Looking across the various trees, blizzard is making a dedicated effort to make crit valuable for all of the healers, with varying degrees of success. All of the new talents have a common theme of creating additional healing in a way that circumvents overhealing: druids plant a PoM-style seed, (disc) priests crit a free bubble, and shaman heals... summon some dude that tosses a heal on someone nearby at low health. Unless there's a major change for HoTs/DoTs in the pipeline, crit will still be a poorly-utilized stat for resto druids, but it's noticeably less crap than it used to be.

It's unsure how far this homogenization will go. Current thinking is that we'll still see spec-specific tier sets, with the offset pieces being more useful to a larger number of specs, although optimal for one or none, and assuming a large number of sockets to cover for things like hit and spirit.

I re-checked it and you're right. Somewhere I've read a MotW with 50ish stats and 70ish resistances, but oddly enough I can't find that anywhere anymore. Thinking about it, it must have been the improved version of the level 80 rank. I removed it from the first post.

I'm really interested in this as well. Just take necklaces for example. At the moment there is 1 neck in each instance for each role. In WotLK, will there be just 1 caster neck each instance which every healer and caster is out to get? My wild guess is there will be different necks, with different flavors (e.g. haste neck, crit neck), all useful for every healer/caster, but each still has its own preference.

Edit:

It does say "healing over time spells", which Flourish is. Therefore it could still be possible that only Nourish and HT are the only healing spells not castable in ToL.

Was just about to edit that, now my mistake will be known to mankind for all of eternity because of Norfair

Back to business, could anyone verify whether Replenish would proc off a Rank 1 Rejuv?

Also, I feel that a lot of good priests have become lazier and more dependent on CoH after it was introduced. I certainly hope Flourish wouldn't mean the same thing for restoration druids.

As for the Remove Curse change, very long overdue and one of the things that always amazes me as a bullshit restriction. I guess druids whining would've been endless otherwise because resto shamans get a decurse with "Cleanse Spirit".
There is also the lack of movement slow in that tooltip, which could be another restriction lifted for ToL.
Nourish however might indeed be too powerful for healing on one target as ToL. 3 LBs, rejuv, regrowth, then endless amounts of nourish after that plus swiftmend for the occasional burst (which has to exceed about 4-5k damage per sec to be noticeable if you take todays numbers) seems rather strong with a 60% buffed nourish (4k hit, 6k crit with 2k Earth Shield charge) if you add aura effect and -25% mana spent to that. Sadly mana cost is unknown yet, so we can't compare it to FoL/Flash Heal/LHW. I hope Nature's Focus not including Nourish is just an error.

Crit or no crit gear, Living Seed is a very good buff to regrowth and im guessing also to Swiftmend as the extra healing chance is always used best on "oh shit" spells.

Another unknown would be what Barks Blessing ended up. Im guessing it was the first attempt to rework a party wide buff raidwide and they scrapped the idea after deciding to not bandaid it but to fix the core mechanic. It is still in the tooltip of Imp ToL so im guessing it might just buff the aura affect instead again.

Overall they gave the 2 missing things, a potent pve aoe heal and a fast direct pvp heal. I would've rather liked the Gift of the Earthmother talent to increase LB by one tic instead of making haste gear hardly beneficial though.

An OOC resurrection spell for Druids is long overdue, but I wonder what happened to something that was characterized as one Blizzard's arguments against it in the past; the fact that a druid could potentially stealth through trash and resurrect the rest of a raid/party.

I wonder if they have plans to introduce more stealth-detecting mobs, more narrow hallways, or other similiar features in dungeons.

How would the party get past the trash to begin with to necesitate a ressurection...?

Gift of the Earthmother doesn't effect the AoE heal, though. Also, faster Nourish casts can't be a bad thing, especially if it's castable in tree form.

Also, the latest alpha build(in the tree here) only has Flourish healing the nearest 5 people of the target, not the entire raid. I'm not sure how that effects the usefulness of the heal, overall, though. Without coefficients or any hard ranks, it's difficult to say if this nerf really effects us. It makes life a bit more difficult for raid healing, but raid healing has never been our class' strong point in TBC anyway.

Does anyone know the cast time for Revive? OOC rez by a stealth class seems very strong for Arena (and some BG situations too).

It's 10 seconds, like the other rezzes. One of the changes published from the first Alpha build was that Druid NS went from making any nature spell instant to any nature spell under 10s.

As far as revive, seems like much fun[read: exploitation] might be had by having nekkid shealth rez runs through instances. Yet mobs will probably be strategically placed with dectect invis.

Gift of the Earthmother actually seems over-powered to me. I think it would be better as .05/.1/.15/.2/.25. There are two reasons

1: Spell haste would remain useful to us. This is important, because having stats that don't help your character cause poor scaling issues (which is one reason why druids and paladins fall behind priests and shamans in TBC raid healing).

2: We are over-reliant on lifebloom for healing now. The proposed .5s GCD reduction would ensure it would stay that way. .25s would keep a better balance with our other healing spells.

Several people have argued that spell haste is already pretty worthless for druids. I disagree. Having spell haste does two very nice things for you

1: You have a lot more wiggle-room in cycling four spells. In reality, most of us switch to three spells when we are running around or things get complicated. It is one thing to rotate between your lifebloom_Tank1 lifebloom_Tank2 lifebloom_Tank3 etc macros and quite another to do something like lifebloom_Tank1 lifebloom T...oh crap! wait rejuv swiftmend...grrr...which lifebloom I on again? lifebloom Tank1...decurse!!!!....etc etc. Without some serious spell haste, I doubt most druids are casting four spells and getting back around to restoring the lifebloom on the MT. There just isn't enough time to cover up for your ~.25s reaction times, shifting fingers, and the time it takes to switch targets.

2: You are faster. Get 150 haste, and your GCD is down to 1.35s or so. That rejuv+swiftmend now goes off .3 seconds sooner, assuming you were in the midst of the previous spell's gcd when you decided to use this combo. Needless to say, this saves lives and wipes.