A little comment about Wild Growth being overwritten by CoH:
Are you sure about that? If you take a look at the big CoH encounters like Bloodboil or RoS (since we don't know what Wotlk will bring) I usually cast CoH on "my" group and when they are high enough to be save from fel rage i CoH the group i share with the other priest.
On RoS p3 i usually cast CoH on g1 , then g2 , g3, g4 and so on until the damage gets so high that I can only keep one group alive anymore.
If i knew there was resto druid on raid healing any of these encounters i wouldn't top off groups. I'd cast a CoH on bloodboil g1, then g2 then g3 to make sure that the hot ticks as much as possible.

I think that the concerns about overwritten Hots come mostly from trash healing, where healers are bored anyways. When I'm healing trash i don't think long if i'm overwriting a hot or not because it's quite frankly not worth the hassle, unless you want to top healing meters.

But at any new encounter i do think about how my healing works best with the other healers. I'd make sure to not top up with CoH if there is a resto druid casting WG.

The loss of group restriction heavily influences the ability to control who gets the heal, I would be tempted to ask for Blizz to implement two versions of the WG/CoH (group targeting, smart targeting) in order to allow this control to exist where needed.

By itself it doesn't matter if you are alone.
When you have heavy raid damage you hit issues with WG vs CH/CoH, using CoH as an example.

When the whole raid takes damage, and say the 'ranged clump' has 10~ people.
Assume both CoH and then WG get used, resulting in CoH healing 5 targets up +1800 instantly, and our WG has then selected the other 5 people and healed for about 800 after two seconds.
By that time if CoH is used again it will select WG targets because they are currently -1000 from the other 5 people.

This is also made worse when you consider it takes 5 seconds for WG to equal CoH, so that's 3 CoH casts which can be done of which 2 have high potential to overwrite your WG as they are still lower than the initial CoH targets they healed.

The speed of casting WG is also hindered by the fact you will need to wait a small amount of time (2-3sec?) for enough difference to exist between people that you are much less likely to overwrite your existing WG.


The whole possibility that it will not get overwritten is that normal raid healing is so expensive now that it will not get spammed so ruthlessly.
However with the revert on Shamans focusing more on CH again (Blizz moved from the direction of heavily influencing Shamans to use other heals more frequently) and CoH still being cheaper than WG this is not nearly as possible as you would hope.

If it kept its current values it should be dropped around 50-60% of CoHs cost and we have to accept that it is a cheap spell we can throw around and not care if it gets overwritten often.


Smart healing is a bane for this type of healing and quite honestly the can of worms that Chain Heal has opened in recent raiding is annoying.
Reverting it from CoH and WG and sticking the smart healing on PoH & Tranq would be more feasible I believe.

Lets face it - the changes to raid wide buffs and synergy mean groups do not really have much purpose right now, letting them be used for healing control should cause no issue as almost noting relies on groups except PoH/Tranq/Pet Shout*?

Our healing is more proactive than reactive. We have the luxury of putting a WG up on a group of players BEFORE incoming damage hits. This is especially handy once you learn the fight and get a feeling for how damage is dealt across the raid.

So whereas Priests and Shamans have to react to damage, we can just cast our WG around pre-emptively. This creates synergy with other group healers. Our heals buy time for the direct heals. That is a luxury because spike AoE damage is healed up sooner and can be topped off by other healers.

That a large part of our HoTs is not converted to actual healing when we are grouped with direct healers is something that is not new and is reflected in the mana cost of our spells too.

Proactive spells (HoTs) are generally fine because they are cheap causing you not to waste huge amounts of mana & the spell is equal over time, this is not the case for WG due to two reasons.
1) it is front loaded, so wasting the first couple of ticks are wasting the most important part of the spell.
2) it is expensive, 20% more than CoH at a cost of around 970~ per cast.

In order to achieve what you talk about, it would need to cost notably less, and/or heal more over time not less.


We also lack enough control over the spell in order to use it (well) preemptively due to smart healing but this causes more issues in 25 man than 10/5 man, which is slightly conflicting with your "We have the luxury of putting a WG up on a group of players BEFORE incoming damage hits".

I am rather certain that I named the two reasons why this spell is not ment to be used in a preemptive/proactive manner, not about its synergy with x/y/z.
I will gladly strike off the "20% more than CoH" if it makes you happy in making it stand alone unbiased.

