Spamming single lifeblooms is 500 hps on 5 people and tranquility already give us pretty good burst group healing as long as its over a short period. Haste affecting the GCD still doesn't really make it ok for blizzard to make a fight requiring the amount of raid healing that would be needed by doing 3 stacks of lifebloom on a whole party for very long. almost 1kdps on an entire party? AOE damage is either intense, or long, not both at the same time. I guess they could put in a fight where the tank only required like 1 dedicated healer, but the entire raid took 800 dps for 3 minutes or so. Then with our usual 2paly, 2 druid, 1 priest, 1 shaman and then 1 coh priest or second shaman, the druids being able to do 5 lb stacks would be nice, but that just seems a bit extreme.

Truthfully though, our biggest lacking as semi-reactive raid healers isn't that we don't have the spells for it, its that we're busy doing things that other classes simply can't do as well. No one other than tanks ever needs a heal faster than 2 seconds, or stronger than an average regrowth unless they did something wrong, or its some specific boss ability that you can assign a healer for like the Rage frost bolt or Council Envenom. The ability to SM a regrowth off if needed right away actually puts our healing deliverable in 2 seconds way ahead of the curve. Personally though, that's what I have friends that rolled paladin and shaman for, and I accept that we give up a lot of our constant reactive healing for far and away the best predictive healing ability along with 13 second and 3 minute ultimate reactive heals, but only where we predicted it, if that makes sense. I think lowering regrowth's mana cost and giving druids more mana has made regrowth an even more attractive option for times when we have GCDs free, but for most people, druids are never going to be primarily raid healers because druids keeping hots on the tanks and trusting your paladins and shaman to raid heal is better. Some people do it differently, particularly for specific fights, but I maintain that that's probably just a habit they got into, rather than a conscious decision that its better. Even the people most supportive of regrowth still usually do most of their healing on tanks with lb and rj, they just don't stop noticing the rest of the raid exists while they twiddle their thumbs waiting for lifebloom to need refreshed.

You can do that with 0 haste.
0 lifebloom 1
1.5 lifebloom 2
3 rejuv 1
4.5-6.5 regrowth 2
6.5 lifebloom 1
8 lifebloom 2
9.5 rejuv 2
11-13 regrowth 1
13 lb1
14.5 lb2

its a 6.5 second cycle instead of a 6 second, but its doable. A bit of haste makes it easier for sure, but not needed. Also, if you precast the regrowth hots you can instead do:
lb 1
lb 2
rj 1
rj 2
lb 1
lb 2
rg 1
lb 1
lb 2
rj 1
rj 2
lb 1
lb 2
rg 2
lb 1
lb 2

then you never have more than a 6 second cycle. Either way you have a bit of space free, this one just groups it differently.

The dps warrior one is something like a 1.5% damage increase, combined with the fact 5/8 of the pieces waste exuberant amount of itemlevel on agility and stamina only worsen the set.

The ret one still makes me cringe though.

Just a quick question... I have recently started helping my guild out by taking my resto druid along to raids when we have needed the extra healing on specific encounters (Kalecgos to date) and I have been trying to work out what types of gear I should be stacking/aiming for. At the moment, my main prority has been straight +heal, as I generally only rotate between casting LB's on the tank/s I am assigned too, plus keeping rejuv up and then on my off-seconds throwing random lb's on people that have needed top ups.

Please keep in mind, that my druid is my alt - so my gear is meh (about 2k +heal buff and 230mp5 in combat), however given what I have read on here about using regrowth as an alternative when raid healing, is haste a viable stat to be stacking to help cut down on regrowth cast times & my gcd for LB rolling? Any thoughts from some more experienced druids would be awesome.

Lastly, anyone have a specific formula for determine the direct benefit that spell haste rating has on my regrowth/ht cast times?

I still use HotCandy, and it still works. I also use the other solutions mentionned by people though, but I like having "precise" bars for lifeblooms so I still have a few bars ticking down under my grid. I use regrowth/rejuv color idnicator for recasts on those though.





Haste is a decent stat, but shouldn't really come at the cost of healing, and regen in kalecgos case imo. I have to drink quite a lot of pots and whatnot and if I had haste instead of mp5, I'd probably have a hard time lasting through the whole fight. On our kill I spent the last 20% refreshing lifeblooms and decursing at 0mana, with pots and drums on cooldown. Then again I died on pull cause I swiftmended the tank and didn't have salv, so I pretty much started the fight at 2000mana when I got combat rezed ^^.

The haste formula is 1% for around 16haste I think? I use RatingBuster to tell me how much haste items give. Ultimately, until we see someone with full haste gear showing stuff that can't be done without it, it's just a nice side stat you can have, but shouldn't be your main focus. It does help to slap a few items if you're usually lagging, but even with lag you should be able to maintain 3lifeblooms without any, which is enough for every boss encounter pretty much.