I don't Heal; I stand there and Regen!

Well I have been 85 for about 5 days now. I stayed up all night, and all day leveling, mostly through dungeon grinds. I actually didn't hit it before I hit my pillow, but I did go back later to grind some experience in Uldum (my entire 84-85 actually). We had a slow start, we had a group figured out to burn through dungeons quick, and I think we would have been looking at some server first 85s if we could have got it to work out, however our planned tank had troubles logging, and our third DPS passed out (not drunk, just exhausted from his rediculous workout regime), so we had to replace. Now we all know the problem with replacing when you have things all planned out: things change. We ended up spending so much time replacing people as they decided they couldn't handle our 24 hour grind, that we lost a lot of time. I am actually in retrospect a little happy about that because otherwise I would not have got to experience how much fun questing was, and probably would have put it off longer than I have. Now that I have you all (my whole 3 followers!) caught up, I'm going to get to the "meat and potatoes" of this post: Healing.

We went into our first raid last night. We didn't really expect to down anything, but thought that we would take a bit of a look, and make some merchants a little richer off of repairs. We wiped. On trash. A LOT! We were expecting this, especially with the interesting mechanics they gave to trash (even trash isn't tank and spank anymore), and we did eventually get to the first boss Magmaw. Again, we didn't expect to down him, but once you get the mechanics figured out, realize how rediculously little warning you get for his GTFO attacks, it's not that difficult of a fight. One problem: HEALERS SUCK! Now don't forget I am a healer, so I am not blaming, and I really am not even QQ'ing, I am just using big catchy words to grab your attention (it's a literary device or something like that).

Discipline Priests for as long as I have played one, have been the kings of absorbtion, and endless mana pools. I now don't often bubble, as my shield only absorbs 10k (in ICC I was up to around 15k), and costs about 5% of my mana pool. I can cast heal for around half of that, and heal about as much. Granted it's a slow cast, but with the way that damage works now, your better off with that slow heal, or a HoT. My Divine Aegis is still a nice little addition, however given that my crit chance is now below 10% I am rarely proc'ing it. There is my little QQ (that I said I wasn't doing). But the point of my post is my frustrations. Never before have a been in a situation where my healing was ACTUALLY the reason for not downing a boss. I have been blamed before (that was before joining Jubilance, <3 you Guildies), but the problem has usually either been DPS being low, tanks being squishy, or a combination of those and my healing, but never JUST my healing.
To get to Phase 2 on Magmaw really only takes about two minutes, maybe one and a half, it's a pretty short time. All three of us healers (we were attempting a 10 man, we don't have 25 guildies at 85 yet) were OoM, or close to, at the start of it. Phase 2 is really simple, healers are supposed to do nothing but sit there and regen, but when you are already OoM, that phase is just not long enough. Even on the attempts that were so clean it was rediculous, healers just did not have enough mana. I have seen the videos, I know it gets better, atleast for healers in general (I haven't seen specifically any Discipline Priests in those videos), and it probably had something to do with our average item levels being below heroic gear (some heroic gear, some not), however for now, it is beyond frustrating.

As an added note I had a fellow Disc Priest Guildy tell me she almost rage quit WoW over the changes. I'm liking them, they're just a lot to get used to and are pretty frustrating at times (see above!). To her I gave her all the help I could (don't top everyone up, make sure your overhealing is almost 0, let dps die if they're stupid, etc.) and then told her to hang on, it will get better. I really think it will. I personally like this new system more than "pump out as many HPS as possible even if your overhealing is 80% because the damage is huge and your mana pool is infinite" I just wish blizzard would have tossed us a bit of a bone, maybe NOT made a clothy's HP be in excess of 110K.

I have also been experiencing some issues with Atonement (which is a mistake/ovesite on Blizzard's part). Specifically that the range it has starts at the centre of the boss, not the outside of his hitbox, meaning that on fights with massive boss hitboxes, I can't even hit the tank. This is something that needs to get fixed, it's non-sensical for Blizzard to give us an ability that only works if the boss is X yards in size. I'm sure it will be fixed, when it comes right down to it, Blizzard is good at what they do.