Proactive: duration based spell.
Reactive: high cost & front loaded healing.


For what it is worth, the main form of raid AoE DoT ability currently (8962) is Sapphiron's Frost Aura which (before resistances) deal 1600 and 1200 per second, of which getting a 50% reduction from FrR is a fair assessment.
Over 7 seconds and assuming a general 50% reduction due to FrR you are looking at 4200 damage for the 10 man, 5600 for the 25 man per 5 players.

Your first WG tick will be around 450-500 (-23 per tick) at this level assuming being correctly geared, enchanted and fully buffed - however that should jump down to 375-425 wearing the resistance gear you should need for the encounter.

In gear for the 10 man and in resistance setup (375~ max tick) you are looking at healing 2100 over 7 seconds.
Considering you should be able to cast it twice without much concern it will end up healing half of the aura damage by itself (assuming 0 wasted heals) at a cost of just under 2000 mana & 2 GCDs per 7 seconds.

Combine that with rolling RJ & LB on the MT and you should end up stretched in terms of mana sustainability.
You could naturally focus on just doing this and using the spare GCDs when you do not need to refresh LB/RJ on OO5SR regeneration to sustain yourself.

Please note I am not trying to say this spell should be able to heal an entire 10 man raid through Sapphiron's Frost Aura (600/sec~) alone at no cost.

Right now, the HPS capabilities of WB seems to be balanced against CoH being spammed and WG ticking on 20 people.

Healing:
Wild Growth: 0.64 * 1500 * 2 + 1085 = 3005 healing over 7 sec
CoH: 0.51 * 1500 * 2 + 720 = 2250 healing non-crit

HPS:
Wild Growth: 3005 / 7 = ~429.3 HPS averaged per person
Given 20 people with Wild Growth (4 casts and assuming no WG cast refreshes another Wild Growth) = 8586 max HPS
CoH: 2250 / 1.5 = 1500 HPS per person
Given chain-casting CoH, 5 people being healed, and no over-heal = 7500 max HPS

If you factor in a 25% crit rate, CoH's HPS increases to about 8437. Add in the Priest Glyph that increases the # of targets CoH hits by 1, it goes up to about 10125. However, if you give both about 7% spell haste, an extra cast of WB can be applied before the 1st WB falls off, increasing WB's max HPS to 10732 and CoH's to 10848. With the higher coefficient on WG, the numbers may balance out with greater spell power.

Unfortunately, as has been stated previously in the thread, WG will not work this way due to smart targeting. An easy fix to this would be for WG to either not overwrite another WG at all or not overwrite another WG that has more than 2-3 seconds left on it. The former would allow a Druid to put WG on 20-25 people, but the latter would allow a druid to cut off the weakest ticks of WG for a gain of HPS on those people at a loss of overall HPS.

I believe I remember reading previously a number of pages back in this thread that the target of WG doesn't get WG unless that person is one of the 5 lowest HP people in range; I don't know if thats still true, but, if it is, it should be changed to act the way I remember reading in the Priest thread on how CoH works where the target of CoH always gets healed and the 4 other targets are the smart-targeting heals. Again, my memory may be faulty; it would have been a fairly long time ago when I had read those reports. If anyone could re-test this, it would be informative.

EDIT 1: Whoops. I noticed I used 1.64 and 1.54 as coefficients instead of 0.64 and 0.54. I'll update my post with fixed numbers in the coming minutes.
EDIT 2: Fixed.

I did heroic halls of lightning last night to test out our healing ability and mana capacity. I didn't spec into omen of clarity as its bugged state would heavily distort results. Only glyph I used was the rejuvenation one (the regrowth one will clearly get nerfed). Here are my impressions.

Lifebloom has a miserable throughput. Compared to level 70 in BC, at level 80 in WLK I've gained:

4% healing from master shapeshifter
6% healing from tree of life aura (though I've lost the old aura)
~105 healing spell power from improved tree of life
5% periodic healing from Genesis
2 new ranks of lifebloom
100ish more spell power from gear

And it ticks for the same as on live. It's just terrible. The bloom part of it heals for about 2300 or so, making it superior in most cases to simply let it bloom. I'm fine with the increased mana cost as it should be a choice between it and rejuvenation, but the throughput is simply not there to make it worthwhile. I've generally found it okay to keep up on the main tank during a boss fight, but the bugged nature's splendor makes it more time consuming than it should be. I'd say it needs about a 15-25% throughput boost

Rejuvenation and regrowth are fantastic. Rejuvenation is ticking for nearly 1500, and the replenish effect is quite nice (though the energy and rage gained from it should be higher). Regrowth heals for about 4000 non-crit and 6000 on a crit, which plants a seed which heals for another 1800. It ticks for something like 850 or so 9 times, for over 6400 healing.

