Yeah this is pretty much why I haven't updated it yet, for any situation that matters you should be using elixirs since there's really no contest. I don't really see the purpose in using flasks ever, since for progression you want elixirs and for farm content the extra mana doesn't really improve your performance. If it was a power stat like healing or haste that would be a different story, but given our flask choices it's better to save the fel lotuses and marks of illidari for other classes. If you are absolutely swimming in flasks then use them I guess, but if not then on farm content I would rather just use a single healing power elixir or go without flasks and elixirs completely.

Rossaroni: I'm sorry you feel like people are attacking you, really I think it's not because you're in SSC/TK or anything (all of us were at some point, and I know I was there when the top guilds were clearing BT so I'm not one to look down on people). I don't think it's because you feel that there should be some mana to spare, especially since I'm also of that opinion. If you normally end fights with no mana, or sub 10% mana, then you don't have adequate ability to respond to bad situations if one happens. I'm actually somewhat heavy on the regen relative to the people in this thread: I've always used an IED and don't plan to use another meta in the foreseeable future, and I put purple gems in all my blue sockets.

The main thing people are taking exception to is basically this comment, which I also disagree with: "My philosophy towards potting, though, is that if I'm having to use pots to keep my mana up, I'm doing something wrong. Either I'm geared wrong or I'm not spending my mana smartly." To put it bluntly, pots are worth 80-100 MP5 and easily over 100 if you have an alchemist stone. Not using them is essentially equivalent to taking 1-2 pieces of gear off, depriving yourself of stats you could otherwise have. It's absolutely expected for a serious raider to build their character around the assumption that they are using potions every cooldown. This does not mean you should aim to deplete your mana by the end of the fight, since that's going overboard, but it does mean that you should expect to drink potions on cooldown in any serious situation, and to keep your mana near the edge of your comfort zone while doing so. For me this means that in a "decent looking" situation (0-2 people dead) I want my mana to always be above 30% with potion chugging. This gives me some room to breathe if we suddenly lose a bunch of DPS for some reason, or if a healer dies. It also means that because I know I can count on the 100 MP5 stream from mana potions, I can put more +healing and haste on my gear to increase my power and speed.

I strongly urge you to reconsider your stance on mana potions, and accept that they are a part of the game that is not going away until WOTLK at the earliest. It is unfortunate that mana potions are so powerful, but you should build your character around the assumption that you are making full use of them or else you will not reach your potential. Don't think of potions as a way to give yourself breathing room in a bad situation, just build yourself so that when you do chain potions you have a little breathing room.

I think you'll find that people in this forum really do want to help you. The light jabs against you not personal, but people are getting annoyed because a discussion of how to build a character that can function without potions is not really productive for serious players. Remember that building around potions does not mean that you have to end the fight with no mana, or that you have to whittle down your breathing room to zero. It's fine to build yourself with a mana buffer, and in fact I think that is a very good idea. Please consider this, since I really do think you can improve your character's performance by changing the way you think about potions.

Getting away from the topic of mana potions for a bit, I'm somewhat concerned about your statement that you go out of mana when you gear for +healing, maybe there's something we can look at there. It's possible that this would be fixed simply by drinking potions more often, but it's also possible that you don't have the gear to support a raid healing or split tank/raid healing role if that's what you're normally assigned to (they're the two heaviest mana-consuming roles for a druid, much harder on mana than pure tank healing). I'm not sure what it's like now with 30% intensity and the new spirit formula, but when I was in SSC/TK I geared fairly heavily for regen and I still had a lot of difficulty when assigned to raid healing without being given a shadow priest. This is mostly because tank healing is dominated by rejuvenation and lifebloom, which are pretty cheap spells, but raid healing has significant swiftmend and regrowth components. At the time, I put on a regen trinket (usually Bangle or the old Alchemist Stone) and chugged potions just to get by if I was raid healing without a shadow priest. Even with a shadow priest it wasn't a walk in the park.

Different gear sets might help, there's no need to try to make one set work for everything. Back in SSC/TK I had two sets of healing gear, one for tank healing (focused on +healing) and one for raid healing (focused on regen). In Hyjal/BT I kind of went back to having one set since there wasn't a lot of alternative gear, but now with the GCD changes I'm beginning to branch out again into a +healing set for tank healing and a mixed +healing/haste set for when my attention is split between the tank and the raid (I use the haste set on trash, all throughout ZA, and on Kalecgos for example).

