Healing Assignments.. how to? (And what do you look for in a raid?)

Matt's post got me thinking. I'm the self-assigned heal lead for the raid groups and pugs my guild sets up. Our 10-mans are mainly in-guild and friends, our 25s are about half and half most days, though it varies. So.. various questions! I'm curious, and I'll probably head over to the PlusHeal forums to get more insight there next.

1. Do groups matter for all healing classes? I know Priests have Prayer of Healing, which is group-wide. I know Trees have Tranquility, again group-wide. Shammies have their water totems [disease/poison/mana/healing] which are group-wide. Paladins.. nothing, right? Do your raid groups spread out their healers amongst the groups, or leave most of them in, say, group 5?



2. When dealing with unfamiliar healers, how do you give them assignments? Based on class? Asking them?

I've been lucky in that I've healed naxx-10 on my Tree and in part on my Disc Priest. I have a very solid understanding of what those two classes need to do, what they're best at, etc. I'm also incredibly lucky in that while I'm not typically one of our healers, I know the majority of the healers I run with for raids. I know their strengths and their weaknesses..

I see it as similar to tank-assignments. We have a paladin tank who is far better at single-target tanking than large groups. He can do both, but his strength is in single-targets. The fact that he's a paladin doesn't change that. We happily run two paladin tanks in Naxx-10, knowing that one is an amazing group tank and one is an amazing boss tank. Sure, the single-target paladin can tank groups. He's just better at tanking single-mobs and generating huge amounts of aggro on that one mob.

We also have a resto druid with what seems like infinite mana, amazing situational awareness, and infinite patience, sort of. (Incidentally, he's also a clicker.. and that doesn't change him being one of the best healers I know.) He heals anything and everything in the raid. I can happily asign him to healing the raid and drop spare hots on the main-tank, and I don't worry about either of them. He's intelligent and uses good judgment. If he's going off his assignment, there's typically a good reason for that.. or else he's just really bored. He heals the hunter kiting in the back in Gluth, and then heals the tanks in his free time. Pure tank-healing is typically going to leave him very bored.. so I don't do it. I think the most fun he had was solo-healing Thaddius when the shammy healer died early on in a polarity shift.

The resto shammy we ran OS with once wasn't specced into decursing. I didn't think to check. Little things like that.. how do you deal with them? How do your healers deal with them to better help the raid? What's the best way of setting up this commmunication?