IZBadAzz thanks for the info. I'm still lvl'n my priest to 70 (67 ATM) and i'm going to give your IDS build shot. Just had one question if you have the time.
Not a problem, these are good questions and ones I struggled with.
when do you start healing your tank/target? i wait till it's aobut 60% which works well but then comes the time where OMG and it's dead. i know the healer is a vital part of the 5-man and beyond and i don't like to dissapoint.
This one is a bit complex to answer, so I'll give the explanation and then try to summarize.
There's two things to keep in mind about priest healing, one is mana usage and the other is time. A priest who wants to be mana efficient sticks to the mana efficient spells will use primarily renews and GHs. A priest who wants to get a heal out now will stick to fast heals like shields and FH. However, this is the wrong philosophy to take, because if you do the first, your target could die before the heal hits and if you do the latter, you risk going OOM.
So, the real question is, how do we get a good balance between mana efficiency and quick heals. And the answer is what I call cancel casting. Basically, if you're healing the main tank target you should always be casting. Throw up a PoM whenever it's up, and a renew whenever it's down, and spam cast GH. Let it cast for just shy of 2s or so (depending on your haste rating, reaction time, and lag). At that 2s mark, if you're going to be doing a massive over-heal, cancel (using a stopcasting macro, never with a move or jump, it's faster), and start casting again. If he needs most of the heal at that point, let it go through and begin again.
The advantage of this is that you can still use highly efficient GHs, but they will average in landing about 1.5s within when it's needed rather than 2.5s. Thus, you get about the speed of a FH, on average, but you can stay OO5SR potentially for a few ticks and actually regen mana as well. When I began using this technique, my tanks started dying less, my mana started lasting longer, and my overhealing went way down (almost to the level of a druid, those bastards).
If you're raid healing, it's a bit different but, again, you should always be casting. Try to favor the most efficient spells, like BH and Renew over Shields and FHs. At the same time, try to keep into account how fast your target's health is dropping and if you have time for a slower heal to hit. Obviously, if they're on the verge of death, it's better to be a little mana inefficient and get a shield on them now and follow with a FH. If they're just tanking a little bit of random raid damage, a good BH or renew is enough to top them off. This is a much harder skill to learn and be good at selecting the right heal, and I still make mistakes sometimes (picking GH and having them die a split second before it hits, for instance), but you get better in time.
And for raid healing, even if no one needs heals, you should STILL be at least cancel casting on the MT, or throwing him renews and POMs. Any time not spent casting is time that could be used now, to save you time on your next heal.
When I five-man heal, I pretty much adopt the raid heal strategy on a smaller level. Since you're generally the only healer you have to prioritize. Usually, the MT is your first priority (in some cases, he's not, like in many AOE situations). Sometimes you have to make a choice between two or more people about who lives, and it's not always an easy decision to make in a split second and it's all highly situational. Either way, you basically should be cancel casting on the MT and break off to heal others when you see it. Also, if possible, try to do your group healing in spurts to work with the 5SR. If you're OO5SR now, or close to it and someone takes a little damage, you don't have to heal them immediately, the shouldn't be taking tons of damage and can usually wait a few seconds for a heal, but once you go I5SR, through them a renew, or a GH/FH and top off everyone else and go back to working on the MT.
So, to summarize, the short answer to your question is you should begin healing at 100%, and just cancel and restart if it's not needed.
All that said, I don't follow it strictly either, sometimes I get lazy too and I'll just wand or sit there when I really should be cancel casting on the MT. But that's the theoretical optimal strategy, IME.
also, which is more important for the healer? Spirit or Mana? i know these may be noob questions but i'm trying to be as good a healer as i can. any suggestions would be awsome
Here's how I look at it, priests have two fundamental stats that they care about, healing and mana (or HPS and HPM, which I think is more accurate, but also more complicated). Different situations and different assumptions affect these stats in different ways.
Let's look at it this way, if you value how big your heals too much and your mana, you get off a few big heals then you run out of mana. If you focus too much on mana, you can heal forever, but you may not be able to get enough healing out fast enough to save lives. So, it's important to have a good balance between the two. Fortunately, we have the ability to use different ranks of spells, so this allows us to focus on the best itemized items and less on the best individual stats.
For instance, if you find out you're going OOM a lot, even with the suggestions above, you're probably using a rank of GH that is to high for your mana to keep up with, try moving it down a little bit and only use the top rank when you must have your biggest heal now, efficiency be damned. Similarly, if you find you're constantly ending boss fights with large amounts of mana (like 40% or more), you can probably afford to uprank. Your goal should be to end boss fights with only a little bit of mana, with that little bit being there for when things go bad to give you some buffer.
That said, to get back to the question, the value of various stats changes based upon the circumstances. For instance, you get mana in two ways, one is from your initial pool (primarily intellect) and the other is from regen (spirit, MP5, and a little bit of intellect). If it's a short intense fight, regen doesn't play a big factor, so you should make sure your initial pool is large enough to sustain the intensity. If it's a long fight, regen plays more of a role, so intellect becomes less important and spirit and MP5 become more important. For instance, 1 Intellect with Kings is worth 16.5 mana, but 1 MP5 is worth just as much mana in 1:23 (of course, MP5 is worth a lot more in terms of itemization, so that's not a fair comparison).
Spirit, however, is an amazing stat for priests. Assuming you have IDS or someone else will cast it on you, Meditation, and Spiritual Guidance, you get 0.35 Healing per spirit and, depending on spirit, regen too (for me, with 710ish Intellect raid buffed, that's 1.24/0.37 MP5). If you have SoR and Kings, that means you really get 0.40 Healing and 1.43/0.42 MP5, and if you're Human, that's 0.44 Healing and 1.57/0.47 MP5. IOW, Spirit is by far the best bang for the buck in terms of what you get out of it versus what it's worth in terms of itemization. This may or may not be true depending on where your spirit and intellect are. So, leaving my numbers asside since they're specific to my gear level, here's about where I'd stack stats, point for point
Spirit > Healing > Intellect > MP5, get Stamina and Haste when you can, just, though you should still have High Stam and high Haste sets if possible.
And since I mention Stamina, for your normal set, just try to meet some sort of minimum threshold, beyond that it's not a lot of use. For instance, if you're likely to be taking 4k hits, getting over 8k means you can survive 2 hits, but any more is wasted because in order to survive a third you'd need 12k health, and that would mean giving up a LOT of other valuable stats. Basically, when you're learning a fight, if you wipe, see what kind of hits you're taking and adjust accordingly.
Hope that all helps.