While I am still playing WAR and enjoying it unfortunately my brother didn't want to make the plunge some I decided to maybe give WoW a chance again. Luckily he has way way to much free time and has like 3 accounts and 6-7 decked out characters. I was going to play his mage since I played that back in Naxx days and loved it.

Every MMO I have ever played I always was able to establish good friendships with some of the mature and skilled top end players so I always had people I could log in and depend on. Unfortunately with WOW....it only took 3 days of playing to remember that dear lord there is a fucking ton of morons per good player. That being said, we decided to not have to rely on good tanks and healers so he is switching to his druid for tanking and I am going to take over his resto shaman. I haven't played a shaman since MC days and haven't played WoW for over a year. Shammy has the newest season shoulders and a variety of the top pvp gear but has a some upgrades to be made to switch to a better pve gear build.

Last 3 days we've just been slaughting heroics to get badges (1-2 upgrades and I need alot of epic gems and he needs a few more tank pieces). We did a ZA (pretty fun zone) and it really got my raiding itch going. I never saw BT before so when a half pug BT raid was being said in trade we decided to venture along. It was pretty damn awesome, I know they made that change so everything is alot easier and more talents etc but it still felt nice going in there with 12-13 Pug people and having some success. We killed everything up to Teron Gorefiend(?) (mother, council, Ill was left I think) It was 4AM and only had wiped 3 times all night. My brother ended up being one of the 2 main tanks and for the first time ever I almost enjoyed healing....gasp (was number 1 or 2 every fight on healing charts).

So now I am half convinced I want to at least make a good run at Wotlk, I think I am actually going to go healer. But I need some advice (researching it myself on other sites but at least here I can have some what mature discussing when I ask a question. I am going to start searching for a server/guild that is pretty dedicated to raiding this week but want to make sure I am gearing out properly (i know new expansion gear will replace a lot of stuff but still). So if anyone has the time feel free to chime in on the questions below, thanks for the help!

1) What is the order of imporance or threshholds I should be working towards with regards to stats between healing power, haste, crit, spirit, mp5, stam, int, spell hit etc. With only a raid or 2 under me I was thinking of focusing on healing power, haste, mp5 and let the rest come to me. I picked up 2 BT drops that increased my haste by 5% already which seemed like a lot in a game where you are non stop casting. I definitely need more mp5...sitting at 120 I think while casting by gear.

2) What add on's are a must for healers? I grabbed just a few but the only one that has been useful is BW (to know when certain buffs are off/on me or a main target etc so I can keep earth shield/water shield always up etc).I just drug the group windows and player wack a mole for the most part during the fights. Is there something that is more efficient? Something that better highlights when some one needs to be cured etc?

3) Which Gylphs are best? I have the lesser healing totem one & the increased water mana shield one atm for majors.

4) Talent tree, im all restro tree but 5 pts that go for increase int by 10% (might look at respecing soon).

I know everything is going to change shortly but I am trying to do my best to catch up on the knowledge side of things so I can hit the ground running and get into a top guild come raiding time. I was going to transfer to BoW's WOW chapter but they are alliance and my bro doesn't want to reroll but if I have to settle for abunch of scrubs I'll stick with WAR. Thanks again

GRID is probably the one addon that every healer will tell you to get.

What Neesha said, Grid is one of the few must have addons, especially as a healer. It will do about all you need including showing what things people have on them that you can dispel as well as general debuffs you should know people have in order to heal them properly.

I haven't 'seriously' healed since 3.0 because it hasn't mattered since going live, but while progressing through Sunwell as a Shaman, haste was where it was at (what I gemmed for), generally speaking though, take the best item you can get your hands on.

If you do find yourself with equivalent ilvl items with different statistics, I'd lean first towards raw spellpower followed by haste though from what I read, intellect is extremely popular now due to the number of things that get boosts from it beyond simply more mana and spell crit.

Between the changes to potions, downranking, talents and spells, it's next to impossible to predict how things will flesh out in WotLK and thus any advice I could give from my TBC experiences is really of little value.

As for glyphs, I haven't really looked into what I'd use for restoration though from looking at what's available for elemental and my Hunter, the ones to use have been fairly obvious.

As for specs, I think my first foray post 3.0 was 0/8/53 but with the deeper trees, everyone's in desperate need of those additional 10 points that will come in the expansion. Combine that with shallow theorycraft backing the newer stuff, it's hard to finger the ideal resto build (before 3.0 I was a strong proponent of 8/0/53).

_________________
Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

If you get grid, you'll also want a click to cast addon for healing. I'd go with clique. It increases efficiency a lot.

I use AG unitframes with clique (the new AGUF has range indicator and threat indicator)

Shammy healing is very powerful right now for raids.

Go to the elitistjerks.com forums for links to clas sites for min/max answers.

Interesting. I use AGUF, but never set it up for raids because I used grid. It'd be nice to consolidate functions. I haven't played WoW in a while though. Just downloaded the patch yesterday cuz my month of Warhammer ran out. Still sorting through all my broken addons.

Thanks guys, appreciate the help.

I didn't have shadow resist gear for mother last night and couldn't roll on T6 shoulders even though I was one of the only ones who never died through out the learning process and final win. No more half PUGS for this cat....god I really wish I had more WoW core knowlege, I'd start my own damn guild agian. Some of these bnet kiddies need to be introduced to a real raid leader, spent 3 of 7 hrs listening to 20 kids talking in vent and having half ass direction.

Anyone have a link to the site that rates servers based on overall guild progression? I found it once but forgot to book mark it.

Oh lastly any way to help mana regen outside of Mp5 gear, mana tide, normal mana potion? I was always managing top healer or 2 and most effecient but my biggest limitations was still mana regen......I have to be missing something here. Is druid's intervene the only true mana twitch for other classes? I couldn't have healed like that prior to hp nerfs and my gear is pretty respectful compared to non BT geared resto shamans.

Thanks again, good news is I will get 10 lvls to sharpen my skills plus I got the whole 95% of WoW players appear to be fucking morons thing going for me so it shouldn't be to hard to slip back into the mix....

I sympathize, Turbo.
We tried a raid on the horde leaders last night. About ten minutes in to assembly, me and another ex-EQer pretty much took over assembly and orders, as the RL thought that "Hey, 40 people, we can kill anything right? Go go go!" was a viable plan.
You know me. I've never been uber. But the basics of any group action were lost on these people. It was a horrible experience. On the upside, we now have ten best friends and 28 worst enemies. Now I know who to call for help on a future raid.

The other good thing I think you will enjoy in the expansion Turbo is the fact all the big raids can be done 10-man or 25-man. So for someone starting out again like you, you don't necessarily need to be in a big guild to enjoy content. You can start up a guild again, like you mentioned, and just do 10-man content if you wish. Something like your ZA run is what you can expect with having 10 people around.