One thing I just noticed is that you don't have a meta gem, it would help a lot if you got a helm with a meta socket as soon as possible even if this means running Karazhan weekly. The IED is worth a huge amount of mana and will help you significantly.

My regen and +healing is enough for what we've done is my real point. I'm not gonna mess with pots until I find my healing or regen lacking, and then I'll start incorporating it. Until that happens, though, why mess with it? I understand just fine the advantages of pots and the mana gained. What I've been saying is that my experience has never warranted pot usage. When it does, I will.

In my opinion if you aren't using pots, you not doing something right. At least for progression encounters, I can see doing Gruuls and not using pots, but if your doing new content, you better be chugging that shit every 2 minutes, if not your not doing your job enough (just imo)

I went to 45 super mana potions in 1 night of kaelegos attempt, however I use 1 mana potion on a BT clear, and that's usually when doing Illidari Council.

You see what I'm saying?

And IMO: You want to stack as much +healing as possible, secondly should be spirit.

Fully Buffed with full consumables and divine spirit my druid had 1024 mana while not casting and about 480 mp5, lets just say I can spam regrowth for 5 minutes straight with my own innervate =D

Well, it's about maximizing your character's potential. Obviously you can do your job with a wide variety of gear and buff setups since this game does not require 100% perfect execution, but the goal of this thread is to discover how we can reach our maximum potential and not just get by doing our jobs. With this in mind, it becomes clear that the way to optimize a druid healer, and any healing class really, is to boost +healing and haste (the power stats) at the cost of regen until you start to get near your mana comfort zone. It should also be clear that since chaining potions grants you 80-120 MP5, this is a really convenient way to squeeze out more +healing and haste while still being comfortable on mana.

That's really what it comes down to: optimizing your character so you contribute the most you can to your raid. If you disagree that you can improve your character through the methods being discussed in this thread, that's okay but please argue that point. I think our collective tolerance is wearing thin for an argument that basically boils down to "if it's not broke don't fix it."

I think the confusing thing for up and comming druids(I count myself in this group) is that, with the 2.4 change, a lot of restos don't need to chainpot for the content they're experiencing, because their regen got buffed so much.

My guild's working on Illidan now. Since 2.4, I haven't had to chainpot for any encounter(except for bloodboil and IC) we've done.

Pre 2.4, it was an absolute necessity. Naj'entus was a 4 pot fight for me(and with innervate, I still was pushing OOM), and Gorefiend was pretty bad, mana-wise. The same encounters right after 2.4 hit were walks in the park, mana-wise. One innervate, and I was back to full.

Now, with maybe 2 upgrades since, it's not nearly as bad. I've been trying to drop MP5 for more healing, because it's felt strange not to have to chainpot. :P

Is it really better than mighty restoration? Clearly the combo is more healing, but as far as I can see falls short of the 25 mp5 from a flask over a fight of any reasonable length. The elixir's 450 mana and something like 14mp5 while casting. On a pretty short five minute fight, you'd get 1500 mana from the flask and 1300 mana from the elixir. On a 8 minute fight it's 2400 vs 1800.

Obviously we don't generally need a ton of regen, but I don't think it's true that that elixir combo is universally better than a flask.

Incidentally, M'uru is the first fight in a very long time where I'm chainpotting the whole thing, every pull.

If you have 500 spirit and 500 intellect raid buffed without the elixir (very lowball estimate) the elixir is worth 17 MP5 straight up, factoring in Kings and Living Spirit. It also extends your mana pool by about 500 mana, and gives you about 1000 more mana when you innervate yourself. If you do both of these things over a six minute fight, the mana pool extension is worth 7 MP5 and the innervate is worth 14, which brings the total to 38 MP5. Even over a ten minute fight where you only innervate once, the mana pool extension is worth 4.2 MP5 and the innervate bonus is worth 8.3, for a total of 29.5 MP5. If you have 600 spirit and 600 intellect raid buffed these numbers turn into ~18.6 MP5 straight up, and an innervate bonus of 1160.

I guess the point is that if you don't innervate yourself, the flask is better for longer fights (since the significance of the intellect's mana pool extension begins to decrease) but if you do innervate yourself it's going to be very hard to beat the elixir.

