In raids what do the healers do and what strategies do you use? In my guild we put 1 healer per group and everyone watches out for the MT and OT. On boss fights we designate 2 or 3 healers for the MT. The DPS classes have to watch out for themselves mostly during boss fights. Step back and bandage or use a potion of some kind and utilize their aggro control tools like Fiegn Death.

My guild often uses the cross raid healing technique. This can be difficult, and mana inefficient, if some form of limits are not put into place.

For example, say the group you are in isn't taking a lot of damage, so you start looking for someone to heal. You find that indavidual that needs healing (lets say he or she is at 30% health) and you pump out a healing touch rank 11 for 3000 HP. The problem becomes that just about every other healer in the raid also tossed him a heal. Talk about over healing, huh?

So as a rule, cross raid healing in my guild is limited to rank 3 and rank 4 healing (or equivilant if you arent a Druid). This cuts down on a lot of wasted mana.

Usually a set number of healers will be assigned to heal a group of indaviduals. Sometimes it is class specific - like mages in the Major Domo fight. While other times it group specific if there aren't enough healers to put 1 in every group.

We also assign MT and OT healers, usually they are in the same groups as the tanks, but not always. Also, support healers for the MT and OTs are clearly notified before boss fights, so that they know their healing priorities should a main line healer run low/out of mana (use those mana potions and innervate!).

Also, your DPS classes will find that in time, and with better gear on tanks (and the healers), healers will be able to focus some of their attention on them.

Also, a big pointer on MT healing for a druid using healing touch is to wind up the heal, but move to cancel the heal should the tank not require it. This is a good strategy for all slow, bigger heals and can get the tank back up quickly from the danger zone.

We have Tank healers and for certain fights we use a couple healers to focus on them (Mages AEing on Bat boss...and such).

We also leave maybe 3-4 spot healers (heal DPS)

Communication is key and we usually have the healers run with macro's telling other healers in a raid heal channel who they are healing and with what. Seems to work just fine if you combine it with ctra and have some small rules set in place.

This depends form boss to boss. We never use group healing, most of time its cross healing, but like said before that is not always mana efficient.
So at thrashmobs we use crosshealing.
At bosses it depends, but most of time we have a couple of druids healing the group only, We assign healers to MT and OT's. The rest who is not assigned can help with group, but prior they should always keep eye on MT and OT's.
And we use healing channel idd, to prepare and assign healers.

We use cross healing. We swapped too so we can put 4 healers and a shaman together, and we had too many healers doing nothing.

Now with the druid changes, we have the one healer group. On trash they are assigned to do all the healing. Priests and Druids out of this group are encouraged to split duty, healing as a first priority, and DPS as a second.

On a boss we ussualy assign more healers to the MT, and to general healing.

If you have 4 druids in the raid all tossing reguvs out, its alot of healing. We've encouraged out Priests to back off just a little to see if it is enough to deal with the healing.

So far its looked good. We may start repurposing some priests in raids.

Our guild normally has one primary group of healers only. Ussual make up is one restro druid for mana tide then mix of druids and priest as are avalible. Shamans and feral druids being mixed though the raid to make best use of thier specs. All healers are exspected to cross heal as needed as well. We have ussualy 2-3 healers focused on healing the MT/OT and others heal the raid in general. On certain boss fights depending on how dps/tanking needs to be done groups will be set up so healers only have to heal thier group and maybe one other. Though we fight that set up to be attualy less effecent. With one group of primary healers things tends to be cover in our 40 man raids with minimal back up healing.