't be hard.
Even if you don't need a smite heal , do it.
The low cost penance it gives is really worth it. (Low cost instant heal which can proc inspiration... goody).

- Don't use archangel as a means to replenish mana... this is not the purpose of it, for shadow it is.
Use archangel to kick some augmented IF+GH.

- Use IF all the time with PoH and GH. The mana it saves is critical. Also remember that GH cuts the cooldown by 5 seconds.
- PW:B is sick... period.
- Don't smite the last boss on Lost City while it's shield is up... thats silly. Smite the adds.

I'll stand in the fire more next time, if normals are becoming boring for you

Holy Paladin heavy nerfs in 14/12 hotfixes:

Paladin (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
•Zealotry no longer consumes the Hand of Light proc effect.
•Tower of Radiance no longer grants Holy Power from Holy Lights cast on a target buffed with Beacon of Light. It continues to work as the tooltip describes for Flash of Light and Divine Light. Please note the tooltip may not be updated to reflect this change until a client-side patch is applied.
•Healing done by Beacon of Light is now properly affected by healing modifiers on targets which reduce healing done (i.e. Mortal Strike).
•The healing done by Light of Dawn has been reduced by approximately 40%. Please note the tooltip may not be updated to reflect this change until a client-side patch is applied.

and Blizz comment :

These hotfixes were intentional and we wanted to share more information about the "why" for you all here:

Mana is supposed to matter for healers, and in the case of Holy paladins, that just wasn’t happening. We were seeing raid groups attempting to learn new bosses where the other healers were out of mana while the paladins were still at 90% of mana. We also thought the experience of paladins healing harder heroic dungeons was inconsistent with that of other healers, or our design intent. We thought it was only a matter of time before groups started going out of their way to stack paladins for raids or recruit them for dungeon runs, which of course is not our intent. For this reason, we thought it was important to address this point now rather than sitting on it until a future patch.

The main culprit for the increased paladin efficiency this was Holy Power from Tower of Radiance. We were seeing a strategy develop where paladins would cast Holy Light on a Beaconed tank, and then cast Light of Dawn on the raid (and use very few other spells). This strategy was remarkably successful considering how simple it is. The Holy Power-based heals are supposed to be an important component of the paladin kit, but because Holy Light is designed to be super efficient, the overall strategy was too efficient. The intent of Tower of Radiance was to make directly healing a Beacon of Light target less punitive, but instead it was becoming the only smart way to play. You can still generate Holy Power by using Flash of Light or Divine Light on a Beaconed target, or through a variety of other ways. Remember, overall it isn’t balanced if paladins are just as mana efficient as other healers and have several mana-free spells.

Light of Dawn was adjusted because it was completely eclipsing Word of Glory. We lowered the healing of Word of Glory late in development, but also redesigned Light of Dawn. They had fallen out of sync, and Light of Dawn was just too good.

Just wanted to say thanks for this thread. Healing my first few normals was a bit of a shock. People were saying 'great healing' to me when I was saving them from death with only a tiny bit of hp left. I thought... are you kidding? Its crap healing if ppl are losing health. I realize now that peeps will have to lose health and get used to not being at 100% health. I have also now re-specc'd to get lightwell. (I just have to make sure I put it in the right place, hehe). I just hope that everyone (i.e., ppl in pugs) are aware that they have to take more responsibility for healing themselves.

One issue I do have is dispelling. In many encounters players can get a lot of debuffs on them numerous and multiple times. In some fights I could just spam the dispel on the tank. Obviously this eats up the mana, but then of course they require more healing if the debuffs are working their wicked ways. I'm finding it tricky finding the balance between using up my precious mana on dispelling or just trying to cast my slow but effective [heal] spell.

Anyway, I just really wanted to say thank you for putting this up. Please keep the advice and tips coming!!
xx

Veeky,

Dispells and Mass dispells really hurt our mana pool, but here are things I'm doing atm:

Dispelling new debuffs i do not recognize and then reading the tooltip,
If it is a DoT on the tank, i'll either renew or move to Gheal on longer casting intervals.
If it is a DoT on a non-tank, i'll probably wait for him to get the next PoH or PoM. If it is critical... i'll shield
If it is a stacking debuff I'll dispell every few stacks, if it is lets say "increased fire damage by 5%" i'll try to dispell it when I see an uninterupted cast going on. I dunno if this is 100% but so far 1 dispell can purge an entire stack of X debuff, which is wierd because I didn't remember it work like this.