I've never felt that end-game healing is affected by threat. The most threat sensitive fight I've experienced so far has been Hydross on phase changes and Morogrim with his murloc adds (I'm 5/6 SSC 2/4 TK).

Are reduced threat talents worth spending the points for? More specifically, are there fights that I haven't done that absolutely require subtlety?

I've always been with the school of thought that if healers pull aggro, it's either bad luck or the tank's fault. There's really only 2 scenarios where healers can pull aggro (clever boss designs that I haven't seen/heard/read about aside): at the beginning of the fight, and upon aggro wipes. In both cases, if the healer could do enough effective healing to pull aggro, the tank probably needed it AND missed his very first few threat generation abilities. Boss abilities like adds summoning can be sidestepped easily with Paladins with righteous fury up (if tanks don't pick them up fast enough).

So are there scenarios where Subtlety is more than just a talent point sink? Or is it a tag with which you can identify people who have no idea how to spend their talent points?

EDIT: In addition, the multiplicative manner with which it stacks with Blessing of Salvation makes it even less appealing.

So far my experience with other Druid healers in raids is that even if I had Righteous Fury on (which I do in most cases), the Druids tend to generate enough threat to surpass my threat level in some cases (and often leading to death). This happens when my healing throughput is relatively low (when using mostly FoL). In this case a Druid with HoTs on multiple players often can generate more threat than a Paladin spamming FoL with RF on.

A Paladin spamming (and more importantly, landing without much overhealing) HL with RF on will generate enough threat to counter any other healers' threat though.

The biggest perk to threat reduction talents, enchants and gear is the ability to laugh at the OTHER healer who dies when a loose random trash mob isnt picked up by a tank and two or three shots another player. That was one of my most frustating issues in 1.0 that in AQ, it would always be me on my druid who would die when 4 priests ping pong faded a random bug onto me.

In a true raid situation, say, on a boss, the only real threat issue is immediately on a pull/transition if the tank gets miss miss parry and has hots ticking on him with no PoM. Your statement is 99% accurate 'I've always been with the school of thought that if healers pull aggro, it's either bad luck or the tank's fault'.

As a Resto Shaman I find my threat reducing talents worthless. I am usually above the other healers on threat with or without the threat reduction from my talents, but it shouldn't be an issue. The only situations where it could become a problem are:

Every ability the tank has to generate opening threat on a mob failing.
Every ability the tank has to re-generate threat on an aggro wipe fail.
A mob becoming uncontrolled through a tank dieing
A mob becoming uncontrolled through a CC'er dieing or failing to re-CC.

Aside from why the mob gets loose... IF a mob is running around with one healer on the top of his threat list the chance's are that there are other healers right under him anyways. As a mail wearer, with the ability to self rez if needed, I would rather have the mob come running to me than the squishy priest.

It makes me think of the idea that you don't have to run faster than the bear you just have to run faster than your slowest friend. The only people your competing with in threat as a healer is other healers. If one of you has top threat there is a high chance all of you do and more than likely it's not your fault (unless you were the one that let the tank die!) and there is nothing you can do about it, he's gonna knock you down one by one.

It'll be noticable in Hyjal on the trash waves... and quite honestly with misdirect nowdays its hard to get agro on a pull even with a NS heal after the first hit.

Basicly any fight with adds or agro resets the talents will help, the enchant however I deem useless and prefer 15SR.

The only time I notice healers dieing to agro is on Hyjal trash, everything else... not really.

I've seen this, too.

Recently, I've noticed our druids pulling aggro reasonably often on trash, especially in Hyjal. I always have my BoP trigger ready, not for mages, but for them. It might be worth it for them to get Subtlety to cloak, if they don't already have it. I'm sure they already have the talents, though.

Subtlety is good for places where there is lots of loose trash, and anything with aggro wipes.
Aggro wiping trash = dead Resto Druid.

Once upon a time, deep underground in a place called Ahn'Qiraj, 2 resto druids used to venture into the trash that lay beyond the Twin Emperors. The two druids used to die horribly on each pull, while the paladins and priests would laugh as they rezzed the druids. One day, one of the druids decided to respec, and put 5 points into Subtlety. When next our brave heroes entered the caves past the Emperors' thrones, now only one of the druids died.

Subtlety works.

One place where threat reduction talents are very useful is in 5-person instances. Most people on this forum probably don't care too much about that but the extra threat reduction does give you a larger buffer if the pull is huge, the tank is poor, or if things just generally go pear-shaped.

(I haven't see Hyjal but I can imagine the trash waves being similar in that there will be many more mobs than there are tanks. Of course, the "some healer is going to get aggro anyways" argument applies there and perhaps having a pally put up RF solves some or most of the squishy healer troubles.)