Heres a little bit of theorycraft (ok bear with me please).

At around 1400 +heal (obtainable with dungeon blues, rep rewards, +18 heal gems and +healing enchants) lifebloom ticks for roughly 200 hp/second. Next patch this will stack 3x for 600 hp/second. Say you are in a 25 man and you have 6 resto druids - have them all stack lifebloom to the maximum on the main tank (recasting every 6 seconds to keep it going) and you get 600x6 = 3600 healing... per second, every second. Throw in 2/5 moonglade and have the druids toss on rejuvenation to the MT, and your tank gets an additional ~12% to dodge and 4800 hp rejuvenation ticks every 3 seconds. Even with an extreme burst encounter such as maulgar, your tank is going to be gaining over 5000 hp per second, and of course there is the option to toss in regrowths and or swiftmends when necessary to counter additional unforeseen burst damage.

The kicker? This can be sustained almost indefinitely in tree form, with a shadow priest, flask of mighty restoration, and pot usage for lengthy encounters. It also only uses only 3 global cooldowns every 12 seconds, meaning that each druid will have another 2 GCD's (accounting for latency) to toss out hots to other raid members as necessary.

The added bonus to this is that each druid has an innervate, meaning they have a second mana pool available on demand, and a combat rez to bail out any people who f***ed up and got themselves killed.

Admitted problems with this strategy:
1) Buff limit. I'm not positive how many buff slots a fully raid buffed tank will have in 2.1 after the consumable nerf, before HoTs might knock him out of defensive stance or remove fort/imp/food buffs.

2) Lack of Druids - lets face it druids are the least played class. Pure restoration druids are even harder to find. Telling your healers to reroll a druid, level to 70 and gearing him out probably isn't the most convenient option for most guilds.

I was playing around with this today before work. My lifeblooms were ticking for just over 500 with a 3 stack, and that's with like 1250 healing.

Rejuvs were ticking for like 800, so that's another 267 health per second.

If you always have a triple stack of lifeblooms and rejuv up, that's 767 hps in my gear. Taht sounds pretty good, but on the other hand, I don't think that's better than what you can do with healing touch, which has the added benefit of being able to spell cancel and get outside the 5 second rule.

It's definitely going to be a cool toy to play around with and I was impressed by it on the PTR. But once I started thinking about it, I don't think it's going to make us anywhere near as good as paladins are right now.

Speaking as a mage who changed mains to a resto druid in TBC, yes you are right. I can't main heal a tank in ToL form right now, I'm mostly just a HoT buffer to ease healing for other healers, and an extremely efficient way to keep people topped up against aoe damage with lifebloom spam. Granting +100 heal to the MT doesn't hurt either. However, 2.1 Lifebloom will be very reliable when stacked, in that it ticks every second, for a very respectable amount of health. Once you start stacking up the trees to replace other healers you can in theory reach a level where the tank is receiving excessively large quantities of healing in a very short time frame... constantly, consistently, and for virtually no mana. This type of healing will be (in my opinion) far more reliable then having multiple independent healers casting long heals and canceling if necessary. Having multiple swiftmends available also gives the healers the oh shit buttons necessary to keep the tank up in case of extreme bursts.

You'd still need to have 1-2 other healers to cover tank transitions (while the lifebloom stacks are being built up), among other things.

You will never have more than 2 healing druids in any given 25 man raid, purely because of class balance, unless you are missing classes which is generally bad. Who are you going to replace ? Priests still provide far superior raw healing (not to mention faster), consistent and reliable aoe healing, shields etc. Paladins are needed for blessings and shamans for totems/heroism. Druids bring almost nothing to the table to compensate for those benefits. Even our decursing and depoisoning abilities are hardly utilized (only thing that comes to mind is a nasty poison of a certain trash mob in SSC). Combat res is nice and handy but for the most part, modern encounters encourage a "learn not to die" philosophy. On top of that, I can't really remember when was the last time an innervate was asked of me by any other healer. My point is, the classes you mean to replace for your experiment are protected classes that fulfill a role that a druid cannot fulfill at the moment.

As for lifebloom, yes, 3 stacks of lifebloom can tick for a lot but the mana cost is also heavy and can become quite tedious on long encounters. As has been stated hots are not always reliable for MT healing. You need very good timing if you want to take advantage of the lifebloom "bomb", else its pretty much wasted mana since your target is getting overhealed by other classes (yes paladins for the most part).

That's not completely accurate. Tree of Life's failings are more related to the lack of abolish and decurse. HoTs are powerful and should be used regularly, especially on the MT.

Consider a Lifebloom stacked up to 600 healing/second. Assuming the burst from a boss is unable to kill the tank in less than 2 seconds, that's about as good as adding a flask to the tank, as he's guaranteed to get two ticks of this HoT during the burst cycle.

