I haven't sifted through the 60 pages of this completely, but I was wonder if anyone know where Blizzard is going with the Living Seed talent, as of now it seems useless to me (in a PvE respect) and is accounting for ~1% of my heals mainly off of regrowth crits (sometimes I only cast this once or twice during an entire encounter!).

Does blizzard plan to buff this talent, or itemize our gear heavily for crit (bad idea imo). I think this talent needs a rework somewhere, for the time being I think i'd take Replenish over it.

Apparently, but my problem with the talent is the spells it can proc off of. If this talent were to be made worthwhile it should proc off lifebloom final bloom crits. Here's the Living Seed healing %'s off of a BT clear 2 weeks ago:

Illidan 0.9%
Council 2.0%
Shahraz 0.0%
Bloodboil 0.0%
RoS 0.0%
Gorefiend 0.0%
Akama 0.0%
Supremus 1.2%
Naj'entus 0.0%

Basically if you're raid healing, this talent is worthless, and if you are single target healing it is still questionably worthy.

Source:
Bane's WWS Parser

How often does your lifebloom crit? You'd seriously reevaluate the worth of this talent if it could be applied on a crit at the end of a 7s HoT? You can't say you barely get any healing out it and then also say you barely ever cast regrowth. Want to see more healing from living seed? Cast regrowth more.

The reason that WWS, from 2 weeks ago(important!), is so dismal is because it wasn't working as intended then. With it working like earth shield now or sometime soon, it will be much better. The point of the talent is to basically make your regrowth a good spell just for the initial heal.

So Blizzard is leaning towards spamming Regrowth after they add Nourish into the game?

In a raid my lifeblooms crit for ~20% of the time. It is a significant amount. If it is to work like POM, let it proc after a lifebloom final bloom crit, and act as a POM/Earthshield for the next time that person takes damage. I don't think this talent can justify the spamming of regrowth.. that's just me though. At least add a super deep tier talent to a spell we use in large quantities instead of one used sparingly/situationally.

Here are the concerns I have from Beta:

1. Lifebloom's last nerf was too harsh. Blizzard takes the stance that Druids did nothing but spam LB. K. Why?

Druids began spamming LB because:

a. Regrowth was awful.
b. Rejuv was too slow of a tick rendering it situational at best. Those situations grew more frequent in Sunwell.
c. Tree of Life prohibited us from casting down-ranked Healing Touch
d. We couldn't raid heal because Hots were not capable of competing with CH and CoH.

These problems have been fixed:

a. Regrowth Glyph is just plain good.
b. Rejuv is still slow but at least it has a bonus affect with talents.
c. You can cast all heals in Tree Form now.
d. We were given a AOE heal to compete against other AOE healers.

This steers Druids AWAY from being LB spammers in of itself in that our other heals are GOOD. We can USE them. And others will see we are now able to fill more than the stereotypical role of MT hotters.

As mentioned, Druids began steering away from this in Sunwell. My top heal for M'uru and KJ was Rejuv. However, the percentages between Rejuv, Regrowth, and LB were pretty close. MUCH closer than say Shaman's CH and HW, or the poor Paladins. And when I looked at other guilds' WWS I saw that my healing style was NOT that far off. A lot of Druids were breaking free of LB.

My problem here is that Blizzard, and our much esteemed Ghostcrawler, are feeding into the myth we only used LB. Even after we showed them this was not entirely true in high-end pve though various WWS parses of some of the top guilds. ( However, I fear there were just too few Druids to keep up the cause because so few Druids were used in Sunwell. ) In my honest opinion, LB's original nerf would have left us with a perfect balance between our spells. We could have really had something for everything. With the last nerf LB is out. It is awful, and here is why:

The nerfed LB is not scaling well at 80: Healing about 2% of a tanks health per tick. Taking 3 GCD and 9 seconds to do the Healing a 2 second cast Holy Light does. ( I know comparing Hots to Direct Heals isn't smart, but that is the only way to show how weak LB is. ) In addition the mana cost to stack LBs loses efficiency the more targets you put it on. The consensus seems to agree 2 targets at most would be the limit in terms of efficiency. I ask you, unless your specific job in a raid was to heal only 2 tanks (and with our other spells this is not likely to happen again) is LB something you would waste a GCD for? I haven't, and don't plan to.

I firmly believe LB is being nerfed for PvP alone. This is scurry as it means whatever other spell the masses decide they don't like will be sacrificed next on the 2v2 Alter.

2. Direct Heal Redundancy

a. Regrowth - Leaves a Hot
b. Nourish - Needs a Hot
c. Glyph HT - Old-Fashioned Direct Heal

All heal for close to the same amount, with close to the same mana costs, with close to the same cast times. IMO the differences are negligible.

I believe Nourish needs reworking. I would like to see it as a All Spec Heal. Something boomkins, bears, and kitties can use to help with their PvP survivability. Perhaps an instant heal or cast on the move heal with a short cooldown. Anything other than a duplicate Regrowth. Honestly I feel Trees have enough to get by, and if LB is fixed we would be golden.

All in all I am very happy with the Tree Changes. My disappointment at LB only radiates because of my disdain for Arena, and to have my PvE affected by it really russells my leaves.

I'd add to your list that Lifebloom's duration was very short and required recasting at set intervals to be efficient. It locked you into a rotation around it, no matter how many targets you cast it on.

Then they made multi-tank fights fairly common on top of that, where it could really shine in combination with other healers to cover for spikes. It was a good way to cut down on the number of healers required to heal through certain fights, which in turn allowed more DPS to be brought to help with the enrage timers and other mechanics.

Glyphed HT is the first or those three heals to fall to redundancy. Regrowth and Nourish simply cover 99.9% of situations without needing secondary talents or Glyphs to do it.

Nourish falls second because of its design. Originally it was designed as a direct heal for trees as Healing Touch was unusable. Then Healing Touch opened up and Regrowth got a killer glyph (less killer now, but still very decent). It no longer fills any gap, it's just ever so slightly better in a few outlying (and trivial) cases.

Nourish definitely needs reworking, but I have to agree that Trees really have just about all the tools we could want. We even already have your "instant/cast on the move heal" in the form of Swiftmend (though the cooldown isn't exactly short) and an additional one would frankly be overpowered for PvP. There are possibilities for new healing spells, but it just doesn't seem necessary.

Why did druids get their talents refunded? I don't see any huge changes in the patch notes.

Something wonky that I don't really understand happened with druid talents in this mini-patch, because we have to re-train ranks of talents that previously we retained after respeccing out of and back into, like Wild Growth/Mangle/etc. You're not missing anything, though, there really weren't any major changes other than a couple Balance talents having the number of ranks reduced.

[edit] Oops, misread the patch notes. I didn't have to retrain skills after all. It was just the points changes in balance, as someone stated later.

Reducing two 5-ranks talent to 3-ranks talent is a major change, technically.

This is one thing that kind of bums me out about WotLK. In an effort to try to 'force' druids to do some direct casting, they gave us a bunch of spells that effectively do the same thing. If we get a Flash Heal type spell in Nourish, why do our HT and RG glyphs also have to turn those spells towards that functionality as well?

IMO, they should either:

a) Turn the functionality of Nourish into a more interesting situational ability. In the past I've suggested an ability on a medium (15-30s) cooldown that renewed all HoT/DoT effects on an ally/enemy extremely mana-efficiently or gave them a potency boost (all active HoTs/DoTs will tick for XX% extra.)

b) Give the Glyphs for HT/RG something more unique than "you can now use these as fast-casting spamable heals."

I've seen mentions of them analyzing if Nourish is still needed as-is with the new Glyphs, so that gives me a little hope at least.