I specced into most of the healing touch talents (empowered touch, naturalist, just one point in tranquil spirit though). That said, I rarely used it. Maybe used it without NS about 4 times during the run. Still not worth speccing into. That might change if you use the glyph.

Nourish is 'okay'. I used it a few times but really regrowth is a better emergency heal the vast majority of the time.

The direct heals are too mana intensive without the gift of the earthmother refund. That hurts quite a bit.

Now for wild growth. Put simply, I didn't use this unless all five group members were damaged. It was still useful in a few places (the gauntlet, and the last boss). It doesn't heal enough, period. I actually like the 7 second duration as that makes it unique while still being useful. The problem is healing for 2400 just doesn't cut it. It needs to heal for about 4000 over the 7 seconds to be able to keep up with much of the damage that gets thrown at you. I shouldn't feel guilty about wasting mana if I cast it when only 3 people have taken damage. In those situations it's better to use single target heals.

Finally, mana is a real issue again. I didn't have a mana battery in the group I went in, and didn't have mana spring or wisdom. The only mana boosters available were Arcane Intellect and sometimes improved water elemental.

I found myself needing innervate on most bosses, and on the last boss in particular I used innervate, a runic mana potion, and even drums of restoration and still ran out of mana before the boss died (to be fair, it's quite a challenging boss in heroic difficulty, even after you figure out the 'gimmick'). Part of this is due to the bug giving enemies a higher crit rate so our warrior tank was taking quite a few crits. Part of this was not having omen of clarity at all, when a non bugged version will save me a few hundred to a few thousand mana per minute.

The main part of it though was simply not getting enough healing out of the spells I cast. Lifebloom and wild growth just aren't giving enough bang for the buck. The mana cost on them is fine, the amount healed is not, which means I have to cast more heals than I should.

I don't think that's necessarily a problem. It does prevent druids from being the sole raid healer in a 25 man, which just makes us complementary raid healers. Hots on the tank keep them stabile and make things much easier for direct healers to keep them up. Area of effect healing works the same way.

It does need good throughput to make it truly live up to that role however.

Let's assume 20 people stand on a spot and all take raid damage.
Now a druid and a priest cast their aoe heals.
The druid applies his hot and the priest his direct heal, they all go up a bit.
Next GCD again, but this time 5 different persons are selected, because the former people are higher in health, due to the hot and the CoH.

So unless 1 CoH and 1 WG is enough to top them it would actually make the hot tick longer, because CoH would target automatically people with lower health.
I'm not sure if the smart mechanic is so detrimental to druids, unless there is very little raid damage incoming which can be healed by a single CoH.

If we assume a malicious priests who needs to be no1 for his epeen and therefore decides to spam CoH on the druids hot targets this mechanic would actually be helpful to the druids, by preventing the CoH from topping off while other people are still low.

This is all quite theoretical, we will see in a raid encounter with heavy aoe damage if the smart targeting is actually good or bad.
Personally i hope for a good priest/druid synergy in raid healing.

Newest changes:

Nature's Grace now a 3 point ability, 33/66/100% chance.
Nature's Splendor now a 1 point ability, +3 sec on RJ/LB, +6 sec on Regrowth.
Gift of the Earthmother now includes Wild Growth.

I always noticed druids doing very well on effective healing meters when I raided, because HoTs did not count as overheal. (Aside from beta) It has been a very long time since I have actually raided, has this been changed? Otherwise I am confused by that statement.

Druids are still very mana efficient healers both in pve and pvp. Your mentioning of the lack of viability of HoTs in pve settings seems to imply that you believe that the healing power of HoTs should have been buffed. However even if HoTs were not effective in pve, they are absolutely effective in pvp, and this would have made too much of a negative impact in an pvp environment. And since druids in naxx still seem to dominate me in healing meters and mana efficiency, it is difficult for me to understand why you do not feel druids to be effective pve healers?