Pre 2.0 resto was.. Well, horrible. It had a fair amount of utility, but it added bugger all raw healing power, and the untility in it was mostly aimed at pvp / 5 mans. This let druids get away with metaphorical murder. I pretty consistently came in in near the very top of healing done on any run where I was assigned to heal without spending a single point in any talent that had anything to do with healing other than HoTW. Massive use of the ZG trinket whenever the feces was heading for the fan, and a set of healing gear which was, and is very good for a non-naxx druid was all I needed. 2.0 changed that. I am a more powerful healer now than I was before, thanks to the new low tiers of resto, but druids who go deep resto now actually gain benefits from that which I cannot overcome by having a better interface, and being very awake.

Specialisation is going to be the way of the future, if you bring a feral druid you are not getting a healer on the same order of power as a resto druid anymore, you are getting a beast of melee combat, that tanks and hurts things, with a couple of sidelines they also do well, such as decursing, (a feral druid in int heavy gear can spam abolishes and remove curses for a very long time) and innervating shadowpriests. if you are short of healing one day and have to bring that druid for mainhealing, I would really suggest having the raidbank respec them twice.

There is, as far as I can tell one, and only one hybrid specs for a druid which ought to work in a raid enviorment You can go balance / resto, and the synergies are there in gear, and in talents to make this a strong spec. The bulk of the utility lies in unique buffs and debuffs tough, so really, this is a way to get imp Farie Fire on mobs, brambled thorns on your tank and a strong healer in the bargain.

This is incidentially the exact same issue which is causing warriors so much angst. If your "main" talent tree does not suck, and suck hard, then speccing anything else wil prevent you from doing the traditional job of your class anywhere nearly as well as someone who does spec into it. This is not really an avoidable issue, if talents are to matter, then with trees as deep as we are seeing in the crusade, what we are really getting is the splintering of most classes into "subclasses"
There are no warriors, druids, or priests anymore, there are ferals, trees, arms, furies, moonkins, shadow, holy, and prot.

Pre 1.9 Paladins had the best of all worlds, with my 31/20 ret/holy spec I was capable dps, as good as it got for healing, and could tank in a pinch (aside from my embarrasing incident with a Molten Giant).

From 1.9-2.0, things changed. Deep Holy made your healing noticably better (because they shifted Illumination, Spiritual Focus and everything else deeper, but I digress), Prot had some nice pvp gizmos in it, Ret was solid for dps but didn't bring anything notable. This meant it was holy or bust for most raiding Paladins, if you spent most of your time healing it was just too good to pass up.

For 2.0 and onwards, Holy is about the same (very nice for healing, with Divine whatsit it's also nice for spelldamage builds now), Prot got a few nice buffs, and Ret got some love too. The depth of the talent trees, and the number of talents we have, basically means you pick one tree and go with it, because with the possible exception of prot once you go deep you might as well go deeper.

I am sorry, but I am not quite sure how you can possibly claim that the restoration tree was underpowered with a straight face. Resto was an incredible tree, it offered first innervate, which was so good that it had to be given out as a free talent because it pretty much forced every druid to spec for that, then swiftmend, which was an incredible burst heal on a supershort cooldown. I have lost count of how many raids were saved because a druid saved a tank with an NS or a SM after a huge burst of damage.

Resto gave you: 10% less mana on heals, 10% more healing, 15% mana regen while casting, 2 instant heals, .5 seconds to your bread and butter heal to just name the truly top notch talents. The fact that your guildmates were retarded and you weren't was why you could still match healing with them even with a horrible healing spec. NS and SM alone completely alter your playstyle. When we kill Emperors in AQ, we always ensured that each side always had an SM/NS druid, because the survivability of your tank increases so much when you have a druid who can drop a 3k instant heal after a big crushing blow.

Think of how much better of a healer you could have been had you spec'd sufficiently for the role. I have no doubt you were an adequate healer, but if you were matching your guildmates already in feral spec, you would have absolutely pulverized them had you spec'd for it.

There in lies one of the more difficult problems for any good hybrid player. As I mentioned in the shadow priest thread, (and it applies across the majority of hybrids) doing well to excellent with the crappy tools that we're given in an off spec tends to force the most serious players into a place where their efficiency has been tested against such crappy odds for so long, that you've essentially endurance trained them to preform on a higher level than their class mates. A good shadow priest is also going to be a good healer- because otherwise they're simply not that good of a shadow priest. They've got loads of experience compensating for limited healing talents and have worked pretty hard at figuring out what they need to do to stay competitive and still keep the off spec they love.

