^^ Good point, though if you’re raid healing with Regrowth (I use a mixture), it’s much less significant. Also, the Emerald Queen is best on a stacked Lifebloom, which you wouldn’t use for raid healing. And it also doesn’t affect the bloom portion (though there are PvP-based idols that do). And we’ve only seen the Crescent Goddess idol drop once in our guild, despite the number of times we’ve killed Hydross. It’s a shame because I’d like to see ALL of our Druids pick it up.

@Sheshonk: This is a very good analysis, but as you say, pretty variable. The healing spell composition by class, the percent healing done to a tank by each class, and the number of each class present at a raid are going to be so variable that it’s probably not possible to find a solid estimate. One thing I didn’t follow – where did you get the last set of numbers (for the Raven) in your post?

@Kuhbi: Have you tried casting your LB with and without the Idol of the Emerald Queen? The difference is so small that I just don’t think it’s the end-all, be-all of idols. I’d personally opt for an idol that provides me more utility and options … or at least improves the ones I do have. Great call on the Idol of Tenacity. That’s actually one I’ve never considered. Maybe I should pick it up though as I have about 3200 Arena points just sitting on Phaelia. Thanks for the tip. =)

I’ve been using the Idol of the Emerald Queen almost exclusively and encouraged my fellow druids to go farm it and use it. To me it appears vastly superior to any other idol in terms of buffing my +healing. Sure, if one gets put into a group with multiple tanks that take a lot of damage the Ravan Goddes will probably be superior overall as more people benefit from it. Your average one-tank-fight doesn’t really require this, does it? We also never had much trouble with tanks dieing on us, but rather with other people screwing up, so personally I’d trade a bit more healing on our tank(s) against a bit more healing for the rest of the raid. They’ll need it, too.
Now that I think of it the Ravan Goddes would be great in Black Temple to support the CoH spamming Priests as they’ll need every bit of +heal they can get. For this to work the tree Druid would have to be in a group that takes AOE damage and stands closes together though. That might work on some fights.
However I’ve been known to appear to raids with one free bag slot out of 90 (or something), which I really wouldn’t want to block with yet another idol

My first 1000 arena points were spent on the Idol of Tenacity, I always figured that this idol together with the 4/5 T5 bonus would be awesome for raid healing (S3 Idol = 131; 4/5 T5 = 150; makes 281 +heal should they stack and count with the value listed in their tooltip). Unfortunately I never got to try it out as my fourth piece of T5 never dropped :/

I’ve been carrying the Emerald Queen and Idol of Tenacity with me at all times and switched them out depending on what kind of healing I’d be tasked with. If I had to raid heal a lot, I’d be using the tenacity one as I figured the +healing value on the final bloom to be worth more than a bit more healing done on the tick. My favourite example: Hex Lord Malacrass’ AOE Shadow Bolts. I’d keep one group up by rotating single lifeblooms on all 5 people and only having to rely on Tranquility in the last wave or so. Having the chance to crit on the final bloom (and the bloom basically never going into overheal in this situation!) make more +heal pretty good.

Please take this with a grain of salt since its highly variable, but should give a general idea of which idol to use when. I’m only focusing in on tank healing because thats my assignment, any raid healing I do is icing on the cake, but not my true focus. Common assignments on the tank are myself and 2 Pali’s, but I included Priests since they are the swiss army knives of healers. Some general rotation % as well…

Coefficients (with talents included)…
Druid (85% Triple Stack Lifebloom 10% Rejuv 3.5% Regrowth DH 1.5% Regrowth HoT)
Triple Stack (HoT) = 2.025
Rejuvenation = 1.16
Regrowth (DH) = 0.3188
Regrowth (HoT) = 0.918

Pali (85% FoL 15% HL)
Flash of Light = 0.479
Holy Light = 0.800

Priest (75% Gheal r1 10% Gheal r7 15% Renew)
Greater Heal r7 = 1.114
Greater Heal r1 = 0.811
Renew = 1.25

Shaman (100% Earth Shield)
Earth Shield = 2.178

It’s been established that queen is 67heal (thank you buggy idol) and raven is 44heal. Plug that in to find avg heal bonus and you come out with…

Queen = 115.3
Druid = 115.3
Pali = 0
Priest = 0
Shaman = 0

Raven = 271.98 (using Druid, 2 Pali, Earth Shield)
Druid = 81.49
Pali = 46.08
Priest = 48.58
Shaman = 95.83

