Chain Heal Spamage

I use recount a lot. Like....a LOT. I think it's a valuable tool for self-assessment because of all the graphs. Ever since I started healing, I've believed that every spell that Blizzard gave us has a time and place where it needs to be used, and that none should be used in excess. I try to keep my healing ratios fairly consistant, with nothing being used too much or too little - all things in moderation, ya know?
This is why I cringe when I look at meters and see that other shamen have 92% of their healing done by...................CHAIN HEAL! Seriously now. It's a good spell. It's mana efficient and it can hit up to 4 targets for awesome amounts of healing. I won't go into the theorycrafting and numbers of all this mess cause elitistjerks have done that already. And I hate math.

The biggest problem with chain heal is that it's slow. Really slow. It also does a lot of overhealing. I've got MSBT running, so I see my effective heals and overheals together. More often than not, especially if I'm running with resto druids HoTing everything up, more than 60% of the total heal is done in overhealing. While we may have the mana to accomodate this, it's not helpful to the raid and can put you in a pinch later. There are several ways that you can maximize the effectiveness of your chain heals.

1) Have situational awareness. That caster way back in the corner by himself isn't gonna get a whole lot of use out of your chain heal. That tank might be meleeing, but that doesn't mean the rest of the melee are near him. Most fights have the tank pretty far away from the rest of the melee because the boss is big. This is especially true in Ulduar with the sheer size of all the bosses. A lot of chain heal spambots seem to see a target taking damage and just throw their trusty old CH at them, regardless of where that target is positioned. This is the key to differentiating the good shamen from the bad ones. Something that I often find helpful is casting CH on myself to bring other targets into position. I use the macro:

#showtooltip chain heal
/cast [target=player] chain heal

when certain targets aren't close enough together to be chained. It's really situational but kinda nice to have handy.

2) Get into a pseudo-rotation. Chain heal might be slow, but proccing Tidal Waves is awesomesauce. After a chain heal, you can get two verrrrry quick LHWs in. I'm a huge proponent of LHW because it's fast. It's horrible on your mana, but if you don't get the heal out, the mana's wasted anyway, right? It's never practical to be in a set rotation, but I like to try to stick to RT LL CH LLL as much as possible when I'm doing raid healing.

3) Don't forget your Earth Shield! I know I'm talking about chain heal here, but ES is an amazing spell, especially with the new glyph! You NEVER want this to fall off your target, but it's easy to lose track of it and get tunnel vision looking at health bars. I use EarthShieldTracker and also have the ES buff in GRID. I usually try to refresh it right after the last charge is used but sometimes it's just easier to do it when you have one or 2 charges left if you have a tiny break.