The way Druids heal hard modes is to virtually never use Nourish. Once you move that spell to your least-used keybind, you can also shelve the Glyph and focus on something that increases your throughput while raid healing.

Only Holy Priests can match or exceed our HPS and, even then, only in some situations. Asking a Druid to tank heal and another healer to raid heal is just inefficient and, in fights where you have to pare healers down to the bone in order to make the DPS checks, inefficiency is a killer.

I'm actually rather surprised there is even debate on which glyphs to choose, given our current choices.

As it stands now it's fairly obvious that Wild Growth and Swiftmend are no brainers, assuming your primary focus is 25man raiding content. Our third choice as stated previously in this thread boils down to Rejuv, Nourish, or Regrowth. For the most part, Regrowth can be tossed out of the equation without much of a second thought just due to our current style of play, and the amount that we actually even use regrowth, let alone use it again once it's already applied.

Thus we're left with Rejuv or Nourish. And at this stage of the game, the only time that we're pretty much forced to use nourish as nothing can come close to doing the job better is Mimiron napalm, or the rare instance where we have to back off raid healing and heal a tank moreso then a swiftmend. Rejuv glyph comes in handy for a plethora of easymode and hardmode encounters alike, Mimiron, General, and Freya most noticably with Thorim/Hodir/etc getting some benefit as well.

This comes from my PoV (hardmodes, raid healer), and again as stated previously this is going to be what most top-end druids/guilds strive for. Even if you're not currently pursuing hardmodes, the simple fact that nourish is so low on the healing totem poll and rejuv is on the very top. It's no contest to buff Rejuv where possible.

Ok, you think Swiftmend is obvious. Can you explain it to me? With numbers if possible. Everyone says Swiftmend is obvious, but nobody explains. I tried to quantify how much Swiftmend actually returns and got abysmally low numbers. Since so many people seem to like this glyph, I can only assume I am missing something.

Well, how much are you clipping off of the Rejuvenation on the target if you are consuming the HoT? Each tick that you clip is ~2500 lost healing. If you are casting ~8-10 swiftmends per fight, in the absolute best case you are clipping 20000-25000 healing. Of course, if you swiftmend before the last 3 seconds in the rejuv you'll potentially clip a lot more.

Now, you could argue that your swiftmend is going to make the rest of the HoT pure overhealing, but then I'd wonder if you're using swiftmend wisely if you're often targeting people with HoTs active and <9k deficit.

In any case, let's see how much you need to cast nourish in order to get the same mileage out. If Nourish averages let's say 4500, a 6% bonus is 270 hp. So in order to make up the "best case" of 20000hp in Nourishes, you need to cast enough nourishes to hit 75 HoTs. That's quite a few nourishes, even hitting 4 HoTs with every one.

I'd say even with the fudgy math, the advantage of Glyphed Swiftmend over Nourish is quite clear.

Just thinking of the mechanic, and how it works, it should be rather obvious to how it becomes an obvious choice.

More freedom with GCD's while healing (you're not forced to reapply the HoT after swiftmending)
More mana efficiency (again, the act of not having to reapply the HoT means you can spend your mana on other people)
More effective healing/healing output (.. without the need to reapply the HoT, it can keep ticking)

Along side of your other given choices, what else would you even consider using instead of swiftmend?

doublepost

I typically glyph for Wild Growth, Swiftmend, and Rejuvenation. I've found that those are fairly practical in most encounters due to my raid healing assignment but will glyph RJ --> Nourish for General Vezax. While the RJ glyph doesn't really do much in encounters where players don't dip under 50%, my Nourish usage is generally minimal as well as situational and my target is not always guaranteed to have a hot on them. A good example would be countering Napalm Shell on Mimiron. If I'm lucky, my RJ spam has hit them but a raw Nourish spam is more than enough HPS.

For some hard modes, my best attempts on IC.25 Hard have used 4 healers with myself as the only Resto Druid. Our Ret Pally accounts for around 10,000 effective HPS which compliments my RJ/WG blanketing. For XT-002 Hard, the RJ Glyph is simply phenomenal because of the number of people who dip under 50%. I also like having the RJ glyph for Mimiron P2.

