Lets say you're healing lead in Naxx Heroic and you have at least one of each healing class and they're all more or less equal in skill. What would you tend to do with each class and why?

I was just perusing the direct heals of all the healing classes and it looks like pallies have the best and shammies have the worst. Our direct heal is just a pinch below Priests and casts at the same speed.

Is this Nax 10 or 25? Since you said at least one of each class I'm guessing it's 25.

We usually have a healer makeup like this:
1 pally
2 shamans
1-2 druids
2 -3 priests

Pally is ALWAYS going on the MT, always. They have no business raid healing, even with Beacon of Light, they just aren't setup to raid heal.

Disc priest? Should go on MT / OT. They are about damage MITIGATION instead of raw healing.

I like to usually have a druid on the MT as well to help mitigate initial damage and give the other healers a chance to react to the damage ( I still find healers are still too REACTIVE instead of PROACTIVE in their healing...maybe I'm used to proactive healing from months in MC & BWL? LOL ). A 2nd druid will be on the OT and raid.

CoH priest will usually raid heal...ours really likes she Circle of Healing, though I may have to adjust her after the 6 sec CD is put on it. She may go on OTs more then.

A Shaman's bread and butter spell is Chain Heal with a riptide and or lesser healing wave thrown in sometimes. Shaman a raid healers...it's what they excel at.

What was your basis of comparison for:

I was just perusing the direct heals of all the healing classes and it looks like pallies have the best and shammies have the worst.

Are you talking hpm ( health per mana ) or health per cast speed...or?

Pretty much agree with everything Kanaloah said.

Few additional points:
A decent druid healer can probably keep full hots running on at least two tank. (3-4 is possible, but stressful)

So we like to have a Pally/Disc Priest for each tank and then one resto managing HOTs on all tanks (its rare to have more than 2 tanks taking more than Rejv eqiv dmg).

Then have COH priests/Shammy/Druids managing raid heals. Typically our second driud healer is responsible for most of the cleanses, since Naxx likes to curse and poison alot! (would assign a mage to help decurse too, those get messy if one is missed).

On the whole, Shammies should not MT heal, it just won't work. Pallies should not raid heal for the same reason. Druids, are the most flexible, being equally good at both. Althogh with the 6 sec CD on WG coming, our raid heals will be less uber. COH and Shammy are the best raid heals.

Shammies CAN MT heal they just aren't ideal and ( pre 3.0.8 ) need 3/3 healing way and need to just chain cast Healing Wave on the tank just to keep the buff up. With the buff and the right talents ( and crit % ) a shaman will do adequate as a tank healer, they just wouldn't be my first choice. Much like I'd prefer to have a priest over a druid as an MT healer, not b/c they can't do it they are just better at other things.

Also, when I listed what I have our druids do, they are on the tank(s), meaning they are rolling hots on more than one target. They get add and put hots on damn near anything that moves anyways LOL.

I suppose a Shammy "Could" MT heal, but so "Could" a boomkin/S-Priest.

To be fair, Resto Shammy > Boomkin, but you get my point.

My point being if at all avoidable, do it! The Shammies I have seen, and perhaps its just those players, have struggled significantly in some Heroic Boss encounters. They really are not meant to MT heal, particularily if there is spikey dmg. On the flip side, their splash dmg heals are simply godly! Only class that ever out heals my WG atm are Shammies.

I know in theory COH priests are better at raid heals, but my meter thinks differently. I always out put way more heals, and have much more mana when all is said and done. Keep in mind many of my 25-man encounter are at least partial PUG, so the quality of player I am competing with could be a large factor.

The only time a shammy SHOULD have issues in a 5 man is if the tank is taking some pretty high damage AND the group is taking damage. That's when we run into issues ( coming from personal experience lol ).

Are you talking hpm ( health per mana ) or health per cast speed...or?
I was looking at hit points healed and cast time. Cast time was 3 seconds (like GH and HT), hps healed was a lot lower than GH or HT.

The reason I broached this question, well two reasons, is that Ghostcrawler made some comment along the lines of "You can't have a raid with only druid healers but you can with priests". It didn't make a lot of sense to me.

The other reason is that my own GL makes noises about how we have too many resto druid. I guess with all the changes to Regrowth (and perhaps the addition of Nourish) I don't really see what Holy Priests bring to the table that we don't have, other than perhaps some different kind of dispell and perhaps a slightly better group heal.

Zute,

As far as Naxx goes, I would say the only time you are really gonna miss a priest healer is Loatheb. There PoH and CoH spells are far superior to WG during that 3 secs of healing allowed.

I wouldn't reccomend running any Naxx with 1 class of healers. There are too many things going on that require different talents. For example, you couldn't run with only priests because the curses would eat the raid. There is one boss (can't think of name) that applies a curse to ~8 memebers of the raid which has to be cleansed in ~10 secs. With GCD's that is not possible for one person to do. If the curse is not removed, it causes 10k dmg to the entire raid!

Well, curses are no issue, obviously since we can remove them. We generally have a pally and mages around that assist on removing things druids can't. Shaman too. It seems like there's just about enough overlap in talents nowadays that it usually works out.

Oh yeah, we often have shadow priests along too. I forgot about that.

in a 10 man its no problem for one person to remove curses but in a 25man you probably need at least 3 people focusing on removing them, would be best to assign people to groups too just to avoid overlap.

Curses:
Druids
Mages
Resto Shaman ( properly spec'd )

Diseases:
Paladin
Priest
Shaman

Magic:
Paladin
Priest

GC is correct ( mostly ) that you could have a raid full of priests and be fine. A raid full of druids would suffer here and there, even if they were chain casting Healing Touch, it's just too slow of a spell in comparison to some of the priest spells to deal with big damage. Topping off players and keeping damage at a relatively manageable level is what druids are great for....Solo MT healing...not so much.

In BC what hampered the guild I'm in is that we had like 4 holy paladins in the raid at any given time, usually 1 priest, 1 druid and 1 shaman ( yay me ). This really limited how we distributed healers. I'd hate to go back to that, now we have 1 paladin, 1 - 2 druids, 2-3 priests, 2 shaman

Hmmm... but if you look at the difference in amount healed from HT (or Regrowth, with crit) it isn't really much different from Priests Greater Heal. Couple that with all HoTs rolling and I bet it more than makes up for it.

Gut feeling, haven't worked out the math except that:
The base levels of healing are:
HT 3750-4428
GH 3950-4590
RG 2234-2494 Crit around 75% of the time

I really don't see where their superiority shines through, unless perhaps they have more awesome talents than druids do for their big heal. Judging from the WWS reports I've seen, I don't think so.

Now, I might buy the argument that if you had a druid and a priest that the druid would be a better raid healer with rejuv, lifebloom and WG and that's the reason the priest should go on the MT. But even so, priests have CH which is better than WB, but they don't have the awesome insta-cast hots.