How are you guys planning to meet your meta gem requirements as you transition into Sunwell gear? I'm currently using Belt+Boots, but we just got Brutallus down (5 weeks after our first Illidan, woohoo) which means that T6 belt and soon boots will be available to me. Obviously these are amazing pieces, but I'm not sure how I am going to juggle gems around to keep IED active. Any thoughts?

Personally speaking I'd just regem 2 blue/yellow sockets with Seaspray emeralds and stock pure +healing on everything else (unless there's a desirable socket bonus somewhere with blue socket, then you can use 11healing/2mp5, 10 spirit, or 9healing/4(5)spirit gems)

Although I raid primary as feral. In Stackwell Plateau when I raided as resto (keeping Fairie Fire up, lifebloom the crap out of people, spot heal with some regrowth) , even in humanoid form I don't have any mana problem at all without chain potting, so mp5 is really a waste to us right now, imo. +healing effect also triples from the 3 stacks of lifebloom.

Oh, and on another unrelated note, I recently had to choose a meta-gem (went from the CE rep one, to Gruul's, to ZA, to T6, so I'd somehow managed to never use a meta-gem in like 8 months of raiding). I decided to go with IED because I realized as long as I'm matching some blue sockets (I tend to do the 0 or 1 non-red socket go for +heal socket bonus theory), I would have to go for IED to be consistent in my itemization priorities. That said, I find I'm in a bit of a grey area for mana. In many fights I can get by just fine without my innervate, however I still do need it at times.

With 2.4, our innervates have become far more useful to some damage dealing classes. Namely, there's a fellow druid (feral) who proposed the idea that innervates might be best used on arcane mages . Now, I have to basically guarantee them my innervate before the fight or else they're done for since they change cast priorities to be less mana effecient. I don't think I can guarantee giving away my innervate unless I invest very substantially in regen over +heal. Has anyone been doing this, or looked at doing this? Is the status quo to use your own innervate still, and is it fair to say that's justified? My instinct is that the healing lost from re-gemming would be more significant than the damage gained from someone else getting my innervate, but I'd like to see some discussion on it if it's worthwhile (I hope I didn't just miss this when 2.4 came out somehow). What are others doing with their innervates, and has anyone experimented with this?

Yes, I'm definitely in the +healing camp. I guess I was a little vague with my question, I was wondering which items people were planning to gem to meet the meta requirements and assuming spinels/rubies everywhere else. I like your idea about Seasprays; I can use one for the socket bonus on the pants, one in the bracers, and that's done with.

On the other hand.. basically, value the meta at 30mp5. Bracing is 26 heal + 2 more red sockets = 70 healing. Maybe it's time to think about letting go of IED?

What fights do you actually feel like you need your Innervate on? I typically Innervate myself on Kalecgos, and sometimes Shahraz, but that's about it. Most other fights, either a couple mana potions or just having full spirit buffs up (Draenic Wisdom, Fishsticks, Kreeg's Stout) is plenty.

I typically give my Innervate to a Shadow Priest when they ask for it. On Brutallus last night we chained Innervates on our only mage (fire).

We usually have a shadow priest with all of our arcane mages.

With respect to regemming, my guess is you are better off replacing a trinket slot with the [Bangle of Endless Blessings] and that should provide you more mana at a less cost to +heal than regemming. Of course, this depends on your level of gear. For example, if you use [Battlemaster's Perseverance], that is the equivalent of 4 epic gem slots or 5 rare gem slots. If you re-gem with spirit, you could gain 40-50 spirit. However, if you replace the trinket instead, you would gain approx. 22 spirit from the use effect alone (assuming you macro it to be used whenever the cooldown is up). However, the real value is in the proc, which I believe is 1 ppm. If so, then it will be up approximately 25% of the time which would effectively increase your total spirit by 25%.