This doesn't always pan out. You can't play any random feral druid/shadow priest off the street into a raid and expect them to simply dazzle you when they heal. It does pan out more often in high end raiding and with the serious theorycrafting off specs.

You hear it all the time- stories of a 31 point feral druid kicking their resto classmates to the curb with their superior healing. Shadow priests who can pull off patchwerk as a healer without breaking a sweat. Meditation? Who needs meditation! They're the people who can pull it off every week and keep your traditional specs panting and trying to represent the edge they're supposed to have. It's not the talents. It's the players.

On one hand, they're often the only people you can fully trust as an offspec- the ones who will produce the highest results possible every time.
On the other hand, if you take them off thier off spec and give them even mediocre gear, they'll destroy the other healers and laugh while doing it, saying how damn easy it is.

Puts you in a pickle doesn't it? Best priest healer in the guild is also, hands down, the best shadow priest. You've got 2 other people who can do adequately on healing but very meh on shadow. You've got spots for 2 healer priests and 1 shadow priest. Do you give the shadow spot to the phenomenal shadow player and lose the healing edge... or do you give the shadow spot to someone who will half ass it and keep the best healer on healing?

It's a hard question.

If that was actually a realistic question, it would be pretty easy: Put the best player on healing. More attempts are failed by sloppy/imperfect healing than a few percentage of raid dps.

Very few actual scenarios will have so few variables to consider, however.

It doesn't matter that it went to priests or druids, the point is that it was an incredibly powerful talent that was so good that a significant portion of raiding druids were forced to spec 31 restoration just to obtain it. That's hardly a 'filler' talent. A lot of talents don't improve the player's personal power - think PI for another 31 point talent that fits the bill, but they are still very very good.

I agree that out of the top tier talents that I listed it was probably the least powerful, but even if you ignore gift of nature, and consider everything else, restoration is still arguably the best healing tree in the game pre 2.0 in terms of how much stronger a healer it made you. Every single intelligent priest still took SH over MH, because extra healing no matter how tiny is always very nice, now that it has synergy with gear it is incredibly amazing instead of just nice.

Claiming that restoration wasn't worth spec'ing into pre 2.0 is a boldfaced lie, unless you were a fulltime feral druid who healed a very marginal portion of the time in raids.

About Bekah's point:
I don't think doing damage as a shadow is particularly skill intensive, the damage cycle is laughably simple and the threat is constant with no huge spikes. The problem is that expecially pre 2.0 shadow was not quite worthy of a raid spot barring special circumstances or extraordinary effort on behalf of the player, like farming consumables well above what the more mundane damaging classes did. This meant that the player who wanted to shine as a shadow priest tipically had something to prove, and payed more attention to the circumstances rather than being on autopilot, but that only proves something about the player, not the viability of the class. I do think the myth of the 'awesome player who offspecs, while the sheeps take the cookie cutter spec' is well over-stated though.

I personally prefer letting people play whatever spec they would rather take, rather than forcing people into roles they might not appreciate. If that means progressing slower because more of your healers are shadow/feral, or your tanks are fury spec'd, so be it. From a min/max prospective, I'd rather all my best healers were in charge of the healing, simply because I find DPS'ing a much easier job with less responsability.

My guilds holy priests keep me on my toes, they're certainly not sheep. That said, people tend to learn what they need to succeed at what they're currently doing, and advance when it's needed. Caveman didn't need to know how to make a ballgown to survive- so chances are they weren't outfitting their wives in high fashion. Throw a caveman in a ballroom though, and I bet you money they'd do their damnedest to learn how to survive, and one or two might even get lucky before the débutantes ate them. The theorycrafting for WoW has been very progressive, and despite the hundreds of dead horses littering the field, people are still occasionally coming up with bright new ideas.

Any class can be boiled down to simple "hit a button -- you've done your job". What makes some frost mages better than others? It's all spamming the frostbolt button really. Anyone can be adequate at a class. I could probably pick up a well geared 60 rogue and do acceptably well on the damage meters after 5min of explanation. Would I be a good rogue? Certainly not. Knowing how to gear- optimum damage cycles- when it's appropriate to sacrifice what for what- being able to make changes on the fly- when to pot- when to push harder- when to back off, that's important and separates out a good player from an excellent player.