At first glance, it seems like a no brainer to go for raven, but take a closer look. Shaman gets the biggest bonus? This isn’t accounting for the actual heal throughput (effective + overheal) on the tank. Another variable that is up in the air is hot overheal, from the tracking I’ve done I value it around 50%. So generally you get something like this breakdown on a tank…

Druid =42%
Pali =28%
Priest = 28%
Shaman = 1%

Account for this you end up with…

Queen = 48.4
Druid = 48.4
Pali = 0
Priest = 0
Shaman = 0

Raven = 60.92 (using Druid, 2 Pali, Earth Shield)
Druid = 34.22
Pali = 12.90
Priest = 13.6
Shaman = 0.96

Please note that if your assignment is the tank and you only have 1 pali/priest you have about the same benefit, so at that point you’d probably want to go with queen to boost raid healing with your extra gcd’s. Thanks again for this post Phae, I’ve been blindly using Queen when in the tank group.

Personally, for our bloodboil we run with 3 tanks. We usually run with 8 healers, but could probably do this with 7 (don’t get to experiment with sunwell out qq). I assign 3 shaman/coh priests to bloodboil groups, 3 people to heal whoever has aggro (be that tank or fel enrage). I triple stack each of the tanks (and run rejuv when needed, lifebloom raid, or lifebloom fel enraged) if the tank gets more than 10 acidic armor’s they have to call it out on vent. This is where the 8th healer comes in, they start helping me out with those tanks, but most of the time just heal whoever has aggro. For the way we do it queen is better, but I could see raven being pretty handy if you used a pali/priest on each tank.

Something I learned way back in Pre-BC days was if some piece of loot is so incredibly terrible you’d never use it, keep hold of it cause there’s a huge change it’l get buffed… Looks like the Year+ I kept crescent goddess returned in spades ’cause now it’s awesome.

I have alternate buttons I use for my macros. I switch them out a lot mid-fight.

Raven goddess I have used sparingly. If you happen to be in a MT group of a particularly hard hitting boss you could argue it’d alright… But I don’t know.

Something I didn’t see in the post or comments as I scanned is that the raven goddess is only +heal to your group and lifebloom is to all lifebloom targets. that little bit of extra +heal can be multiplied by the amount of lbs you have out on the raid (In Sunwell I’ve found throwin single lbs out and letting them do their thing is a really effective raid heal method between healing tanks/specific people.) and the emerald queen really gets better with each lb you have out.

I’d rate Crescent Goddess and Emerald Queen about equal. Given the situation each can really shine.

Also loot never drops when it’s good. For example we got the cloak off Kael and Gurtogg and Illidan nearly every week. Suddenly once they made 30% of healing go to spell damage, making the Illidan cloak sick for casters it stopped. Also, once the spirit buff was announced the Kael nd Gurtogg cloaks stopped dropping.

We also got the hydross idol every week from about march of last year until we stopped doing SSC, we still get the supremus idol about every other week.

I am very marginal, i use…… Harold’s rejuvenating brooch…… when im not in the MT group, and use the raven one when im in the Mt group.
I have the emerald queen one but i tend to use rejuv and regrowth more then lifebloom so…

@Nilianil: I’m surprised you don’t frequently find yourself in the tank group. I frequently find myself there and switch out for another Druid because I don’t want to be stuck in ToL the whole time. ^_^ Or we’ll have a multi-tank fight where we create two tank groups so all four can benefit from ToL aura, Imp, and/or Devotion Aura. You’re right though – outside the tank group, it would be kind of silly to use the Raven Goddess idol.

@Sydera: Srlsy? What a great tip. I’ll try this out at our next raid and see how I like it. Thank you!!

@Jazzy: It is really sad. What’s up with that? I can only hope they take our Idol itemization in a better direction come WotLK.

@Erdluf: Great way of looking at it. Thanks for that analysis. =) The 24 in the last paragraph is the +Healing from Emerald Queen – the +Healing from the Raven Goddess (since you get the RG’s +Healing on all your spells, including Lifebloom).

@Treibh: If you’re doing Bloodboil, do you have the Crescent Goddess, yet? If so, do you use it?

@Sindarina: That’s an excellent point and something I don’t mention in the article above. Oddly enough, with as many times as we’ve killed Hydross, I’ve only seen the Regrowth idol drop once.

But hey, it’s theorycrafting, what am I whining about

We run with two or three resto druids in the raid, and I’m very rarely the one in the tank group which means that I’m better off with Emerald Queen equipped most of the time. It might also be situationally better in some other circumstances – e.g. on Gurtogg when you’re in a Bloodboil group. Since Raven Goddess has been buffed it is at least worth keeping in your bag