Brambles however… oh Brambles- Increasing damage by Thorns by 75% is certainly worth considering (of course, you have to remember to rebuff every 10 minutes, which is really annoying). So every time your tank is hit, whatever hit ‘em is looking at taking 43.75 nature damage. This is especially good for warrior tanks, since they don’t have really good group damage like feral druids and paladins do.

When I switch over to full resto at 70 (I’m currently Restokin), I’m looking at 14/0/47.

Insect Swarm is 792 damage over 12s, and -2% hit at the cost of 176 mana. Insect swarm is not free; it is equal to a lifebloom outside ToL. I guess I would find more use out of 50% crit to regrowth and 3% crit to all spells over Insect Swarm.

Which actually brings me to another point:

I would never argue Regrowth is the epitome of mana efficiency, but in ToL with 62% crit rate it is not as bad as it looks on the spell book.

As far as Improved Regrowth, I don’t miss it at all. If I have an “emergency” I can just press NS + HT or just set up a Healing Touch (if I think there will be enough time). With the changes in 2.3, it’s an instantaneous deshift and start casting. Regrowth is just so inefficient that I personally haven’t missed its lack (though for PvP, it’s a must-have).

But if you’re healing on tree form, how do you use IS? Or you just stay out the form for the whole fight? And about losing the 50% crit on regrowth, don’t you miss it? I usually take it as my panic button on tree form, but maybe I’m relying too much on it…

(the anti-spam word was “resto”, lol… ah, yeah, I’m easily amused)

Insect swarm doesn’t even carry half its weight from a strict healing perspective. Add in that it only mitigates physical damage and it’s usefulness is even further reduced. This is of course assuming you don’t have a boomkin tossing it up already (and with the idol of the unseen moon now out and idol switching becoming important, I think you’ll see more moonkins mixing IS into their rotation to maximize idol effeciency).

To me, if anything it seems like this is a pvp talent. I just don’t see it’s benefits being significant enough in pve (and lord knows there are a lot more ‘we almost had him’ moments in pvp than pve I find).

But it’s true, in PvE old NP provided some crit damage reduction that was always there (if you get those 2-3 crits needed to let it stack, you’re kinda dead anyway). -10% against that unlucky hit that happens to crit could’ve been worth it. However, those were 3 talent points I wasn’t willing to pay. I was (and still am) a sporadic gladiator and more often raiding tree, and I didn’t see the full benefit of it until I got some balance talents (give 3% spell crit, thanks). To tell you the truth, even if we had the same Natural Perfection as pre-2.3, now I’d still take it, but in my opinion it only makes sense for PvP healers and resto-balance druids (either PvE or PvP). If I took it, it was just because of PvP (extra crit is nice for grinding, but I could’ve taken other balance talents instead).

@Phaelia: that “someone cast rebirth” while server was down.. LOL!

So yes I think it could be a comparable benefit against someone who crits a lot, and I can see it being helpful still for resto druids who *primarily* arena (does this new talent stack with a maxed resilience rating? I assumed it does which the former version did not..I think), but for someone like me who rarely does, the more generable benefit previously was more helpful I found.