Well we only have 1-2 active resto druids, we usually only take one a raid. Shaman also stack very well together. A tremor/grounding for every group helps, we can also cycle the bloodlusts through the dps groups to maximize dps, or cycle mana tide through the healer groups (I don't think we've needed to do this, but it's an option.)

Chain heal also stacks very well. When damage is going around the raid, we have 2 paladins, a druid, and the priest on the tanks, and the 3 shaman to heal the raid.

I think this also depends on the availability of our paladins. Some raids we have 2 resto shaman and 1 dps shaman, others we have 5+ shaman.

In answer to the OP, I have tried out a this build and it just doesn't cut it for raids.

You gain:
40-50 mp/5 depending on your int.

You lose:
About 125-150 +heal
Earthshield
20% to chain heal

In my mind it just doesn't make up for everything you lose.

Imo, the best healing setup for most fights (of course you want more healers for some fights, but let's disregard that for now) would be 3 Restoration Shamans, 3 Holy Paladins, 1 Holy/Discipline Priest (Imp. Divine Spirit and over all a very strong healer).

Yes, no Restoration Druid. But you bring 1-2 Feral Druids instead. I'm maybe a little exaggerating but I really don't like Restoration Druids. Shamans and Paladins just bring so much more. Even a Holy/Discipline Priest brings more. If I could, I'd always raid with the above setup.

Personally, I've found that having one Restoration (Tree) Druid can be fantastic, if they know how to gear for it. The increase to healing received, when placed in the MT group, is a huge boon.

With that said, I prefer to stack Resto Shaman and Paladins as well. I have a couple of decent Holy Priests, but they're not the focal point of my healing team.

Resto druids are very good, lifebloom is silly on certain fights. Look at WWS from our last nights Hyjal:
Wow Web Stats

Werebeef got 16% of the healing done with 21% overheal, Gurg who was second got 12% of the healing done with 51% overheal.

They heal a lot and are very effective. I think it's best to have a variety so you have all of the skills available, it's very nice to have all the different kinds of heals going around. I just think shaman stack better then most classes, specifically healing classes. Theres very rarely a time when too much chain heal is bad.

I think this sentiment was some unqualified theorycraft that spawned with Nihilum's comments. In my experience, the resto Druid is second-to-none at MT healing; their MT healing is so effective that they can free up an entire healer from the duty to focus on other things. Secondly, under the entire gamut of raid healing conditions, I do not believe a resto Druid can be topped in raw healing output except in very specific conditions.

Obviously I haven't justified my thoughts completely as I don't want to completely derail your thread, but the point I'm trying to make is that I believe Bliz wants there to be a balance in the healing classes brought to any given raid as all have roles they can succeed in. Stacking one type of healer is great, but a healing group without one of its tools such as Chain Heal, Prayer, FoL, or HoTs is going to be at a net loss when it tries to stack one and remove an ability.

In the current state of affairs, however, it is very evident that you want 2+ Resto Shaman and 2+ Holy Paladins to have an effective setup. Most raid groups will use 6-9 healers depending on the fight, so this already ties up at least half of the healing spots if not more. I think my guild is the exception to the rule in that we bring only 2 of each right now, but I think if we had the option, we would bring more.

I'm not saying Restoration Druids are bad, of course not. I just don't like their healing style.

Paladins are obviously very good at single target healing; but not so very good at raidwide damage healing.
Shamans on the other hand, are insanely good on raidhealing if the group is more or less close to eachother; not as effective on single target, but they can do the job.
Holy Priests are a bit of a jack of all trades, you can put them on whatever job you like.

Where does this leave a Tree Druid? I mean, why use one - the other classes can do the same thing (if not better, but I'll leave that) and Restoration Druids don't bring anything to the raid over Feral Druids.

That's where my opinion comes from - You bring a Feral for MOTW and combat resses. What would you need a Tree Druid for then? The other classes can just heal as well - and bring some seriously nice buffs to the raidgroup.

This is what I meant with the healing meters and the overall healing %. I was just mentioning the overheal because it was right there in the WWS.

I know I perfer healing in a raid with a resto druid, even though it's harder to top the healing meters. The hots that are spread around are very helpful.

Maybe they are helpful, but unneeded if you run with 3 shamans imo. 3 Chain heals top the raid up extremely fast...

If I'm bringing 8 healers, I want 3 resto shams, 3 holy paladins, 1 holy priest, and 1 tree. Period. If I'm bringing 7, drop down to 2 paladins (or 2 shams if we have DPS shamans present as well, which we always do at least in EJ).

Not having a resto druid is a clear mistake though. The WWS site is crawling for me right now or I'd link our Illidan parse (I linked it on the second page of the Illidan news post thread) from the other day. Rolling lifebloom is awesome and disgusting at the same time.

One tree and two paladins can keep up a tank indefinitely on almost any fight. Add a fourth healer for serious tank spike fights like Azgalor and Mother Shahraz. That leaves the shamans to do what they do best and focus on raid healing, while the priest freelances. That's usually how we set up our healing.

You don't understand -- a resto druid's job is not to top off the raid. It's to heal tanks. Keeping the lifebloom rolling is everything, and that requires fairly focused attention. A druid can toss off a quick regrowth or whatever if someone else needs an emergency spot heal, but his attention should remain focused on a few specific targets. The parse Teewee linked has Werebeef basically just keeping lifeblooms rolling on all the trash tanks throughout the waves. It's an unbeatable amount of healing.

