This is written with HC progression in mind, your mileage may vary

I've been messing around with a few of the trinkets and I've come to the same conclusion, they don't seem proc off over-healing. This drops their value a bit, will need to confirm. Most trinkets this tier seem pretty bad, I'm waiting for HC trinkets before upgrading anything major (beyond the valor option for specific reasons).

It's always worth it to weave them into your rotation when you have downtime. Remember that dropping a fully charged set of mushrooms can even be used to top yourself instantly, or a tank if you feel like micromanaging that badly. It's not as black and white as "We don't really stack on this encounter, therefore don't use them".
That said, remember that they rely on overhealing from rejuv, which is wasted HPS. It's merely a catchup mechanic you can abuse if you play smartly.

T14 2p: Godly. The mana you save while spamming rejuv makes this really worth keeping untill ilvl and T15 4p is an option.
T14 4p: Believe it or not, the once-hated playstyle of SotF is actually quite powerful now, I have been experimenting with it since t14 farm and I'm pleasantly surprised. With the enhanced haste bonus I'm seeing WG really picking up the pace. It's still not comparable to RJ during heavy raid damage fights but there is almost always an overlooked ability where 5-7(I'm talking 25man here) people take about 1/3 of their health in damage. Timing your SM to land on melee and dropping a WG on the raid just after a damage spike is amazing and really fills the gap in our repertoire for spike healing groups.

T15 2p: Pretty useless. Efflorescence healing was great in DS but it's pretty lacklustre compared to our other options.
T15 4p: If you can get this, GET IT. As stated previously this boosts your RJ by around 19%. If not for DPS having tier priority during progress I would have pushed hard to get 4p. (Value of LFR T15 pieces vs HC ilevel T14 should still be taken into account).

My plan: Stick with T14 4p SotF abuse for now. The mana gain during progress outweighs the benefits and stretch it takes to get T15.
As soon as T15 becomes a definite option, and only when I get all 4 pieces(chest is offset this time), will I switch over to T15 and Incarnation.

Lastly, as for Trinkets and RPPM, go have a look at the resto shaman subforum as well as Hamlet's RPPM writeup. There have been some great insights from both.

Hamlet's RPPM post
5.2 Healing Trinket Compendium/

PS: The WeakAuras string for mushroom management earlier in this thread is brilliant, thanks!

There is also an addon: ShroomHelper

When are people thinking about shifting from regen gemming to throughput gemming?

Sitting on 11.7k spirit and the fights in ToT normal this week varied from sitting on tons of mana to struggling for mana near the end of fights, not sure how other people feel.

Seems incredibly high. It depends on comp a bit, whether you have mana tide and hymn available and how much weight the other healer/s are pulling. If you're using 2 regen trinkets (I don't know what else you would have at this point) you should be able to get to a point where you're comfortable with mana at around 7k spirit. Also depends on dps and length of fights of course. The 4.7k spirit would net you around an 8% healing boost from mastery, at a guesstimate. If you're ooming on 11.7k with regen trinkets you are probably using regrowth without clearcasting too much or not managing your innervate/trinkets/cds well enough. (or your dps are standing in fire)

So keep using hybrid spirit gems in blue slots but you shouldn't need spirit anywhere else.

You have 2672 spirit in gems, minus the purified which you would keep. And you're reforged for +600 spirit. I don't know if you could reforge for more mastery from spirit without gaining unnecessary haste (offhand is the only place I can see), but reforgelite or something might be able to sort out a process to keep you close to cap.

As for why? You're underutilizing innervate. You miss 1 or 2 innervate CDs on every logged ToT fight. 2 on Durumu, 1 on Primordius, 1 on Animus, 2 on each Qon and Consorts. 2 on Meg and 1 on Ji-Kun. Pick up the innervate usage and you can afford to drop spirit for throughput.

Losing the gems you lose ~3015mp5. That's around 253k mana on a 7 minute fight, in which you are currently missing often losing 2 innervates for 120k total. So taking away 1280 spirit (half the spirit from gems and therefore ~126k worth of mana on a 7 minute fight) from your green gems and prismatic sockets nets you a "free" 640 intellect, while allowing you to cast the exact same number of spells. If you are actually finishing the fights on half mana or above (really wish you could see this through logs somehow) losing the rest of your blue gems for purifieds, swapping your meta over to the intellect crit and reforging your offhand to mastery from spirit should see you, again, able to cast the exact same number of spells while gaining another 500 intellect or so.

Anyway tl;dr: Drop at least the 1280 Spirit. This is absolutely free SP and crit. The rest is conjecture but I think you stand to benefit from losing more.

Of course as you are you're destroying meters as you are (so jealous of your gear :X) but certainly if your healing team is struggling on heroic fights that last around 7 minutes you would want to make the switch without hesitation. For longer fights you'll have to do your own math but I would imagine keeping the spirit may be beneficial. For shorter fights, well, no way in hell do you need 12k spirit with regen trinkets.

