I've been thinking about Improve Divine Spirit and how valuable that is to the raid, versus the value of Circle of Healing. My opinion is, given LF1M's current raid setup, circle of healing far outweighs the value of Divine Spirit, but I wanted to open the topic for discussion.

When it comes to healing in a raid there are basically three healing tasks: Tank Healing, Healing random burst raid damage, and healing raid-wide damage.

Tank healing is self explanatory, dropping big heals on Grov. Paladins and Druids are the kings of this, but Priests are decent at it. Greater Heal is fairly mana efficient, heals for a reasonable amount, and when properly pre-cast is generally an effective healing tool. Priests are much more latency susceptible than a Druid or FoL paladin (and roughly equally latency susceptible as the big heal paladins) performing the same roll, but they're certainly adequate.

Random burst raid damage is the situation in which a random target in the raid takes a sudden burst of damage and needs to be rapidly healed up. Rage Winterchill's ice bolt is a good example of this. Paladins are probably the best at this, with FoL, but Priests also shine here with Flash Heal (which, given the new mana regen model is viable) and the accidental bounces of a shaman's chain heal are very effective here.

Raid-Wide healing is healing up damage that has been dealt to everyone in the raid, or a significant subsection of the raid. There are many, many examples of this, particularly for melee DPS. Here, with a few specific exceptions, shaman are the absolute kings. Chain heal mops up this kind of damage quickly and efficently. Circle of Healing priests also shine here, doubly so in situations where groups can be stacked to get all effected targets in the same group, in close proximity (Blood Boil, Voidreaver). Healing damage like this without the benefit of Chain Heal or Circle of healing is much more time consuming, much more dangerous (as you're healing one target at a time, rather than many targets at once, for a lesser amount), and generally more frustrating.

In these three scenarios, Circle of Healing is beneficial in only one. However, in that one scenario it is incredibly powerful. I personally feel that it is inferior to Chain Heal in most of those situations, but it's debatable, and quite close regardless.

Based on this there are two reasons I think I should keep Circle of Healing:

1) We don't have enough raid-wide healing. We have 1 or 2 resto shaman on a good night, and 0 on a bad night. Trying to have another healer fill that role is virtually impossible, as we saw on Naj'entus the other night. If Capt and I had been Divine Spirit spec, I do not think it's reasonable to believe that we could have kept group 5 alive.

2) The content we're working on now (tier 6) is packed with fights that require raid wide healing.

Now, if we had 3 resto shaman on a consistent basis, I would change my opinion. In fact if we have a night where we have 3 resto shaman I might respec to DS just to try it out. However, I don't think that's likely to be in our future. Given that, I think that it is more important for me to retain the flexibility to heal raid wide damage than it is to have Improved Divine Spirit in the raid.

That said, let's talk about the value of Improved Divine Spirit. The max rank group buff provides everyone in the raid 50 spirit (55 with kings), and turns 10% of your spirit into + damage/healing. In the best case senario that's going to be something like +40 spell damage for our DPS casters, +50ish healing for most healers, +70 healing for druids and priests who stack spirit like mad, and + 14 healing to all healing spells cast on the tank (tree of life buff).

My question is, what does that mean for raid DPS? If we gave every DPS caster 10% of his spirit as +damage how much would that actually increase the DPS of the raid as a whole? I don't think the answer matters until and unless we get some more consistent raid-wide damage healers (i.e. more priests or more resto shaman), but I'm curious.