Read his whole statement in context, he has 480 while casting mp5, I don't think he's advocating gimping your mana regen to the point where a resist pot in a given fight is going to ruin you.

Basically, if you're in a tank group, then spirit has enough of a benefit that balancing spirit and +healing with the currently available gear still leaves you with enough spirit to be ok. With 0 sunwell gear and placing no value on mana regen from spirit, completely ignoring mp5, and only balancing my personal +healing and my aura (where it makes sense, not lol 10 spirit gems), with 0 group support I still have 65 haste for a cushion, 2610 +healing and around 450 mp5 if you give a 40 mp5 value to the alch stone. Oh, plus whatever the memento proc is worth. If you're not in a tank group, you probably have at least a resto shaman, possibly a SP too, and thus are probably doing ok on mana. Its really not possible to have a really gimpy of a mana pool in BT/Hyjal level gear unless you're doing something pretty crazy.

I gem all my gear for healing, and if I am on a mana-intensive fight, I swap EotM for the Bangle. I lose 80 static heal, but gain a bunch of regen. That's worth it, especially since I then I have higher healing for elsewhere. I've got a crapton of gems in my stuff (15, if I remember right). I'f i'd gemmed Heal/spirit or heal/mana 5, that's somewhere between 135-165 +heal i'd lose, depending on blue/epic gems. So losing a little bit of heal by doing a weapon or trinket swap costs you less than if you had gemmed for regen, and now you have options. (I'm way closer to that 165 mark now, I had to fight to get "rights" to spinels in my guild, and had to go with blue gems in most of my pieces, and am refitting since the vendor opened.)
By the same token, I burn pots and drums like candy when I need them. The cool thing is that there are only a couple encounters where I do, and I'm still gemmed exclusively for heal.

If every fight is mana-intensive for you, something is wrong. (Your people are stupid and stand in fire, other healers aren't keeping up their assignments, your assignment is bad, or your spell choices are bad.)

It was more like replying to his blanket statement that if I wasn't "chugging every 2 minutes" then I "wasn't doing my job". I don't think I can take that in any more context than he put it. I guess I have a different perspective since our one holy priest will never spec Divine Spirit.

You are only using two specific encounters as counterpoints. Just because those two examples are at the cutting edge of raiding doesn't mean it applies throughout the raiding experience. Blanket statements have exceptions, yes, but his advice is valid for nearly all encounters at the learning stages.

Unless you are arguing for argument's sake, I don't see what your issue is. Chain-potting is good. Gearing for chain-potting is good. Swapping in regen gears for the uncommon elemental damage encounters is a logical exception.

Blooming and rejuving the tanks is acceptable if you have enough tanks to heal, which is the case in at least twins and muru. It doesnt matter much how you set things up, but the total healing output to counter the total damage income has to come from somewhere, a druid is best to do the steady part of this.

On twins for example i keep 3 LBs up and then rotate 2 rejuvs over the warlocks pet plus those 3 tanks. With the occasional barkskin on flame sear this is taking up all my cds till one of the twins is dead.

And yeah i'll jump on the bandwagon here and say that switching trinkets and 1-2 items for higher regen if necessary is the best choice.

Even better than elemental potions are Mad Alchemist Potions with the healing alchemist stone for those 2 encounters btw. On felmyst you can safely drink the pot once flying phase starts just for the mana regen if your camp didnt get any encapsulate.

I guess we can summarize a lot of this by saying:

- Getting yourself enough differently themed gear (haste, heal, regen) so you're able to dress (and drink) for the occasion, is good.

- If you got your main job down safely, help out wherever you can, making use of any spare mana/GCD's.

- Mad Alchemist potions rule Sunwell. I use them on Kalecgos as well

Hmmm...you guys make so many valid points about going all-out +healing, and ignoring socket bonuses and so on for maximum efficiency.

I have a Redeemer's Alchemist Stone, why should I not use it?

I guess the only thing holding me back from re-socketing everything(ignoring blue, yellow, just go all out Living Ruby/Spinels) is due to the fact I am too much of a perfectionist. I hate seeing any un-used socket bonuses, or greyed out area. I love to see a balance of mana and healing.

Dammit...decisions decisions. What you guys say to the new upcoming 11heal/5 spirit gem then, compared to a crimson spinel.

It scales better than an 11/2 gem but it's still giving you some minor regen at the cost of half the healing from a spinel, regen which you still dont need no matter if its from MP5 or spirit (in most cases).

My biggest dilemma r from a blue and red slot for example, which gives +7 healing socket bonus. That means the blue slot is effectively giving me 18 healing and 5 spirit. Do I really want to give up 5 spirit for 4 healing?