Do you have any spare GCD's? If you do, you can opt to heal outside of your assignment as much as you can safely afford. A lot of those HoT's are likely going to be useless because they get overhealed by the healers who's job you're assisting on (probably the raidhealers), but if you assisting a bit can save just one guy that would otherwise not have gotten heals quickly enough, it's worth it in my opinion. Again, only if you can safely pull it off without any risk to your main responsibility. Like others have said as well, this would mainly be something useful for progression content, when healers are usually strained most.

Reading all the last postings about chain potting makes me remember that I still had no reason to test my "new" alchimist stone (which I have about 3-4 weeks now). Being mostly in a group with no support, there is still no problem in any encounter (currently working on Kalecgos) - a shadow or shaman in group is nearly regeneration overkill.

If I socketed for regeneration (which I do not), I really would not know how to spend that extra mana (currently at 2398 healing unbuffed, which I plan to raise further). I would consider the new 11heal 5spirit pearl for some of the slots, though.

Btw I see no need whatsoever for a special innervate weapon - raidbuffed, even while completely oom and spamming regrowth while the innervate is ticking, I am at 100% before the innervate finishes (and that is, as I said, with pure +heal gemmed equip, which still leaves me at about 690 spirit raidbuffed).

First of all freeing a spot in a mana regen group is good for the whole raid as others will need it more than you. Secondly having the argument "but i dont need the extra regen" to get into the tank group is a good one and will increase the use of the resto druid by making use of the tree aura, you should try to get that through to raid leaders. Im not yet sure if tree aura is better than devo aura, im guessing its encounter dependant but at least it makes up for some if you switch the holy pala out for the tree druid. For most new encounters the extra concentration aura and regen on the pala is doing alot of good.

Pre-BT you will have to gear and socket for regen at least to some extent and maybe switch trinkets. I found the trinket switching to be the best way to adjust for intensity and jobs on encounters.
In BT (plus ZA farming) you should aim for a haste set. It will be a punch to your regen, but again a very good way to increase your output. Some fights (e.g. illidan p2, reliquary, teron, archimonde) are just about the short (30sec to 2mins) burst output you can do and haste is the best way to do this.
In SWP the gear suddenly brings both, haste and regen upgrades. It provides some breathing space again to use more mana unfriendly tools like regrowth and swiftmend.

I am usually in the tank group and keeping up LBs on all tanks. The rest of my healing i can use situational meaning throwing extra hots on tanks or other raid members. I dont see where other druids get the downtime from, but maybe im an overhealing hyperactive clickcast abuser, but it still makes me a better healer than having a tunnel vision on my job.
So far i managed to run oom even with chain potting in all SWP encounters, yet i was still able to switch from a high mana output style to a low mana and continue to heal after 15 minutes in the PTR twin gauntlet without taking drinking breaks for example.

TLDR version:

• +heal is good
• +300 haste is better just less mana efficient
• +regen also increases your healing output but is the worst of the 3 ways
• Mana pots are a gear slot that shouldn't be left unequipped
• not relying on group mana regen synergy is a good thing, but if you get it, you can still use it for more healing output

Not directed at anyone in particular.

Lifebloom, lifebloom, lifebloom, rejuv, repeat is about the cheapest reasonable cycle you could possibly be doing. Lifebloom in tree form is 176 mana. Rejuv is 332. If you're doing all 4 of those every 6.5 seconds is 662 mp5. If you have 400 mp5 while casting counting procs and such, but not mana pots, you're losing 52.4 mana per second. That means you'll run out of mana in 209 seconds or 3.5 minutes. I know my innervate isn't up that often.

Doing nothing but lifebloom on 4 tanks ie illidari council, you'd burn 108 mana per second. Innervate for 12k mana every 6 minutes is 33.3 mana per second. In order to not run oom between innervates you'd have to have 74.7 mana per second, or 373 mp5 while casting to sustain the absolute cheapest 6.5 second casting cycle indefinitely. Possible, yes, but an oddity, not the norm.

For anyone that missed the point, its not remotely possible to sustain chain casting without mana pots in most reasonable fights unless you're specifically limiting yourself from using most of your spells or have geared for a stupid amount of regen.