The very nature of a HoT means it cannot overheal according to any meter you care to name. It can tick away un-needed sure, but no mod I know of tracks this. Add to this the fact that it is very easy to put instant cast HoT on every member of the raid and you can attain some insane healing figures in ToL.

Pre-TBC I was always within the top 3 on healing as I abused HoT liberally even back then, I daresay I would be ToL now if Blizzard had made the form more enjoyable to use and more feasible in Heroics

meters have always been off. You could still dps the core hound packs in MC remember....

The beauty of a HoT healer is that a regrowth heals 3k crit and another 2.5k in hots filling the last percents on an offtarget (trash member). A HT healer would either overheal or leave some of the HP bar empty (rather the latter).

Or, more likely, your paladin/shaman/priest just flashed healed the balance of the damage and you have 21 seconds of useless HoT ticking. Which in my experience, is the more likely scenario. I have never met the paladin who said "I won't top that rogue up, he has a regrowth ticking".

Normal hot ticks cant overheal, the excess healing is ignored.
Lifebloom final tick(1k~ one) counts as a heal cast by the person who it was cast on, not by you (nor does it get the gift of nature 10% bonus). I could be mistaken but thats what my basic tests seem to show.

Sadly as Lifebloom is one of my primary spells now, I dont rank that highly on healing meters, but I dont really care :P

Could you not ditch Living Spirit for 3 more points in Subtlety?
Or ditch some points in Imp. HT or Tranquil Spirit unless most of the time your not in tree form... in which case you can also ditch spirit :P

Atleast it would be a mix of those which you could sub out to get max Subtlety if I was you.

I doubt I'd really spend that much time in tree form really and I do use healing touch quite a bit still.

As for living spirit, that's one of the things I really want in this build. I'm at 419 with just mark at the moment, which is 516 with divine spirit and kings. Living spirit would push me to 586 or so, giving me a total of 70 spirit which I'd say is pretty significant.

Yes.

To expand on that, if a tank is going to be taking heavy damage, I chain HT rank 7 or so, or bump up the HT as needed. I'm aiming for about 2k to 3k a heal. I respecced recently to have both empowered HT and 10% mana cost reduction on HT, which helps on those 'endurance' fights.

Against some enemies, I'll cancel the heals if the tank isn't actually hurt, but against others like the heroic bog lords, it's just not safe to do so.

What's the best endgame balance/resto spec for a healer? At 63, I'm using this:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=MtMrzicsMZZxEc0ba

Good combination of damage talents and healing talents.

One option at 70 is to go for healing throughput with swiftmend:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=MtMrzicsZZxEc0xqMMo

The other would seem to be dreamstate's mana regen and the Ht talents in resto:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0tMrzissMuZZxEc0xkM

I prefer to heal with healing touch, while using rejuv (or lifebloom, I'm guessing soon) to heal incidental damage on the DPS. Is the regen of dreamstate worth giving the spirit, swiftmend, and gift of nature talent points?

Much of the dilemma I've run into so far with TBC raiding is finding exactly *what* the raid requires of me. When all the feral business got buffed, many of our Druids went feral, while others left the raid game entirely in January.

So we currently have 4 Druids in the guild. The thing with picking specs is that you need to take into account how many Druids you are bringing to a raid, and ensure they are each filling a niche for the healing. It has been better to have a variety of builds amongst us, than all of us specc'd into exactly the same thing.

For example, in my guild is not worth bringing more than 1 tree to a 25-man raid. We don't really use trees at all in Karazhan (there was a couple of occassions, but its not the usual way we approach that instance). The thing with trees, as has been mentioned already, is they are too inflexible.

Now 1 tree healing on the MT on Maulgar, alongside a priest and a paladin is a fair mix. But after several attempts the first couple times, I found it much more efficient and better (read: safer for our tanks vitality) to use HT for healing.

Couple that with the fact that Karazhan is so hybrid friendly, I use a balance/resto spec most of the time so I can maintain effective flexibility. I am usually filling a hybrid heal/dps slot there, so I'm not a main healer. I supplement damage and healing as needed for encounters.

Here's the 1st build I tried: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=MtLrzVcshZZxxctcqb0o

It was very decent and viable, but it didn't do enough in terms of helping damage in Karazhan. I only used this build in that dungeon. Learned the hard way that I may as well have done Moonkin. But at the time I wanted to have stronger HoTs. I just didn't realize that this build didn't have the mana efficiency required to uphold both ends of the bargain at that time.

Here's the 2nd build I tried: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=Mt0rdicsxuZZxxIxho

I went for buffage, mana efficiency, and situational healing. I enjoy this build very much, but it certainly requires a larger intellect pool. Mine is less than optimal, but I'm working on it, and so far, this build has been solid.

For Maulgar, we usually have 2-3 Druids. Two are heal specc'd, one is usually bear. We use 1 tree and 1 HT maxed druid (37 in resto with Natural Perfection). We've gone in with two trees before, but it didn't work out how I thought. Though that Tree Druid doesn't *have* to use tree form, when you spec that deep into Resto, placing those left over points is a sad task; there is rarely any place worth putting them. Which brings me back to our initial issue: speccing balance/resto instead of full resto, since trees have been more of a hinderance to our raids than a help. Perhaps we are not properly assigning the tree roles within the raid. Either way, HoTs seem most useful when used on someone that is not going to be taking a lot of damage (ie, rogues, shamans, other healers, etc).

Right now, I intend to have at least 1 tree in a raid, but that is becoming hard to justify. It is *too* specialized and limiting, not flexible enough.

I dont get why people have trees focusing on the MT, the power of HoTs really only shines when theres primarily 3 people all doing it together. Tree aura while nice in the tank group I've always found better on raid healing because once the HoTs are up they are effectivly doing nothing to help the tank.
Sure while raid healing they can pop off HoTs on the tank, but really your better off having one of your primary tank healers being one who has the ability to instantly heal more than regrowth can when it crits - soley down to the nature of fights now and how much HP tanks have.