While I am at it though, anyone mind linking the 11 healing 5 spirit gems? Truth is, I haven't seen any appear yet.

In some cases, if you count the benefit to the raid's healing output from spirit, you actually do gain over all +healing. The only case for that is pretty much lone blue sockets with +healing bonuses, or like 1 blue socket with the others being red, and a +healing bonus. T6 helm is a good example, or the cloth one off gorefiend.

I have a question about healing meters. How much stock should be put into them? I’m always at the lower end of the meter (under the other druids) and our healing class lead often asks me about it. I’ve got good gear T6 BT and sunwell. I’m almost always on tank healing, we mostly have 3. So I role LB and rejuv between them or sometimes just the pally as he takes more dmg. The tanks never drop and I feel I’m doing my job, and well. On Kal I heal a group of 6 with no problems but after the kill I will still get “why are you low on the healing meter”. I feel doing my job is enough. I don’t know if I don’t use SW enough or other spells. Any thoughts on this would be helpful to put my mind to ease or fix my short comings.

Firstly, Kalecgos usually bugs out meters due to the demon world and real world split. WWS and recount are usually weird with this fight.

There's basically a continuum of proactive vs reactive healing. The style of healing you're describing is very reactive. You're healing only your assignment, and always the same way (from what you've said). Rolling on 3 tanks all of the time, no matter who is taking damage or what type it is, will lead to a lot of wasted hot ticks on tanks that are already full, and lower healing on the meters.

Proactive healing would involve hotting only tanks that are currently taking damage, anticipating burst damage before it happens, queueing up a regrowth to land right when it happens (queueing a regrowth so that it will land 1 sec after a brutallus stomp is a good example), and using your spare time to drop regrowths/swiftmends on the raid.

With that being said, if your resto shamans are doing their jobs well, you'll find it hard to pass them on the meters, because of the ridiculous raid healing efficiency of chain heal. But there's no reason you shouldn't be right up there. Elsewhere in this thread, someone has even put up logs with them geared in full haste that allows them enough throughput to even pass shamans. Last night's M'uru attempts had me at #2 on the meters, #3 being distanced by quite a large margin.

Basically you can tell how proactive v reactive you are by what % of your heals come from which spell. I'm curious as to what other druids experience, but I usually have about 45% from Lifebloom, 40% from Regrowth in a typical fight, with Rejuve/Swiftmend/NS+HT comprising the last 15%. The less proactive druids I've known have upwards of 85% lifebloom healing, and I crush them on the meters most of the time, barring unusual circumstances.

Considering it has the most healing of the trinkets, plus the most regen of the trinkets, I would always use it, unless you need the trinket for a specific fight. For example, the PVP trinket to break stuns(Rage Winterchill). Or the Battlemaster trinket if you know you're going to need an extra 1750hp for a time during the fight.

I recently hit the 2000 +heal mark. I am the only Resto Druid in my guild and am always in the MT group. I was around 480 spirit when I first hit the 2000 +heal mark and since then have been dropping +heal for Spirit when I can to keep myself around the 2000 mark. At the current time, I'm at 1995 +heal and 566 Spirit.

Reading the last several pages of this thread (I come catch up once every week ot two) it sounds like I might be making a mistake. I remember reading that having a Druid in the tank group that stacks Spirit is a good thing, that's the information I've been basing my gear choices off of.

My Armory:
The World of Warcraft Armory

I generally chain chug Mad Alchemists and use my innervate when I gotta, else I save it for someone else. I generally keep HoTs up on the tanks and use all of my GCDs on raid healing if I have them to spare. I don't remember the last time I was OOM at the end of a fight unless we were short healers.

Should I forget the Spirit stacking since it's mostly just for the ToLAura and gem for +heal?

Edit: I just counted it up, and replacing my gems to achive the most +heal, I'd gain 45 +heal and loose 31 spirit.

There's no universal answer for this, you have to assess each piece of gear for a given fight. Essentially you'll have to determine just how much spirit is about equal to a certain amount of +healing for a given fight. If you want a really rough number, I'd say that ignoring mana concerns, that 1 spirit added to your aura benefiting you and everyone healing your group is about equal to 1 +healing for just you. That's off the very rough math of assuming all healers benefit evenly from +healing and 4ish healers healing the tank. Obviously this varies quite a bit from fight to fight. Further, there's issues beyond that even like whether increasing the power of your heals or the power of heals on the tank is more important for a given fight. For instance on azgalor, almost all of the healing is on 1 tank, so wearing spirit heavy gear will mathematically work out very well. But since its your heals, not everyone else's that will be keeping the tank up through the silences that are really the only threat to him, I would say sacrificing your aura for boosting your hot ticks is worth a bit more than the raw output math would suggest.

