[Healing] Shamalamans

Haven't touched/read about anything related to WoW in months so I'm way behind the curve. I did a Kara last night with some buddies and other that it going stupid fast, I'm kinda lost on how to heal now.

I was never a really good healer, pre 'spell power' I had like 1400 healing on my shaman and only really did heroics/kara/za. If I recall all I really did was down rank chain heal and go to town with that (other than oshit NS+healing waves).

Apparently we no longer need to down rank and it almost seems chain heal is garbage. I had a pally as a 2nd healer and it seems he can top off 2-3 targets before my chain heal even goes off Is chain heal still our primary heal?

I still use chain heal a lot to get the lower cast time on lhw/hw. Usually I just keep riptide rolling on someone (I'm usually in charge of raid healing or keeping our healers up if we are bunched up) and if they get low drop a chain heal and patch stuff up with riptide again or 2 lhw. at this point, chain heal doing 6k on someone is useless to me, so i cancel cast that all the time and since the changes with mana regen I focus more on mp5 than spell power now. i actually like the changes a lot but we are no longer BRAIN HEALZ and can't spam it anymore, and we are NOT the best raid healers either. CoH and resto druids kick our ass now. although that glyph we can get come expansion will be nice (extra bounce from chain heal).

although, for us to keep up with resto druid's and their wild growth they need to make imp chain heal (2/2) add an extra 2 bounces (5 total, just like wild growth) and reduce the mana cost and casting time. before i can get off one chain heal a resto druid can get off 2 wild growths.

Priests rape the fucking shit out of shamans in every aspect now. Chain heal is good, but druids and priests are better raid healers.

Shamans really didn't get anything new as their regen and single target healing is pretty lackluster. Just look at their talent tree for resto...nothing really changed at all.

Shamans will be a level 70 healer in an 80 raid when it comes to wotlk and going to be fairly terrible. Which is why I am main switching to a mage so I can do nothing in raids.