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There are two main considerations you should take into account while you are healing: health points healed per mana point spent and health points healed per second. Both of these are valid concerns at different times. The first dictates how many health points you can heal given a certain amount of mana, and the second is how fast you can heal during the heat of battle, in both cases a higher number is better.
Let's start by comparing the healing spells you will have at level 60, including PW:S, Renew, Flash Heal, and Greater Heal with no talents at all, just base spell information. PW:S is included because it in effect give you as many health points as it blocks, thereby working as an instant heal of sorts, although you can't associate a health points healed per second value to its effect given its 15 second timer. Also, crits are not taken into account when calculating average damage, because as a healer, you can't and should not count on crits to heal.
Prayer of Healing is clearly your most efficient spell when it used on 3 or more party members, at least without talents. You should also see that PW:S is the least efficient in the list. Therefore, you should be using PW:S sparingly. It is best used as an emergency spell; liberal use of this spell during a fight is wasting mana. Now we highly recommended this guide through the Shadow and Holy aspects.
It is evident that the Holy Priest has a clear advantage over the Shadow Priest with respect to healing given a straight spell to spell comparison. The Shadow Priests Greater Heal spell is only slightly more mana efficient and is actually slower than the Holy Priests smaller Flash Heal. These differences are small in number. However what it emphasizes is that the Holy Priest is effectively just as efficient using Flash Heal as the Shadow Priest is using his biggest heal.
Through the use of Subtlety, Holy Priest will draw 20% less aggro, and will have 10% more mana than the Shadow Priest with the talent Mental Strength and a free cast every 5 minutes with Inner Focus. Let's look at some scenarios comparing actual total hp healed with a full load of mana for a single encounter. It is difficult to compare an actual fight, as the mix of healing spells used will vary greatly, so let's just compare the total healing capacity for two spells, Flash and Greater Heals, as if they had been chain cast back to back till the Priest is out of mana.
Likewise, the Holy Priest has a clear advantage healing with 29% more hp healed with Flash Heal and 57% more health points healed with Greater Heal. This is appropriate since a Holy Priest gives up some versatility, as well as damage output in exchange for this advantage. Also notice, that the Shadow Priest only increases total hp healed by 2700 by using Greater Heal over Flash Heal when in comparison the Holy Priest gains 8410 total hp healed using Greater Heal over Flash Heal.
