At the beginning of TBC, I think most people would agree that Resto Druids were pretty lackluster. It was hard to tell if Druids were better off trying to be single target healers with Dreamstate or HoT spammers with ToL. Every guild had a Feral already and bringing additional Restos didn't make much sense when you could stack Paladins for blessings.

The high point of this Resto Druid antipathy was probably Nihilum stating publically that Resto Druids were underpowered and that's why they didn't bring any to their raids.

Then one day Blizzard changed the +healing coefficients for Lifebloom applications and things changed dramatically.

I'm not sure when I first noticed it, but it was our first Illidan kill on Monday that really brought home how incredibly powerful Lifebloom stacking could be. The number one healer on our kill was a Resto Druid app we had who was in mostly Karazhan gear. In fact, looking back at our recent late BT kills, Resto Druids nearly always ruled the healing meters with their Lifeblooms.

In the Mother Shahraz thread on this forum, someone from DnT stated that they brought 2 Paladins to spam FoL on the MT and that really helped their healing a lot when the MT had this quick heal buffer. Well, on our Mother Shahraz kills our 2 trees do almost the same thing with Lifebloom stacks, but they're able to do it for all 3 tanks at the same time.

Killing Illidari Council with 3 of the 4 tanks having double Lifeblooms stacks on at all times? The difference it makes for the other healers in the raid is huge.

I look at WWS reports from other top guilds killing these same bosses and rarely see other guilds utilizing Resto Druids to the same extent we do. It this because they just don't have the Resto Druids in their guild? Or do they think it's more effective to not depend on Lifebloom stacks?

What about other top guilds who shared Nihilum's concerns that Resto Druids were underpowered? Does the Lifebloom buff change that view at all?

Remind me what the coefficient for Lifebloom is, or what sort of ticks your geared druids are getting with their rolling Lifebloom stacks?

I think this problem was slightly overstated even at the time that the Nihilum fella made that statement about restos. I checked all the other Illidan killing guilds recently and I think all apart from two had at least one resto druid (by that I mean T6 geared). I think the difference was very small back then, and most people would bring one just for MT healing + the combat res/innervate they could provide. I mean at a time when people were using warlock alts to soulstone half their raid in BT another combat res is a nifty thing to have.

Nihilum are the very pinnacle of min/maxing to the point of extremes. Most other guilds this wouldn't apply too, even if they were slightly weak you aren't going to tell your guildmate and friend of 2+ years that hes too gimp to bring to raids anymore.

Then came the lifebloom change and I think it put Druids at almost the right place. As you've said yourself, keeping 3x trinketed lifeblooms up on all your tanks in an encounter is mighty powerful, true I've not seen into T6 personally yet but it applies at T5 level too. Very cheap and very efficent and more importantly a different style of healing to pallyspam.

I do think that resto druids could still use a slight tweak to make them as useful as Paladin's but at the moment the difference is small.

But after that rambling, to answer your original question yes we have embraced it. Its a great tool for almost all boss fights, and as you said you can keep it up on 3 tanks easily with 1 Druid. The extra healing ticks are great and the mana efficency is fantastic. I just worry slightly about how interesting it is to play.

Lifebloom is great, and looks very nice on the healing metres because it ticks every second, rather than every 3 seconds like all other hots, so its effective healing is insane.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but weren't druids also godly towards the end of WoW vanilla? I think we are seeing a classic case of item scaling slightly better for druids, just like they do for Rogues in current end-game.

I think what totally changed my outlook on resto druids was switching from using them for raid healing, which is the more intuitive use of HoT, to using them to sustain healing on the main tank. MT healing they are insanely good, raid healing they are actually fairly underpowered.

Check out this thread: Druid - Tree Concerns and Issues

The fights in BT/Hyjal seem very friendly for priests/druids in general, there's even fights where Circle of Healing is excellent. Can actually feel useful there - starting with fights like Najentus. My guild's always used 1-2 Restos per raid - they're MT healers some raids, FFA other ones. Healing is always about finding the roles where the strongest are as taxed as the weakest. But healing meters tend to reflect what you've been asked to do, rather than the state of your class. I think Awake's got a good guild but I'd guess comments like this relate more to their desire for a minimum of 3 Blessings, their dislike of Paladin and maybe Shaman "offspecs" and probably their love of ferals.

I cant get the numbers to add up, is Lifebloom unaffected by the resto talents? From the numbers in those logs it seems the Coefficent is 46% regardless of any talents.

The HoT part gets ~51.8% (7.4 per tick) and the final heal gets ~42,8%.

