Well the initial link included 4 tries on Bloodboil with weird assignments. You had to drill down a bit. The second link did that for you ^-^

And once again today on first bloodboil first kill, two trees with similar healing style (75-80% lifebloom) outhealing paladins and a priest with the same healing assignment (on the tanks).
http://wowwebstats.com/hjcdc5n4zosu3?s=10794-11385
The shammies and the priest were on raid healing with chain heal and CoH so no competition there…
And of-course no mana problem. With an innervate on me I didn t even had to pot once.

When I say that +Healing scales “badly” it is because adding a tablespoon to a cup is more signficant than adding it to a gallon. Every point will yield the same return, but the percent increase to your overall effectiveness afforded by each additional increase actually goes down. On the other hand, mana regeneration very interestingly scales UP. This means that it’s going to be much easier to “cap out” on your regeneration once you have found the rotation and casting composition that works for you. =)

Thank you for the well thought out response! It’s great to have you as a reader and commentor!

I think that there is a limit to how much mana regeneration you need. That limit is defined by what spells you use and at which frequency. Let’s forget the obvious differences of LB and HT for a second and focus on mana/hps on a single target. Casting a Lifebloom every 1.5s for 172 Mana is obviously less taxing than cating a HT every 3s for say 800 mana. Now let’s say HT did more HPS than LB at the cost of more mana and I already have enough mana regeneration to sustain casting LB (because it’s dirt cheap). I have two options: I can up my regeneration so that I can sustain spamming HT to increase my sustained HPS or I can increase my +healing so that I can bring LB up HT’s HPS.

Once I have enough regeneration to keep spamming HT I don’t really need any more, because I wouldn’t use it anyway. So I’d go for other stats like +healing.
My healing style consists mostly of LB and Rejuv with the occasional Regrowth thrown in. Therefor I’m using gear that gives me enough reneration to sustain spamming LB and other heals at a lesser frequency. Any more regeneration would be wasted for me. To increase my HPS I go for +healing instead.

Your approach seems to me like the opposite, increasing your reneration to sustain casting a spell that has inheritly more HPS but higher mana cost.

Of course, both ways work.

Thinking about this I’m not 100% sure that my line of though is correct, as it involves a lot of abstraction because you can’t quite compare LB and Regrowth like this because they work in completely different ways.

I wasn’t aware that +healing scales so badly? After all Empowered Rejuvenation should increase it’s effect by 30%? Also, with a tripple stack of Lifebloom I tend to notice any increase or decrease in my +healing value quite a lot. A drastic example would be the difference between feeling worthless in Karazhan at 1400+Healing when we started out and beeing bored out of my skull there with 2000+Healing now

Also, changing your gear might just involve swapping out some gems. But please keep in mind that a single rare gem costs 60 Gold or more (on my server at least), with epic gems beeing much more expensive! You’ll need to do quite a few daily quests to earn the gold for it, making it expensive and thus time consuming.

@Kuhbi: You make some excellent counterpoints. Regarding the gear compromises you need to make when using Regrowth: remember that as your +Healing continues to improve, each point of additional +Healing is worth less than the one before, because it gives you a smaller overall improvement. On the other hand, Spirit and Intellect both have exponentially increasing returns. The more you add, the more you get out of them. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to ignore +Healing completely in favor of mana regeneration, but a “healthy” (haha!) mix of both is likely best.

For me, pre-2.4 I stacked MP5 like a … MP5 stack of pancakes. Er … anyway. Post 2.4, I’ve managed to juggle most of my gear around, replacing much of my items with Int/Sta/MP5 and +Healing with Int/Spi/Sta and +Healing instead. As a result, my mana regeneration is just crazy, my +Healing has shot up probably 150 points, and I’m able to give away my Innervate in about 50% of fights. All this while increasing my use of Regrowth. Now, I think this is a special situation as my guild has been making some pretty phenomenal progress, giving me access to items that I previously did not have. But I don’t know if rebalancing your stats is all that difficult, especially when you consider Gems and Enchants.

True words and I’d like to add that Blizzard as a whole has no clue about druids at all. See spell haste on Druid gear and 4pc T6 bonus.

Blue posts on Druids should be taken with a truckload of salt at all times.

