Originally Posted by Imalinata
I follow this thread pretty closely, and I've looked for other threads, but haven't found any that address or mention this issue. If there is one and I've missed it, please point me in that direction. 
My guild has killed Kalecgos and we're likely going to be starting attempts on Brutallus this timer. We did have 3 resto druids and at times all three of us were in the raid mostly because A) we run very minimally so that we don't have a lot of guild bloat and people sitting for raids and B) one of the druids stacked spirit so he was consistently in the tank group which gave us a reason to bring three. Due to some issues that we had, the spirit stacking druid is no longer in our guild and we're running with just two. When asked if we were now recruiting another druid, I was told no because 'druids aren't great farther in Sunwell'. After pushing for clarification, the reason given was that druids are still good, but there are other classes that could fill the healing spot better, and since hots don't scale well there's no real reason to bring more than one, maybe two, to raids.
Since I've not seen any mention regarding the decay in our effectiveness the farther through Sunwell a guild progresses, I'm skeptical. Based on some of your posts I believe we do have a few raid leaders/guild leaders/people who do healing assignments contributing here and I'm quite interested in your take on this. For the guilds farther in Sunwell, would you cut down on your druids if given the chance? |
I'm at the same progression point as you, so can't give any specifics, but I sure can give a few generalizations...
HoTs actually scale the best with gear. The problem is when other direct healers get comfortable with a fight, they tend to get so good at their assignments your HoTs are overhealed to a much greater extent.
From a raid leader perspective, they are looking to get the most DPS in the raid as possible. They only want to take as many tanks and healers you need to avoid wipes. Thats why you see ferals being a strong option for off tanks in raids, they can go cat during the boss and not hurt raid DPS as much as a prot war. The same goes for healers to an extent. A coh priest can put out more healing than a shaman, but thats not enough. The priest is going to be overlooked because a shaman adds more raid utility via totems/blust.
If you are looking to make the argument to pickup additional trees in the raid to a DPSer, you have to make the argument that you can take 1 less total healer by using 1 more tree in the raid. Giving the raid leader an additional DPS slot to play with. A tree's greatest strength is their ability to raid heal with little detriment to tank healing, this allows a tree to fulfill both tank and raid healing roles at the same time.
At the end of the day, both druids and priests will play second fiddle to Pali blessings and Shaman totem/blust. They just don't have the raid utility to compete.