A lot of resto druids I've talked to say that they found it difficult to mainheal 5-man heroics as a Tree of Life until they got a certain amount of +healing, as the mana costs for shifting in and out of ToL to cast Healing Touch is pretty nasty. My plan is to grind up to 70 and mainheal instances as a balance/resto hybrid (with dreamstate, lunar guidance, and nature's grace in balance, and maxed out Healing Touches in Resto tree). After I get a certain amount of +healing, I'll switch and go full resto for Tree of Life. My focus would be on doing instances and raiding.

My question for experienced resto druids is what amount of +heal is required to make Tree of Life healing viable with a minimum amount of shifting back to caster form?

Hrm, I'm not sure I'm exactly what you're after - my tree is my alt - but I did use him as my raiding main for 1½ years before BC so I'm hopefully not that far off from being an experienced druid even in the Lifebloom Era. At about 1250 +heal I almost never shift out to HT-spam in heroics & Kara, which is about as hard it gets for me. I don't think I've ever done a non-heroic 5-man encounter where I felt HT-spam was needed since the Lifebloom patch (err, 2.1?) hit when my druid was around L64, however he did start BC with 900ish +heal or so which isn't exactly standard for alts. I've also strenously avoided pugs and only instanced with people I know. This has probably made a difference.

Even if I did have to regularly HT-spam on more encounters I doubt I'd want to go Dreamstate, for a couple of reasons. One, there are "difficult" heroic encounters - first boss in Crypts, Kargath, etc - where the damage is spread enough for bloom-spam to be a superior tactic to HT-spam even for a Dreamstate druid. Two, the fact that I have swiftmend and better blooms & rejuvs when I do go caster form to HT counters a lot of the HT efficiency difference. Three, for the vast majority of instancing just spamming blooms with occasional Rejuvs & Swiftmends on the tank is all you need to stay on top of things and in those situations trees have a level of efficiency and ease-of-play that's pretty much peerless.


Also, this question is possibly a bit too narrow to merit it's own thread. As that's apparently not enough to inhibit my reply reflex, I wonder: is replying to a narrow thread a positive act as doing so might cause the thread to spark an interesting broader discussion or a negative act as it prolongs the agony of the narrow thread and keeps other, better threads from their rightful place on the first page?

I was dreamstate resto while lvling and up until I had +1850 heals, and they have many advantages over tree of life. Here are some that i have noticed, scince I changed over to tree of life

* - +50 MP5 more then tree form (I had mostly PVP gear, which has no spirit and lotsa intellect)
* - The ability to CC quickly & cheaply i.e. Cyclone, Hibernate (increases your usefulness in 5-man heroic especially when tank looses agg)
* - The ability to remove Curses and cast NS+HT without shifting (its BS not being able to remove curses as a tree)
* - The ability to actually do some damage if needed (I've switched to boomkin to help dps on a few occasions i.e. for the 3rd boss on H-slabs.)
* - With my gear I also had around +800dmg which allowed me to join groups as dps when there was already a healer.

I hear about people saying this is a healing touch build, however I never used it because it was slow, you get knockback, its harder to heal multiple targets and its nowhere near as mana efficent as lifebloom. Putting talent points into HT is a waste and if you skip it you can almost as much points into your hot's as a tree of life druid, bar Empowered Revujenation, Living Spirit & Improved Regrowth. I found that so long as the tank was able to keep agg I never needed increase my HPS using HT.

With +1850 heals(incl +120 heals from Lunar Guidance) I was doing about as much healing as a tree of life druid with +1600 heals. When I changed to tree of life I gained around +10 heals per tick off my lifebloom, which isn't game breaking. I think the most significant advantage I gained from going to tree of life was getting swiftmend and 20% mana cost reduction on Hots. When you are only casting hot's(raiding) this more then makes up for the extra 50 MP5 I got as dreamstate.

So the question whether to go dreamstate (w Boomkin) or tree of life I would say go dreamstate just because its way more fun. Plus when you get attacked by those cheap shoting rogues while your doin your dailies you can go boomkin and make them your B....! However when you get a good amount of +heals (>1600) and your serious about raid healing I would go tree of life.

Just use Regrowth in ToL instead of HT in a dreamstate build. The reduced mana cost in tree is far superior to the mana regen in dreamstate - 50 mp5 is nothing (I never ever asked for BoW in heroics or kara, but rather salvation since mana is so easy to come by after the regen buffs).
A regrowth+swiftmend is a lot stronger and faster than HT anyway. 3 seconds to land a heal is a joke.
And if you find you need the HT spam for some obscure fight, it's quite easy to do it even without a few extra mp5 - you can still grab the HT talents in deep resto.

As for crowd control - I find feral charge and bash far superior to cyclone in heroics.