Nononono you misunderstood what I said… Keeping someone’s health on a smooth level does not mean you are not doing much healing or that you do not top the meters… You did not check the link I sent you.
http://wowwebstats.com/knb35fkdeithu?s=301-631
I was 2nd on healing against better geared priests and paladins… That sais it all.
And again 3rd on yesterday’s kill with a slightly different healing assignment where I was not on the tank all the time.
http://wowwebstats.com/o6vydqqw1gxao?s=15492-15867

And really I don t think that I could have spent more mana since I am casting on gcd usually. Which also proves that I had mana left not because I slacked but because I have much more mana regen than I need… And I don t think that regrowth would make things better in any way… Maybe it would make things worse cause of the mobility required…

Oh and Tharfor is a useless moron that needs to l2p a druid… His post had been given value because it was blue but still the dude is far from mastering his class.

A healers performance is measured in people alive after the boss is dead, everything else is just details. (which of course can be important!)

@Phaelia: I might have not explained my points properly

1) Health missing: if someone’s missing HP but not enough that the player would be target for a direct heal of another healer right now and there is both the chance that he’ll be tanking further damage and I do have mana+time, then I will put a lifebloom on him. In fights that require them to be topped up /NOW/ (Najentus) then I might resort to Regrowth, too.

2) Likelyness of another hit: or to be precise, any damage taken even if they’re at 100% health. I put a single lifebloom on warlocks with low mana and Shadow Priests in general whenever I can afford to do so. Warlocks can safely lifetap and Shadow Priests might not kill themselves as easily

I’m not sure that Regrowth is the more efficient solution for countering overheal. For one it’s much, much more expensive than lifebloom. If a lazy Paladin gets there before you and his FoL crits for 3000 on the player (or however much it hits at T6 level) your 3300 Regrowth Crit might just have gone to waste. After that it’s HoT will continue to tick for 21 (27) seconds. In some fights that’s great (Council, Bloodboil) and in others it’s just plain waste (Supremus).
What I wanted to say is that you need a feeling for the fight and the situation. Putting a pre-emptive HoT on somebody or simply pre-casting a heal before someone takes damage at all is the high art of healing for me

3)Time to refresh LB stacks: actually I find that point rather critical. You really don’t want to lose your tripple Lifebloom stack on your tank(s). While Regrowth might only be a two second cast, there is always the possibility of spell-pushback! (unless you spend 5 talent points and have a concentration aura, both of which I do not have) This issue grows with increasing frequency of raid damage. A chance, I know, but annoying none the less.

4) Someone else casting a heal on a player: It really depends on how much health they’re missing and who’s healing them with what. After a while you get a feeling for the time it will take for someone to be healed, how much health they will gain and who will be healing them. There are many times when a single (chain-)heal will not be enough heal them to full, so I will apply a single lifebloom that will do the job

5) Mana: I’m under the impression that I can “pull my weight” pretty good without _excessive_ use of Regrowth. By excessive I mean making it one of your primary spells, which I try to avoid because it eats through my mana so insanely fast. I’ll use it if I have to, but I try not to.

Using Regrowth a lot isn’t bad and absolutely respect any healing style that keeps people alive.

One last point that just came to my mind. Making extensive use of Regrowth requires compromises in your gear selection, e.g. gearing and gemming for mana reneration. And that is much, much more than you would need if you were using Lifebloom and Rejuvenation only. For these two spells all that mana regenration is wasted (not quite wasted, but your power is re-directed into another spell) and you actually lose a lot of power on your lifebloom, simply because you trade +healing for regeneration. Both ways work, they just require drastically different styles of play. Changing your style of play or even trying a different one will require a high investment because you lack stats for one of them.

@Kuhbi: It sounds like what you’re doing is working for you. However, I don’t entirely agree with a couple of the stipulations on deciding whether to use a Regrowth or a Lifebloom:

1) How much health are they missing? If they are missing a smidgin’, we should use a Lifebloom or just let a Chain Heal or PoM hit them.
2) How likely is another hit on the player? I don’t think this is actually a factor. It speaks to the issue of your Lifebloom being overhealed by another player. The up front direct heal on a Regrowth is always going to be better for them since a LB is probably going to be overwritten by someone else.
3) How much time before we need to refresh LB? This is less of a factor than many seem to think. How many times do we really find ourselves in the situation where we have 1.5 sec for a LB on another player but not 2.0 sec for a Regrowth. That 0.5 a second is only 10% of our interim. =)
4) Is someone already healing the player? If someone is already healing the player, we should ignore them regardless.
5) How is my mana situation? This is definitely valid, but we never want to get ourselves into a situation where we can ONLY use a Lifebloom (hence the value on regeneration).