That's the point. It's a bit like the current hunter scorpid trickery, or pre-TBC rolling ignites. You can pop trinkets and start a 3-stack lifebloom or two. If you then make sure to never let them expire (reach the "big" heal at the end) you can keep refreshing the duration of the 3-stack at its original value. Let it expire, and you have to restack it, but just keep it rolling forever and the HPS and HPM are amazing. Also the rapid ticking serves to smooth out tank healing and cushion against spikes in between the direct heals from other classes.

This is what one minute of healing might look like as a result:

Wow Web Stats

I would stick to the spec you leveled with at first, and do what you can to group with priest healers so you can build your healing set. It won't take but a few drops before you have a decent set.

IMO, it's a lot of time and effort to waste to level up tailoring just to get that gear.

Right now, I'm not even in full Kara gear, and I have just shy of 10k armor. That's ridiculous. And more importantly, it's awesome to have for instances where a stray mob might start hitting you. As a healer, if you go down, unless you have a backup, it's a wipe, so survivability is very important. Try to run some instances to fill in the gaps, or, just buy some green mail pieces with +healing or +mp5 on them for now. Another item you can buy at the AH is Crystal Pulse Shield - Items - World of Warcraft which will last you until the Triptych Shield of the Ancients - Items - World of Warcraft from the chess event in Kara (got mine last night... WOOT!).

Just some ideas. I'm ok with going leather as Enhanc because Blizz fails to give us good options in mail gear, but our mail resto gear is great (and sometimes better than equivalent-level cloth healing gear), so I recommend sticking with it.

Yeah, it seems as if Blizzard has figured out what we need to be successful healers and give us exactly what we need. Kara mail healing gear gives us a perfectly good set to start raiding with, and it just continues on through Hyjal/BT.

I realise this is a very strong potential, but heck - We always run with 3 paladins and they can heal a tank forever too.

I'm a bit biased I guess, because I've yet to see a good druid put this in action.

With 8 healers it's obvious the 8th is a resto druid. The hard call is when you run with 7 as having 3 pallies in your raid is very very very good for buffs. Granted the 3rd buff isn't as useful as the first 2 but still adding kings to all DPS, salv to all healers and might on tanks (on top of the light/kings on tanks + salv/wisdom/might on dps + wisdom/kings on healers you should already have with 2 pallies) is a big help. Will a resto druid heal more and be useful with his aura? Maybe, but remember it comes at a cost of more than just replacing the big pally direct heals with druid HoTs.

OMG is the thread about Shaman resto spec or about Druids and Paladins?

Well really we're talking about how we can justify to bring 3 resto shaman along, which means we need to talk about what the other healers can bring to the group vs us.

I Paladin, and the 3rd Paladin Blessing (usually Kings I guess) is always nice to have. And Tree Druids are very good healers if they know what they are doing.

If there is a lot of single target healing to be done, I am not sure that more than 2 resto Shamans is a good idea. We don't do it anyway, but even if we wanted to we could not, since we have only 2 Resto Shamans in the guild .

Our typical Raid healing setup looks like this:

- 1-2 Resto Druids

- 1-2 Holy Priests

- 2-3 Holy Paladins

- 1-2 Resto Shamans

On fights were more healing is needed we usually fill up with Paladins/Druids.

I found lately that it is very hard for othe rhealing classes to keep up when I start the Chain Heals. Hydross (especially nature phase, and both phases on melee tanks), Void Reaver on melee tanks.

With a SP in group I can just pretty much spam heal Chain Heal rank 5, LHW rank 7 to top off single targets and Healing Wave rank 9 or 10 to heal tanks.

Blah, I've been delaying respeccing - but lately I've been really tempted. When I died on Supremus this week (yeah, lol I know) if I would've taken 100 less damage I would've lived.

However, I'm not sure what talents I want to drop to get 8 points to put in Elemental to get Elemental Warding.
I'm quite fond of some of my talents, noteworthy being Nature's Guardian, Focused Mind and Improved Reincarnation. Doesn't leave me much to drop. Totemic Focus is a no brainer, those are filler points anyway. But then the other points would have to come from Tidal Mastery and I'm not too sure if it's worth it. I mean, quite often I use [Totem of the Maelstrom] together with Rank 1 Healing Wave to get Ancestral Fortitude and Healing Way stacked up on a tank quickly and therefor 5% crit is rather nice.

Do any of you think it's worth dropping that to get -10% damage taken from Fire, Frost and Nature? I mean, in BT/MH there is a shitload of that damage flying around... but still, I'm not too sure.

Anyone that can convince me? :p

We run with two resto druids/shamans, one holy priest and two to three paladins most of the time, and in addition to that we always have one enhancement shaman. The only fight I've actually preferred three shamans is Archimonde, and we're still learning him. Druid healing is amazing, they seem to be in the top four regardless of the fight type, be it aoe or single target dps. I've yet to be out healed on hyjal wave trash though, at least the times where I manage to stay focused for the entire event (It's getting increasingly hard on the first bosses).

Now, to my actual question: Are there any resto shaman spreadsheets around? I've been looking for one for ages, and I still can't seem to find one.

Yeah I found one in Binkensteins *forgot the name of it*

Anyway: ://files-upload.com/400040/shamstats.xls.html