I think you will see an improvement in the RJ glyph if you run Hodir (and other aoe heavy fights) with fewer healers. I've been attempting the fight with a H.Pally, H.Priest, and 2xR.Druid setup and there are several occasions where people don't pay attention to their Biting Cold stacks or eat an Icicle and dip under 50% very quickly. The goal, of course, is to take as little Biting Cold damage as possible as well as avoid every Icicle, thereby reducing the raid healing to mainly Frozen Blows (which our Paladins absorb a good chunk of) and thereby nullifying the RJ glyph.

Except that in normal case you'd pretty much instantly recast rejuv on the person you just clipped, right? So effectively it's not really about decreased heals, but rather about mana / time cost of that. And before you say that this may mean that the next rejuv tick on that person comes in late, remember he'll get instant heal from 4t8 bonus (which you should have since you're doing hard modes).

Because the Swiftmend glyph saves you from casting another Rejuvenation on the target I view the glyph, at best, providing me with the savings of an additional RJ. If I’m casting every GCD, a non-glyphed Swiftmend keeps me from having Rejuvenation on one additional target, or about 550 HPS. In cases where I’m not casting every GCD, I save the mana I would have needed to use to re-apply RJ. In my case, this is at best about 120 mp5 for the duration of Rejuvenation.

Of course, whether or not Swiftmend is worth a Major glyph slot is also highly dependent on how often you actually use it. However, even if I was using it constantly I can’t say this savings is enough to make the Swiftmend glyph a must-have; nonetheless it is still a strong glyph.

I would say that the swiftmend glyph is even better now with the 2pice t8 set bonus and probably would be absolete with the new glyphs that came with the patch except for this bonus hopefully provides a better use for swiftmend. For pvp though i don't think anyone would argue the fact that this is a "must have"/

In an intense healing situation you need every GCD you can get to increase your throughput and if you have to use 2 GCD's just to use a swiftmend, then put another rejuv on the target, you are missing out on that much more throughput you could be producing.

On a fight like Hodir HM/mimiron. It is very crucial that all the healers in your raid put out as much healing as possible and if you miss a rejuv on someone because you had to reapply it after swiftmending, this will cause you to fall further and further behind. (assuming you are raid healing, but if you are tank healing then its still not a bad idea to have this glyph. It allows you to continue the constant throughput on the tank without using up another GCD.)

If you do not find yourself using swiftmend very often, then i would suggest using another such as nourish or WG because these too are very useful glyphs and if ur not using swiftmend very often, you are probably using other direct healing spells such as nourish.

First of all, if you are blanketing the raid with rejuvenation and you don't have GCDs to occasionally even intervene, then I'm not sure you have GCDs to cast swiftmend in the first place... Considering that rejuvenation has potential to heal for more than swiftmend, casting swiftmend even with the glyph is really a loss of HPC and in fact raw HPS.

Second, since swiftmend actually has cooldown, you cannot fall behind indefinitely. And in fact if you cast it on every cooldown rather than when people actually need it, you're lowering your HPC and raw HPS (see above) needlessly.

So in order to have GCDs for swiftmend, the necessary condition is that the raid is healed at the rate above DTPS in the first place. Now, swiftmend will clip rejuvenation (let's round it to -10k HPC on average) if you have no glyph, and you're using the GCD that otherwise you'd be using for rejuvenation (another -10k on average) so if you were very aggressive about it and used swiftmend every 20 seconds (which is kinda nuts in my opinion), you'd clip your raw HPC (and HPS since all of that has 1sec GCD), by 20k / 20 seconds = 1k HPC/HPS - half of which is because of not having the glyph. More normally, you'll be talking about casting swiftmend anywhere between 2 times over 3 minutes to 9 times over 6 minutes, so not having the glyph costs you anywhere between ~100 - ~250 raw HPC / HPS. Considering that if you blanket the raid with rejuv and WG using every GCD, you have raw HPS ~20k (reference), and the top EHPS in the world according to WMO is something ~11.5k (IC hard mode), the loss of even 1k raw HPS is completely irrelevant.