I think a big reason that Regrowth FEELS inefficient is that it feels clunky and slow compared to the RAT-A-TAT-TAT of hitting Lifebloom every 1.5 seconds and jumping around like a Garbanzo bean. Really though, the 0.5 second additional cast time of Regrowth is pretty insigificant (though if you have to heal on the run, Lifebloom is always going to be a good option).

@Sheshonk: Thank you for this tip! While the Full Heal Equivalents value should make tracking overwritten/undocumented HoTs unnecessary, the idea to track the composition of Rejuv + Swiftmend and Regrowth + Swiftmend is great!! And while I used to be the only Resto Druid in our raids, we’re now regularly running with 2, making it a lot harder to get bloom totals. Maybe I’d have better luck in ZA where you’re less likely to have more than one Druid.

@Primevalue: To determine whether you should be gemming/enchanting your Innervate weapon with Spirit or Intellect, use the Mana Regen Calculator with your current Spirit and Intellect values. As a general rule, if your Innervate is completely refilling yoru mana bar, you’ll want to be using an Intellect weapon for that temporary increase to your mana pool so that you get more back. I am very envious of the Alchemist’s Stone. It’s far and away the best mana regeneration trinket, though it does require you to use Potions to actually be effective. ^_^ I prefer the Ethereum Staff to Light’s Justice + Aran’s Soothing Sapphire because I like Spirit. I haven’t considered Vashj’s mace + Al’ar’s offhand, though. I’m probably sticking with what I have for now, though, as other healers in my guild could really use the upgrade more than I could.

@Dimitris: If you don’t see a problem with having enough mana to spam Moonfire for the last 10% of the mob’s health, I’m not sure what to tell you. I think your raid would be better off if you’d use some of that mana to heal more earlier on.

“Druids are not designed to spam big heals. they are awesome to smoothen damage and keep ppl alive until someone throws a bigger heal (even the druid himself)”

This sounds like the quote from Tharfor where he says, “I notice when I’m raiding with mine that I don’t do very well on the healing meters, but that’s just because of the way that druid healing works.” I’m not willing to accept that we’re intended to be a healing stream totem. And with the changes to regeneration and the cost of Regrowth, we needn’t be just that, either. I outhealed our best Shaman last night by a fair margin … all by pushing myself. If you think you’re going to end up with extra mana at the end of the fight (to put to whatever purpose), you can logically scale up your healing. ^_^

@Coren: It’s definitely the case that MP5 and +Healing should be taken into consideration together. I push new raiding Druids to reach about 1200-1250 +Healing before switching to a HoT-based build, and I think the same sort of step-up between +Healing and MP5 should also be considered (though admittedly I haven’t set anything like that up). Good point. =)

You pointed out that the values can change a good amount based on playstyle and encounter.

But one more thing I’d like to point out that the “worth” of MP5 can change dramatically based on how much +healing you already have (and vice versa). So to new trees just growing up, don’t start stacking mp5 like a madman if you only have +500 healing without doing the math for yourself. The value of +healing is very high when you don’t have much, and the value of regen becomes much higher the more +heal you have.

For your comment on raid healing with lifebloom.
Again it is very dependent on the damage expected.
For Archimonde fight for example, I was on MT and my group (lock, healadin, hunter), trinketing out of fear in rotation with other groups.
So damage from fire was pretty random and in DoTs. So even if Prayer of Mending or chain heal temporarily healed over this, The HoT kept ticking along with the ~1,5k DoT on almost everyone on range. And since people learned the fight and avoided fires more efficiently, less spamming was required on them and we could focus on the tank.
And not forget that regrowth is far easier to get “over-written” by a flash heal eg cause of the slow cast. Not to mention the gcd and cast time wasted.
Druids are not designed to spam big heals. they are awesome to smoothen damage and keep ppl alive until someone throws a bigger heal (even the druid himself)
If you want to take a better look, check below
http://wowwebstats.com/knb35fkdeithu
I didn t even innervated myslef and had more than enough mana to spam moonfire on the last 10% free-kill phase.

We are now trying Bloodboil which is a really different fight. Damage is consistent this time a bit bigger and more spread. We are again on the spam healing / ooming phase of learning a fight…

About the dark mending staff, don t underestimate it. If you are on MT group use the Etherum Life Staff. If you are with casters use the ZA one gemmed with teardrops. Of course I have the luxury of 3-4 spellsurges while I m on heaelr group, but again, I don t think a druid has much mana issues anyway…

Again, I believe that current semi-endgame or even endgame itemization provides more than adequate mana regeneration, so favouring pure +heal in gems and enchants is realy more helpful.