I couldn't give numbers on other bosses, but when I tank Maulgar, I'm taking around 1400-1500 sustained DPS. Figure 50% avoidance and multiply out by crushes, and you're looking at a potential maximum burst of 4000 DPS. If Maulgar is not able to kill me from maximum health to zero in less than 3 seconds, then you can add on all the 3 second HoTs as mitigation as well. At around 1500 healing, a ToL Druid can throw up around 1000 Healing/Second between a Regrowth HoT, a Rejuv, and a Lifebloom. 4 Druids spec'd this way would keep me up in this situation no matter what else happened, as long as they maintained their HoTs.

Finally, HoTs are critical for times when healers need to move around. Not every fight is Patchwerk where healers focus on one healing bar and never worry about other raid members, AoE damage, or moving.

We generally find that in fights where a tank can get bursted down, heavy HoT usage cuts down on our problems significantly.

Tedious yes, heavy mana cost no. I suggest transfering to the PTR, respeccing full ToL, put on some decent mp/5 gear (I have a little over +100 mp/5 while casting, unbuffed, in my +heal gear), and stand around Darnassus spamming lifebloom on yourself. Even without innervate it will probably take you a couple of minutes to go out of mana. Lifebloom is practically free, and thats the beauty of it - while you can compare it to healing touch/canceling in terms of pure hps, and HT will come out on top, think of how many times someone in your raid might've cancelled a spell that would've saved a wipe.

Also I really wouldn't understimate the effect that multiple 2 piece moonglade bonuses can have on your tanks avoidance. I've tested it, and it does stack between rejuvenations from different druids.

As for a general lack of druids and of course the general crapiness of raid stacking, yes I acknowledge those problems, but this is theorycraft after all.

I would be stupid to disagree with such a point, and I don't. My contention was that lifebloom changes hardly make trees the new paladins. I definitely should've elaborated more, but here are some things to consider.

Non-tree healing druids will also benefit from the lifebloom changes, and can keep up rejuvenations, etc. in addition to the ability to use healing touch, which is still one of our best spells. The extra efficiency tree receives while casting hots is easily offset by use of consumables and smart group composition. So what is it's actual benefit? You get more +healing on all of your hot spells and your group members all have amp magic without the downside. Think of all the times when the tank needs burst healing, exactly what hots are not sufficient for(things like hydross and leotheras where the tank can take upwards of 7k dps in a short timespan), would you rather have slightly more efficient and potent hots on a tank or the ability to heal for 8k in less than 2 seconds(ns+ht+swiftmend)? I'll take the latter every time.

HoTs are incredibly powerful - that I do not dispute, they are just ill-suited to heal tanks for most fights in which the tank is in danger of taking immense spikes in short periods of time.

Additionally funball, I haven't tanked Maulgar in a few weeks, but I seem to remember being crushed and then arcing smashed less than a second after for about 6k each(maybe more). Those numbers may be off, and I'll have to actually tank it again before I can answer definitively, but it would seem he's capable of putting out alot more than 4000 dps, no? Is there something painfully obvious that I'm forgetting?

Also, I'm sorry for derailing this into a 'tree sucks' thread.

That is a bad trap to fall into. You might as well say that you can spec 0/0/0 and just compensate for your lack of talent points with consumables. If you want to make that argument, it should be something along the lines of "Any extra efficiency tree receives while casting hots is offset by the extra efficiency that you gain by speccing into balance for moonglow and dreamstate, not to mention the ability to actually switch gear and do some damage if needed."

Obviously as a druid with 41+ points in resto, I'd have to agree that tree form could use some buffs... not being able to remove poison or decurse, among other things, drives me absolutely insane. The fact that its actually worse than useless in PvP is also extremely lame (yes I actually heal as a resto druid in PvP, please don't mock me).

I am 27/0/34... I smoke pure resto druids constantly. Tree just cannot keep up with a smart hybrid druid. Even our feral/restos can sometimes beat the tree druids.

I'm not going to derail anymore, but tree really stinks, IMO.

That is accurate, however that is limited burst. By that I mean, he can only use those abilities periodically.

4000 DPS is a back of the napkin calculation for "sustained burst". This means, given a 1500 DPS average, 50% total avoidance, and 15% potential crush rate, what could his DPS be over the course of 10-20 seconds if everything hit and everything crushed?

Since the 1500 DPS average also includes the damage from his specials, his auto attack DPS would be lower. We can safely assume that when you enter into a burst damage zone from a special, you'll start at full health, be bursted down low, and then come back up to full in 2-4 seconds. Not much different than with direct heals.

All that being said, ToL needs help.

Sustainability is pretty easy for a resto druid. In tree form lifebloom costs a whopping 174 mana and you'll get anywhere from 2000-3000 healing per cast depending on if you're letting it bloom, or refreshing a three stack.

You kill your FSR regen keeping one rolling, but with innervate giving around 9000 mana you can see how it's not terribly difficult to keep up.