Hey, this is what I did for our early Maulgar and Gruul kills! Although at the time, lifebloom still didn't get a +healing bonus for anything past the first application so it didn't really occur to me to roll it. And I didn't have enough mana regeneration to cast more than a few regrowths, so it seemed like a good idea to just top the raid off with hots and let the other healers focus on the tanks. Raid-wide damage on Gruul is pretty well suited to hots anyway, since it's mostly from Shatter and when one hits it's safe to take your time to get everyone healed up, since it will be a while before they take any more damage.

But yes, I agree with everything you say regarding Regrowth and working with other healers. Regrowth has always been a good spell for raid healing, even though it's not the more efficient thing in the world and takes two seconds to cast. I think your phrase "kinda fill in the gaps" fits pretty well with what druids are good at. The other healing classes are at their peak performance when focusing entirely on raid healing or tank healing, but we aren't really performing to our maximum potential unless we are doing both. Certainly we can focus entirely on one or the other, and sometimes it's necessary, but we are unique among all healing classes in that we can put out significant healing on the tank and anyone in the raid at the same time (shamans can heal tank and melee with chain heal, and priests can heal clumped groups, but we can do anyone).

I find that in practice it helps to have a sense of what other healers are going to do, for example I know that certain healers in my guild gravitate to the tank, some peel off to heal the raid whenever they get a chance, and so on. If you know what the other healers are likely to do, you can cover what they aren't doing. For example, on Illidan I usually just heal the tank without doing much of anything to the raid, since I know that as soon as someone gets Flames or Parasites a priest will break off and heal it. On Kalecgos what I do depends heavily on what other healers are in the same realm as me: it could be focusing on the tank, it could be splitting between the tank and raid, or it could be purely raid healing. On Anetheron I stay on the tank unless the shaman near me is sleeping or swarmed, in which case I heal the raid too.

One effect of this is that my position on the healing meters depends more on what other healers are in the raid than anything else. A good example is that normally on Anetheron I'm third on the meters and just heal the tank and healers near me that are swarmed, because that's all I need to do and I'd rather be safe and stay on the tank if I know the raid is covered. A few weeks ago our regular shamans weren't there and we had a weak one subbing in, as well as a new and inexperienced resto druid, so tank and raid healing were both worse than normal. I ended up doing 56% of the tank's healing and almost a quarter of our raid's total healing with seven total healers. About 60% of my healing done was on the tank (2/3 of it lifebloom, 1/3 other spells) and 30% of my healing done was Regrowth on the raid. The other 10% was random non-regrowth raid hots. This was pre-2.4 (Regrowth's always been a good spell, like lairpie said). That parse also had three swiftmends and one NS+HT on the tank, all with zero overhealing (was pretty scary).

Well, it's a different story if you have some convenient gear with decent socket bonuses. For example if you have [Boots of the Divine Light] and [Life-Step Belt], you can use two Luminous and two Royal gems to meet the IED requirements. Relative to Bracing you lose 26 (from the meta) + 44 (from not using four red gems) but you gain 14 from socket bonuses. You gain about 4 mp5 from the added intellect and another 4 from the Royal gems. That's trading about 35-38 mp5 for 56 healing, which is pretty damn aggressive and a little too aggressive for me, especially if I'm trying to have my innervate available for other people.

The post I mentioned earlier from a Forgotten Aspects paly (Eir) about the effectiveness of 2 druids stacking lifeblooms on tanks. He wasn't the first to do it and more of what i remembered from his post was actually from posts following it, but the thread does lay out a fairly convincing argument for 2 trees.
http://elitistjerks.com/f33/t15429-h...ced_lifebloom/

I really don't understand how, assuming equal skill, gear, etc, a guild could ever feel dropping trees was a good idea for really any fight where the tanks dying is remotely an issue. Honestly, if we could get all the buffs from people in group 6 and had all the characters in the world to choose from we'd probably run 3 resto shamans, 3 resto druids, 1 23-38 priest as our standard healing line up. Our tanks freak out if we try and do anything without 2 resto druids to the point where I can only (can meaning feel able to, no one's really telling me I'm not allowed or anything) bring my hunter alt that is consistently one of our top damagers once a month or so when this and that star align and we have a feral druid that happens to be resto at the time in to keep our 2 resto druids without me.

