Superfluous?

We've got a bunch of Resto Druids right now. Depending on the night and the Raid Leader's call, usually 3-4 of them. Then 1-2 Resto Shaman, 1-2 Holy Paladins, and 1-2 "healing type" Priests (one's Holy, I'm Disc).

I'm typically called on to go on the raids, partially because our 1-2 Holy Paladins is usually whittled down to 1, and thus they want a healer for the other tank. I'll have to say, however, that lately I've been feeling kind of useless. I'm a Disc Priest, but I'm not sure how neccessary my healing is. The druids all seem to have HoTs rolling on my primary target, so I can throw the love around elsewhere most of the time. And with the Druid group HoTs, half the time I don't even need to throw a heal on anyone else in the raid.

I'm feeling a little down, since my role seems to already be filled by a bunch of other people already. I mean, am I there for the, "OH SHIT!" moments? Because I can understand if I am, but at our current gear levels there really don't seem to be many of those.

So many fights involved raid wide damage, that as a single target healer I'm now feeling somewhat penned in. This is, of course, a limitation of a single target healer. One I was sort of anticipating, but really had no idea how different the situation would feel. Right now, even if I WERE a Holy specced Priest, I'm not sure how useful I'd feel. Tons of HoTs rolling, group HoTs that hit before I can even get halfway through my group heal cast time? What's left for me to do?

Of course this means the Druids are dominating the Healing meters but a good margin, and pretty much DOUBLE the overhealing everyone else is doing. Great for them. One of them seems to like their healing meters a lot, paying no attention to OverHeals which for a Druid, at tihs point I suppose they don't really have any choice.

The Cast and Forget method works if you're peppering the whole freaking world with HoTs, and so long as people aren't needlessly dying, then it's working out.

But my role as the Disc Priest? Still feeling awkward. I HATE wasting mana. For the last 5 years I've HATED wasting mana on healing someone already close to full health. The old game punished Priests for wasting mana, and it's become so very ingrained in my play style. They've made a lot of changes to the way mana regen works - first there arrived MP5, and then came the Age of Spirit, quickly followed by Intellect. The 5 Second Rule is sort of a joke at this point. Not to mention lots of Replenishment... until you forget which class / spec combos offer it, and realize no one in your raid / party offers it.

So now I've got no one to heal. I sympathize with our Paladin Healers, and understand that at this point, my only option is to Overheal like crazy and shrug it off. Which goes against all my instincts as a Priest healer.

Peeking at the meters from last night's experience: I guess I did about 9% of the total healing for Anub in ToC 25 (1.2% less than the next Healing), and 4% of the overhealing in there (4.5% less than the next lowest Over Healing). While I'm somewhat low in terms of total healing, at least when I did over heal, it was kept to a minimum.

This would be a side effect of just plain running with too many healers. We've been tentative about it in the past - we either have far too few healers, or waaaay too many. Maybe I should just lay the blame on our DPS. We'd need less over all healing if they could all stay out of the fire / didn't aggro needlessly, and they could take stuff down faster (focusing fire as required, less auto-pilot).

BAD DPS!