Also, your priests aren't using Hymn of Hope. That's 27200 mana, assuming you get targeted. Time innervate with it for another free 6 k mana. If your shadow priest pops it as well then you're looking at 54400 mana and on the 10+ minute fights where you can fit 2 in that's 108k. If you pop it during heroism you can gain extra tick and if the disc priest pops a shield for BT they can gain another tick and a shorter channel. Don't quote me on the ticks, I haven't played disc much since cata but since they're % based buffs they shouldn't have changed. You also don't have a Tide in your group, but that may be unavoidable.

Anyway I'm rambling. Point is, mana restoration abilities are there for a reason and spirit stacking is a suboptimal substitute.

Personally,

11.7k is fine for learning progression fights, the variations in your mana during the different encounters will come with experience on your behalf and on your fellow raiders in avoiding damage. You will probably end up dropping some for throughput as a lot of healers in my guild have decided to do, though that may change as heroics will end up forcing us to run a lean healer comp. Though with your current trinkets you are effectively running at 15k spirit which is a lot especially with 2 t14 and the 9% rejuv.

A little while ago there was an interesting disgussion on MMO about stacking spirit as a throughput stat
I think everyone's well aware of the fact that switching to mastery will get you stronger spells (disgussion might even have been about 2 spir > 1 int, can't remember), but the extra spells you get from more spirit (even though it's not many) might be worth it? I'm by no means good at math or theory crafting in general, but I'd like to see some comments on this as it sounded pretty convincing! I think the general PoV from the thread was something like this: A few more rejuvs might avoid a wipe where as 1-3% more healing just looks good on the meters. I'm sorry if this has already been covered.
Thoughts?

-Aleks

What you described is a very niche situation, and could just as likely happen the other way: you're GCD capped during a high damage phase, so an extra 2-3% healing will save lives while extra Rejuvs later on just pad meters.

Say you took all your spirit and made it into mastery. You'd end up with around 90% increased healing. On a 7 minute fight with no overhealing, you'd have maybe 450k mana to play with with 2 innervates and a pot. You couldn't even afford to cast your 28 or so swiftmend/wild growth spells. So maybe 12 combos, 2 tranqs and no lifebloom. It's fairly obvious how this matches up to say, another 300 rejuvs that you would normally cast on such a fight.

Spirit is all about finding the point where you can cast your normal healing rotation, account for any mechanics that require burst healing/cleansing and end up ooming precisely as the boss dies. At this point, if you add more spirit you are wasting stats. The only real benefit to taking spirit beyond this point would be for something like Wild Mushroom. So say 2500 Spirit is 250k or so on the previous 7 minute fight with no overhealing. Adding any casts now will be overhealing, and you can afford to cast enough rejuvs to fill maybe 6 sets of mushrooms and detonate them. Which is worth maybe 13 million healing, while you lose 4 million or so of that to the "wasted" rejuv overhealing. In this respect the bonus spirit allows you to intentionally overheal to stack the mushrooms which may be mechanically necessary to have fully stacked on demand (ie normal overhealing isn't sufficiently quick).

The other scenario would be on a standard fight where normally maybe 20% of the fight duration is spent idle for lack of things to heal. You could press a bunch of buttons and hope something good comes of it and there would definitely be a very limited benefit (for a small loss in your burst healing.)

One last situation would be dropping a healer (or several) from your usual amount. Resto druids are, arguably, the best healers at the moment in terms of HPM and raw potential hps ,if not burst or preventative healing, and by far the worst offenders when it comes to natural overhealing. We stand to benefit the most from a reduced healing team. Dropping a healer and thus artificially reducing overhealing would encourage spirit stacking, to a point where you would definitely throw mastery out the window in favour of spirit.

Looking for advice on gearing in 5.2. I saw a couple posts back that someone had mentioned chest was out off piece this tier, which makes sense bc theres no spirit and has crit, but given the opportunity, is getting other non set pieces worth it now (progression raiding) and dropping 4p t14 but keeping 2p? I got the legs off Horridon last night and that are pretty much a direct upgrade from t14 legs.

@Phaelon: The Simple Questions / Simple answers thread may be what you're looking for, Link

@Arzo: This would depend on how important T14 4 piece is to you. Swiftmend is our cheap big heal, drops a nice patch for melee / stacked fights, and if you use SoTF can be a good 1-2 punch with WG or for other spells. Granted you may get an ilvl increase in int / spi but getting to use Swiftmend 25% more often is very nice.

@Aleks0410: The value of spirit during progression is really to help you learn the damage patterns and to keep players who are learning the avoidable damage mechanics live a little longer, as mentioned previously in my post.