As to metas and innervate, I frankly have no one to really give my innervate to most of the time. We have 2 resto druids, with the other having a bit more mp5 and less spirit, so his innervate would naturally go to someone else first, and at least 1, usually 2 feral druid innervates to work with. Sometimes we have a balance druid who also, assuming he has a sp, doesn't need his innervate. On fights where I can't find an effective way to burn off my alchemist stoned, chain potting, innervating fueled mana pool, I'll often innervate a fire mage so he can pop 1 more destro pot over a fire pot, but he has so little spirit on his gear that its mostly for the humor of innervating a mage. If I had a consistent good target to innervate other than myself I'd probably swap to IED and do exactly what Gian said, gem my trash boots and my belt to make the meta requirements.

We've been running with one of our feral druids being resto for the last couple months in left over healing gear and while we were fine for bt/hyjal with having a semi random assortment of other feral druids that aren't always around being feral for us, for sunwell its our feeling that we absolutely must have a consistent feral druid. I don't really want to try and relearn Kalecgos or Brutallus with each combination of 4 feral that are sometimes there and our two consistent prot warriors. That has left us with possibly being forced to choose between losing our precious double set of hots by bringing an extra paly, or bringing a druid who has less experience and so far hasn't performed as well as we're used to.

I agree, right now no one else really needs my innervate. But my understanding is an arcane blast spec would be feasible with innervates and produce significantly better dps. I admit I'm a little ignorant when it comes to mages (so by all means if I'm out to lunch here let me know), but the problem here is that I have to decide the mage will get all my innervates before the run begins (otherwise he's gimped his spec). I can't go into a fight and then say "okay, looks like I don't need it, who wants it?" At that point the mage has already made his spec selection. I don't know if there are any other classes out there with high dps low dpm options that aren't presently viable.

And for those who wondered what gear I have or how I need my own innervates: I don't always need them. I occasionally do. I'm wondering if it's worth it to aim for 'I never do.' I have for trinket options the Redeemer's Alchemist Stone, Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon, and Essence of the Martyr (2nd in line for Memento in all likely-hood).

I don't think I will regem/gear to give away innervates 100% of the time. My inclination is that I would be best off switching away from an IED and just going for all out +heal. However, I do feel we have an absurd amount of regen now and having heard this idea from a druid with a mage alt, I thought it worth discussion at least. I just see all that mana I have, and I feel like if I could give some of it away it might be put to better use. This seemed like a creative possibility and I was hoping to foster discussion about the usefulness of innervates for other classes. My concern isn't with my regen, but with the tradeoff potential of it going somewhere else and whether there's a better choice.

The short story on mages speccing arcane is basically that if [insert 10 different conditions here] arcane slightly out damages fire. In nearly all other situations, gear sets, raid compositions, debuff sets, buff sets, fight lengths, etc fire is better. So, if your guild is willing to give you multiple sets of gear to setup you using a gear set higher in regen to allow you to innervate a mage that will also want to have both an arcane set and a fire set and you're both willing to respec constantly slight gains can be seen, but overall you gemming normally and throwing a fire mage your innervate letting him use a destro pot over a mana pot if the occasion arises is a bit more feasible. So, not a worthless idea, but it definitely takes some setup.

Unless you are completely min-maxing healing power and haste, the mp5 return of IED completely destroys the 26healing of Bracing in terms of value for money. Having said that, being alchemist really eliminates the mana issue. With the SSO alchemist stone, you can just go all out on healing power and haste.

If by spell haste meta you mean the MSD, that thing has been nerfed to beyond junk status =<