Talents effecting is Gift of Nature and Empowered Rejuvenation, especially the later.

So with Gift of Nature and Emp. Rejuvenation you can get a total of ~81.8%?

I just cant get it to add up with the numbers in the log provided above from the Illidan kill, there you can see Pyxis with Lifebloom ticks for 914 with 1838 healing on his gear, this only adds up to a coefficient of ~47.6%.

Unless I'm missunderstanding entirely how Lifebloom works here, these figures dont add up.

You could be missing any number of effects. Amplify magic, tree of life aura perhaps?

What? ToL aura increases healing received by the party.

Sorry, I was thinking of the old version. Yes, the ToL aura adds healing received equal to 25% of the druids spirit. My bad.

I think the very old (first one that was available) increased the healing done for everyone in the party for 15% of the tree's spirit or something. I remember us stacking 5 druids in the same group for the insane +healing bonus. (it stacked back then as well..)

The paladin aura did reduce damage done i think..

Although, with ToL Aura, the coefficient is lowered even further isnt it? He has 557.1 spirit (kings, prayer of spirit) so thats 139.27 extra healing received on his target.

So taking his Lifebloom ticks at 914 and subtract the ToL buff you get 774.73. Now subtract the base healing of 39 and you get 735.73. This is 40.02% of his +healing which is 1838. Am I way off here? The numbers arent making sense to me :o

Edit: I might just have dreamt up that damage reduced thing, its still early in the morning :p

Pyxis has 1838 on his gear and can get additional 297+350 healing to LB ticks, which adds up to 2485 healing. I suspect only one trinket rolling on the ticks since I get 830-ish numbers with 1600-ish healing+EotM buff.

Well, I think I found what has been throwing me off, I didnt notice his Idol which increases the periodic healing done by up to 88. So using the formula:

(Lifebloom+ Idol) + ((PlusHealing * Empowered Rejuvenation) * Coefficient)) * Gift of Nature / 7 ticks = healing done per tick

(273 + 88) + ((1838* 1.2) * .519)) * 1.1 / 7 = 236.61

Which is fairly close to his minimum single tick of 241. He might have been wearing some more healing gear which would explain the discrepancy.

Comparing to the other druid with a minimum tick of 217 and +1701 healing :

(273+88) + ((1701* 1.2) * .519)) * 1.1 / 7 = 223.20

Again, might have been wearing something different, but its the closest I can get and seems to confirm a 51.9% coefficiency.

Running two restoration druids does not seem out of the ordinary to me.

Generally speaking hot healer performance is a function of how much time the recipient of their hots spends at less than 100% health. As the skill and aggressiveness of the direct healers in a raid increases you will find that the relative effectiveness of the hot healer decreases. As the direct healers start reaching for their maximum possible HPS druid healing begins to suffer as a consequence.

Looking at your WWS it seems that your team of MT healers employ 1.5s heals almost exclusively. I am curious if tank deaths ever come into play during unexpected spikes or if your healing strategy works for you consistently.

When mana and mobility are not constraints I feel that paladins with sub 1.7s holy light and shamans with chain heal will edge out a druid in the roles of single target and raid healing. However, even if a druid isn't on the top of healing meters they still easily earn their place with the utility gained from combat resurrection.

With around 1900 healing its around 236/sec (without idol, with = 243), when we run 2 druids its generally 1 on MT doing the rolling LBs, and one on raid healing, depending on the fight ofcourse, its a good compliment as even the raid healing druid can keep up hots on the MT most of the time.

At the start of TBC it was.. 'ok' healing as a druid, it was still nothing that special and just like pre-TBC when hots stacked, except you tended to have less druids in the raid to hot.
Since the LB fix its really made a good change on this, and the spell itself is very very good.

The idol does not add +88 btw, you get 49 divided up between the ticks aka +7 each, the remaining 39 would be normally given to the final tick but is removed.

We had two resto druids left over from our 40 man days and they were both exceptional raiders so I don't remember ever thinking that they didn't pull their weight when healing.

Our MT is addicted to Lifebloom, and has commented on the rare night when we don't have a resto that he feels much squishier. The aura in combination with Lifebloom's frequent heals is a very powerful tool to have in your raid. Not to mention that resto also look very good on the WWS, always topping the meter while keeping a sub 20% overheal rate.

The overheal stat for resto druds can be largely ignored since HoTs do not tic if the player they are on is at full health.

Lifebloom and tree druids in general are incredible for a lot of fights -- after being on tank healing for a while I cannot describe how much more stable (and in general easy as hell) healing is with a couple of druids rolling trinketed lifebloom on tanks.