I discovered that if you start a lifebloom stack with a trinket up, or other buffs on your healing, then it keeps the bonus as long as the stack does not expire. Due to this, it would easily be possible to have lifebloom ticking for 800+ health per second on three seperate tanks, and you would never run out of mana. You could also keep a rejuv on each of them, which adds a fair bit more healing and allows for a swiftmend, but this will really start to eat into your mana. Still, with a SP and a shaman, I would think a druid could go a good 10 minutes with 3 lifebloom + rejuv on 3 different tanks constantly. This would be the role for a druid to fill.

Ofcourse the big downside is the reduced movement speed and the need to be within 40 yards of each tank.

I don't think anyone is really arguing with you about the flexabilty of paladins. I would say a skilled/geared healer can fill just about any roll. The reason paladins are most suited for single target healing (ie MT) is that they have a limited variety of heals. What pallies lack in variety they make up in endurance, and endurance is extremely important.

What paladins lack in MT healing is Inspiration or Ancestrall Healing. They make it up in LoH, but that is a highly situational spell to be used before enrages and such and be then reuturned to healing game with Fel mana potion + Dark rune.

Constant Ancestral Healing / Inspiration would mean considerably easier boss kills in most situations where most of the danger comes from spikedamage to tank.

The bad itemization for +crit on resto gear(not just mail, cloth or leather also) really cuts down on the effectiveness of Ancestral Fortitude, even with multiple shaman in the raid. T4 has no spell crit, T5 has 62 rating which is nice, and then T6 has no spell crit at all again. Sometimes I can't help but question what goes through the item designers' heads when they make decisions like that. I haven't looked into T6 equivalent pieces to see if there are off-set items w/ a spell crit flavor but the utter lack of it in most cases really kills most of the potential of the talent.

Yeah, Inspiration uptime certainly doesn't seem to be what it used to be. I guess this is a combination of less MT healers than in 40-man raids, and generally lower critrate figures for Priests and Shaman. Also, as the emphasis at least for Priests has shifted to slower heals to regen more mana (bye bye 3-set old school Trans bonus! ) that contibutes even further to the "problem." Back in Naxx and AQ40, I remember running with 7 Priests in a raid, all spamming Heal 2--Inspiration really wasn't much of a problem then!

I'd imagine that perhaps healing gear might start getting more crit "bonus" itemization as we move forward and the primary +healing/mp5 stats start becoming more or less insignificant upgrades in future gear tiers.

Just wanted to add a bit tot he discussion

First comment i have is to HoT's
Ive been aware of the usage of HoT's as lost all its meaning from a long time ago, and you will probably bash me for this comment, but there is a 95% chance that a target getting a HoT WILL get a direct heal afterwards. My personal experience is HoT's being roughly worse in heal/per mana for me then even flash heal.
This is based on SWstats mana efficience tap.

Secondly: Crit on priest/shamans
Ive done some calculations on crit vs. mana regen in my own case as a priest.
17000 / (17000+400+85*(70+4.5*(70-59))) = 61,6892% DR
17000*25% / ((17000*25%)+400+85*(70+4.5*(70-59))) = 66,8081% DR

Giving a difference of 5,1189% DR for 15 seconds. In between these 15 seconds you tank has a chance
of getting hit 6/7 times(dependable on inspiration buff proc vs. the boss's swing, and the boss having
attack speed of 2)
Most warriors will have 50% to avoid this from dodge/parry/miss chance(not counting block as it doesnt
avoid the damage completely) which brings it down to 3/3.5 hits on the tank while having the buff.
Lets estimate the boss hits for 6k, then there will be a total of 18000/21000k damage incoming.
The inspiration buff will then give a difference of 921,411/1074,98 damage.
As a priest, i have a roughly mana efficiency of 9 heal per mana, meaning i will save 102,38/119 mana.

This will mean in my case, for each %crit i have, i can save 102/119 mana.

To gain 1% crit, i need to pay 22.1 item value wise, which is equalevant to 8,44 mp/5.
Comparing this to eachother, we can take an encounter on 10 mins, where as i will probably cast 250 spells.
Now, what will be most efficient for me, 1% crit or 8.44mp/5

1% crit which gives me at "highest" 119 mana. From casting 250 spell i will have 2.5 crits, taking im lucky
and all these are on the main tank, i will get the effect what is equilevant to 297,5 mana "returned"

8.44mp/5 will give me 1012,8 mana, if taking into account im not having full mana at any time.

Conclution is: The mp5 equilevant to crit rating will give me 3.4 times the mana in this case.
This is ofc. only based on some assumption i made up. I didnt take overhealing nor how much i gained from the crittet spell if it werent crittet. But if the heal isnt overheal, i would gain 1.5x the mana efficiency of the crittet heal, but i dont think it would turn the table. Also its only based on i alone would gain, not taking into account what the other healers in the raid would gain from it.

BoL makes a huge difference to the amount of healing a paladin puts out.

Unless you have a very large number of paladins on a raid-- 4 or more-- BoL has to compete with other important blessings. Every class wants at least 3 other blessings to aid its own performance more than it wants BoL to make incoming paladin heals more efficient.

That means that, unless you have so many paladins that some of them are probably healing raid anyway, you don't get BoL on raid-members that aren't tanks.

The idea that shamans cannot single target or "tank" heal is rediculous. With Earthshield and 15% from healing way shamans can do exceptionally well at single target healing. The only type of healing that shamans actually lack is HoTs which as posted earlier are not as efficient.

The paladin has the fastest small heals in the game, which to me shouts top up healing on things like periodic slow raidwide damage. Chainheal hits so big that it's real use shines on large spikey AoE damage. Healing way, for the uninitiated, generates 5% additional healing from Healing Wave and stacks up to 3 times. That gives shamans huge single target advantages when allowed to focus on one person. Also the paladin speedy heal talent stacks on the pally themselves and not the target of the heal making them the choice for multi target top up heals.

I discovered this as well, and on fights like Gruul and Magtheridon where I can position myself to have at least 2 tanks in range I can spit out some pretty crazy healing with only Lifebloom and Rejuv. Essentially I spend most boss encounters watching the timer bar for when my lifebloom will expire and hitting those people again before it times out. And with only 2 tanks to alternate between I can throw out extra lifeblooms on DPS if/when they take damage. If I only have to heal one tank, I time it so I stay outside the 5 second rule while maintaining the lifebloom stack which, given my spirit regen, means I could go for hours maintaining that one lifebloom stack. Basically I don't run low on mana until I have to start hitting rejuvs and swiftmends or start spamming to mitigate raid damage.

True Branar, Inspiration is a really nice buff and nice addition, but i just wanted to prove that its crit is not "worth" going for as it will gimp the priest/shaman majorly while going for it. But i dont think 5% is worth calling a "worst case scenario saver" as its depended on the priest actualy landing that crit at the time you need it, which in most cases doesnt happen.

Ofc, priests can use inner focus to gain 25% crit, but most priest, me atleast, use inner focus to get outside FSR or staying outside it for a period of time.

On another note - what do people generally have their non-tree Resto druids doing? (note: "Benchwarming" and "People spec that for raiding?" are acceptable answers =P)

Our seems to focus mostly on MT healing - maintaining a stack of HoTs, spamming the appropriate rank of HT, swiftmending and NS+HTing where necessary.