I have a priest and a shammy in World of Warcraft. My shammy is 85, but my priest is only 80. Thus far I've only used my shammy for dps and I've tried to stay away from making him a healer. My priest - although he is only level 80 - has always primarily been a healer (mostly just heroics with the occasional raid).
However, I've been throwing around the notion of dual spec'ing my shammy and making him a healer, which leads me to my question. Should I spend the time and gold on setting my shammy up as a healer, or should I work on leveling my priest up and just use him to heal. What is driving this question is a concern that I have as to whether shammy healing is really worth the effort or not. I've seen chat in the trade channel where player's specifically say that they need heals for a raid but not shammy heals. If I'd just seen this once then I wouldn't worry over it, but I've seen it multiple times.
Also, I was in a 5 man heroic last week and someone in the group asked which is the best healing class. The healer (who was a priest) responded that pallies and priests have it the best for healing right now. It's just little things like this that make me doubt it's worth my time to set up a healing spec on my shammy. Oh, and I did peruse the shammy forum with this in mind, and I saw a lot of posts from shammies griping that healing sucks as well.
EDIT: This question was posed on Jan. 12, 2011. It should be noted that any input given by board members upon this question might have been made obsolete due to patches, class changes, etc, or in other words, the accuracy of this question and its answer(s) is highly subjective to the passing of time.