Any player can hit flash heal or mindblast. It's certainly not difficult. The reality of it is, however, that some people are just better than others at "spamming frostbolt".

I do agree, however, with allowing choice =) People tend to do much better when they're happy with what they're doing. I count myself very fortunate that my guild managed to luck into some people who really love healing above all other choices in the game. I don't necessarily understand them, but man I could just kiss them for it. =D

Again, caveman are not any more adapted to survive than modern humans are, they just have different selective pressure. I think I understand your analogy, that given the challenges that a caveman faces on a regular basis, something easier should be nothing in comparison; I disagree with your analogy because I don't think that someone who chooses to offspec is necessarily facing a greater challenge than someone with an optimal raiding spec, and thus will have an easier time when called to perform his 'natural' role.

A great player is a great player regardless of the spec / class he plays. Our raid leader is a great warlock, and one day, one of our main tanks had connection problems and couldn't log in to play, so he logged on our main tank and tanked Emperors flawlessly on his first attempt at the fight. He never played a 60 warrior before, but his first time playing one was tanking twin emperors and he pulled it off.

Granted, that's an extreme example, but if you are a min/maxer by heart, who pays really close attention to all details of the game, odds are with a bit of practice you can transition into any class that you want.
I disagree. The difference between frost mages is not who does the most single target DPS on one mob, but you see it in lateral aspects of gaming. The mage who always instantly frost novas the little bugs on Anub, or the mage who is always instanteous on counterspelling the enemy healers in PvP instead of going for the phat critz. Shadow priests don't have as many gimmick abilities other than their sustained healing/mana returns, what differentiates them for the most part is gear choices/willingness to use consumables/optimizing damage cycles, but I'd argue that the difference between a good shadow priest and a great one is really minimal, assuming both are willing to bear the same burden of consumables.
Again, I think that the difference doesn't show up in the 'spamming frostbolt' fights, but in the fights where you are called to perform differently, and outside of a few fights where silence is amazing, shadow priests are rather monodimensional. Healing usually -

Oh totally. What I said somehow upsets me is that people who somehow choose to play non-conventional specs assume that if you are good at being an offspec, automatically you are a better player than the conventional players in your spec. The analogy used in the post before this is that you are used to playing with a handicap - but again, I find that the people who enjoy offspecs are not necessarily those who enjoy playing with a handicap, but just people who somehow got burnt of playing a support role; I very very rarely see people who play offensive classes get burnt and switch to a support role.

Isn't it the same for any DPS class? Every rogue/hunter/etc has a clear cut optimum cycle that they perform. From a boss fight point of view, ofcourse. And yet there are clearly differences in performance between different players, more than what gear accounts for. Even for "frostbolt spamming".

If you want to talk about lateral decisions and PvP, a shadowpriest has his "gimmick ability" too: healing. Knowing when to drop shadowform and heal in addition to knowing when to fear and silence is what separates a good shadow priest from a great one.

Absolutely, which is why I'd rather have the absolutely best players doing healing or tanking, if given the choice. I already conceeded however that I think those considerations take second place to players wishes, it is more important that people are enjoying what they are doing.
I completely agree. I consider myself a quite good PvP healbot, but I am still completely green at PvP shadow and I am learning nonstop. PvP has a much harder learning curve than anything PvE related, and it is defently a great way to tell the very experienced players from the mediocre ones.

I am sorry, I disagree every bit of the way. Maybe in particular guild set ups, where you were constantly short on melee DPS/tanking, but for guilds who had tanking and DPS covered, and you were healing on challenging content, SM/NS/sustained healing from 10% mana off were absolutely amazing.

I absolutely make do with being shadow spec'd now, and I am enjoying my self sufficiency much more, but I'd be lying through my teeth if I said that being holy didn't make a huge difference in my healing throughput and efficiency.

I think you were just in a very peculiar situation where your guild was consistently short on tanks, and the rest of your healers were incompetent, because there is no other reason why your other optimally spec'd healers were not leaving you in the dust healing wise.

EDIT:
I don't want to make it sound like I think feral druids are useless. I don't, feral druids are amazing, expecially with 2.0, but the sacrifice you make and you had to make was pretty damn huge. We can argue if the payoffs were or weren't worth it, but trying to brush them aside as 'minor' is absolutely insane for me.