This is covered a lot in the second half of Page 36

The only things that are really certain are:
-There's some balancing point for how much spirit is needed to increase your aura enough to justify gimping your own +healing
-10 spirit gems are bad because that balancing point is nowhere near 10 spirit : 22 healing. Even with a +healing socket bonus of say 7, 10 spirit is still not going to be better than 15 healing in the vast majority of cases.
-Try to look at each fight, and for ones where a lot of healing is coming into your group, go with a bit more spirit and for fights where tank healing is a non issue like Rage, Gorefiend, RoS, favor +healing.

(actually, a fight would have to be insanely raid damage oriented to make the akama pants better than the rage pants off pure +healing, and if it were really that raid damage heavy, you'd probably want the extra mana from the badge pants for more regrowth use, but I'm sure there are other good examples)

31 spirit * 1.15 (living spirit) *1.1 (Kings) * 0.25 (tree aura) = +9.8 healing on your group members
Imp DS: 31*1.15*1.1*0.1 = +4 healing for you
So you lose 41 +heal, but any heals on your group gain roughly +10 healing.
The simple perspective would be, do you typically have 5 or more healers focused exclusively on your group? However, there's also a question of how efficiently do you utilize your +heal vs. how efficient other classes utilize it, how often are you in tree form, etc.

The tradeoff is probably around the point where I don't think either decision would be 'wrong' in this case, although I personally edge towards personal +heal when it's close. If it's a fight with only one tank, it's pretty rare for you to have 5 healers focused on the tank at all times. If there are multiple tanks, then you're going to benefit more than most healers from +heal since that caters to a druid. I simply feel that personal +healing allows more versatility whereas +heal via your aura is more situational. It has to be a more extreme case (such as [Grovewalker's Leggings] vs. [Kilt of Immortal Nature], which Lairpie noted earlier) before I start making the tradeoff for my aura over personal +heal.

Edit: Lairpie, did you mean the badge pants when you said the rage ones? Winterchill doesn't drop any pants to the best of my knowledge.

I guess I was also looking towards the future. We are 5/6SSC, 2/4TK, 1/5MH. In the next couple of weeks we'll have SSC/TK cleared and will be moving forward to bosses that have gear upgrades for me. I was trying to balance the +Spirit/+Heal out.

I'll probably stick with what I have (gem wise) until I get upgrades, unless I can find a definate reason to switch.

Personally, I'd regem your pants and boots with 22 healing gems as soon as your server has a badge gem vendor up because you're not going to replace those until Sunwell. I'd work through the rest of your gear as you can with 22 healing gems in order of least likely to replace soon. So, pants, boots, chest, shoulders you're keeping for quite a while, so I'd gem them up with pure +healing when you can buy/get spinnels.

Hi! I just have a question about what I should be aiming for with my gear.

Generally, I'd like to get as much +heal as possible, but I'm unsure if stacking haste would increase my throughput moreso than stacking +heal. Another druid in my guild claimed he was aiming for 2300 +heal, 225 mp/5, and about 220 haste. Should I follow his advice and start gemming for haste as I go into Sunwell, or keep working on +heal?

If you can safely pull off 5 heals per 7 seconds (without letting a LB drop every third rotation), then it is going to increase your throughput more. 4 heals and more +heal is not much worse id reckon and a bit more relaxed, but it is worse.

Has anyone done in the math on the regeneration for [Ember Skyfire Diamond] ? It seems that with the association of intellect with spirit for mana regeneration now, that at some point the +regeneration from [Ember Skyfire Diamond] will outpace the static gain from the [Insightful Earthstorm Diamond] (about 25-30?). I'm pitiful at math, though, so I don't know if the amount of intellect needed to pull this off would be an absurd number.

Also, considering how difficult it can be to meet the requirements for [Bracing Earthstorm Diamond], getting the [Ember Skyfire Diamond] may be a happy medium of regeneration and +heal. The threat reduction from the Bracing Earthstorm might be a bit lost in most raids these days. Maybe it would be prudent to put the [Ember Skyfire Diamond] on the list of recommended meta gems.

2% Int is only in the region of 10-14 Int bonus, which I highly doubt will come close to the IED level of regeneration - its somewhere roughly around 3-6 MP5 depending on your level of gear from a general math-out.

Quite honestly, you either want the BED for the healing, or the IED for regeneration - the ESD compromise is rather weak on the regeneration front that's flat out not worth it in my opinion.