Healing style and spiritual attunement effectiveness

I searched several times on this, but suprisingly couldn't find what I was looking for. I'm sure I'm missing something some please feel free to point me in the right direction if there is already some good reference information on this.

I have finally ventured into heroic instances recently. I had gotten quite used to drinking more frequently in regular instances as my gear level has climbed. The first few heroics I ran I didn't really think about it, but my mana was still very low at the end of each fight. My guild has a Pally, Priest and Druid healer. I have ran with all three of them and never really seemed to notice a difference. Then I happened to run heroic ramps two consecutive days. Once with a guild group which included our Pally healer, the second day with a PUG that included a random Pally healer. With the random healer I had almost zero downtime the entire instance. As far as I can tell nothing else changed significantly, although I may well be missing something else.

So the question really is this: Does the style/strategy of your healer have a significant impact on SA? I always assumed that if you heal me for 5000 I get back 500 mana. Shouldn't matter how you heal me for it. Is there some other factor going on there?
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Non-direct heals (e.g., Power Word: Shield) don't return mana. Healing stream totems don't return mana. I /think/ that Earth shield doesn't, either, but I could be wrong. Basically, if the game treats it as a shield (not a heal), or as a heal that you do to yourself (Prayer of mending may work this way, I forget), you don't get mana.

If your healer is PW:Shielding you a lot, and you're going OOM and are not in danger of getting gibbed, consider asking them to do more direct heals (or an early renew, or something). Still, if you're not dead, and that PW:S keeps you from getting gibbed and makes their job easier, that is a good thing.

If they ever complain about you drinking after every pull, adn they're at near-full mana -- that's when you say in a whisper, "Since I get mana back from direct healing (but not overhealing), can you use more direct heals rather than PWS/totem/earth-shield?".

If i remember right, stuff like prayer of mending, earth shield and the "bloom" of lifebloom does infact return mana. But stuff like from healing stream totems, lightwell and bandages do not.
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Thats a first, puging and getting a better group than a guild run ^^

Anyhow, indirect heals don't give you mana back (healing stream, well, bandage) but everything else does (lifebloom, ES and PoM included).

The reason why you were going oom was because of slow dps usually. Once you have enough SD you can just consecrate twice, then keep on just auto-attacking with SoR/V and you are golden. In that case if the dps is way slower, you actually end with full mana since the healer has to heal you for more for that duration of the fight.
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Did you consider that, in the nonguild run, the group was killing them more slowly, or that there was less stunning or other crowd controlling going on?

I tried to convince a few rogues to use less stuns, but decided to give up since they appearantly can't decide these things intelligently. Either they stun everything all the time or nothing at all. I can't seem to get them to stunlock casters, and not melee. Stunning prevents a lot of damage from reaching me, which, in our case, is a bad thing. Sometimes.
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I'm about to drop the hammer...
...and dispense some indiscriminate justice!

This is my armory profile

This is curious because I have noticed this effect too with diff healers but I also noticed one more thing.

I had a very low geared pally healer run with me and as I got used to his level healing I started to pull more and more. Eventually he obviously got worried and he used blessing of light on me and the weird part was I am sure I was getting back more mana even though he was healing me back to full the same.

You comment reminded me I was going to look that up whether you actually get more mana back from blessing of light.

edit: I looked it up but should have that effect but I am wondering if it's a bug and they dont count it in the overheal and you get the use of the mana.
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You don't get more mana, but Blessing of Light allows you to take more damage and still have the healer be able to keep you up.
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better to tank in hell than DPS in heaven

Simply you were getting bigger heals, thus he was refilling bigger parts of your mana pool at once. Like, instead of firing 2 heals for 300, he fired one for 600. (numbers out of nowhere).
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Uord - Prot Warrior
Darkworldie - Death Knight

Tanking... srs business

only prot paladins throw 300 heals
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better to tank in hell than DPS in heaven

It could just be the difference between proactive and reactive healing. It's possible your PuG healer was a proactive healer and was spamming FoL on you when he expected you to be hurt rather than after you were hurt. I've found this tends to keep my mana topped off a bit better as they're not waiting until it's "worth it" to heal me.