I would assert that a glyph that increases your raw HPS by 5% is pretty damn good, actually. Especially if it means that using swiftmend isn't necessarily a two-GCD operation. The flexibility of not having to refresh that rejuv is worth something.

Personally I found rejuv to be underwhelming enough even in optimal situations that I swapped it for the innervate glyph. It's nice knowing that I can give it out when I need a bit of mana, but not a full innervate's worth.

Though at the moment I'm trying out glyphed healing touch, which is practically sacrilege, I know. But I've got to say, even though it's pretty ugly mana-wise, it's definitely nice having a 0.9 second cast that works well on random raid targets.

I suppose this all really boils down to how often you cast swiftmend. Assuming your main strategy is to blanket the raid with RJ and WG, the glyph doubles the worth of swiftmend. But this gain can be still abysmally small considering in the parse above the total healing from rejuvenation alone was 2.7 mln, and the raw HP gain from swiftmend glyph on two casts would be ~20k total - that's ~0.5% of overall effective healing done, not mentioning raw healing done (that would be about 0.3%). At the same time, the glyph of rejuvenation wasn't that much better since it contributed only 51.6k healing total = 1.3% overall effective healing done - but that's about 4 times better than the glyph of swiftmend.

The choice between the Rejuv and Nourish glyphs comes down to a few things IMO, none of which are ever the exact same from druid to druid and raid to raid. Here are a few considerations to make, none of which you can easily map out with theorycrafted numbers that will always be the same like you can with dps theory.

- Are you doing hard-mode content?
- Does your raider's health dip low enough for Rejuv glyph to activate?
- Do you stick to your guns and only Rejuv/WG spam the raid at all times no matter what?
- Do you have other quality raid healers (Shaman/Priest) who are better at burst-healing the raid instead of you using Nourish?
- Are your tank healers quality players so you don't have to Nourish the tank as often?
- Do you sometimes fill the role of mixed tank/raid healer?

Agreed, there's no way to correctly Glyph for every single fight. The only solution (that I've found) is the old fashioned way of keeping stacks of multiple glyphs in my bags and just changing as the fight requires.

While I agree about Wild Grouth glyph, Swiftmend one is not so obvious. If you are using SM as part of your healing rotation - i.e. every time it's off cooldown, then yes, SM glyph is a must have. But if you are using SM as an emergency measure when someone is low on health, then benefit of this glyph is decreased. Add to that 4pcT8 bonus and recasting Rejuv on Swiftmended target becomes not that bad idea at all (assuming target was dangerously low on health before SM, ~1.8k instant healing can be useful).

I prefer to look at numbers. Here is an example:
Wow Web Stats

During all fight I've casted 3 Swiftmends. So I've lost whopping 3 GCD. On the other hand, Glyph of Rejuvenation gave me 3% increase to effective healing, Glyph of Wild Growth gave 4% increase and I'm keeping Glyph of Nourish for those cases when I need to heal a tank (like 3rd phase of IC hardmode, regrettably, I haven't WWS for it at the moment).

So I doubt that those 3 GCD outplays any of listed glyphs.

A fight like Kologarn you may have a point, the raid takes some damage every 10 seconds (?), your GCDs aren't particularly important. On a fight that does not allow you to miss a single GCD and where swiftmends are a key part of your healing (pre-nerf firefighter; IC Hard Mode, god knows why you are tank healing there; Knock, Knock, Knock on wood etc.) it is a hugely powerful and required glyph.

As people have said, I think there are too many glyphs available for different situations and I too keep a stack of a Nourish and Rejuv glyphs in my bags to change depending on the fight, though it is extremely rare that I switch to nourish.

The three best Glyphs for Restoration in 3.1 raiding for hardmodes are Wild Growth, Swiftmend, and..............innervate.

Wild Growth - greatly increases the effectiveness of our second best spell.

Swiftmend - saves a GCD thus increasing HPS and generally smooths out healing patterns. Extremely helpful for saving people in GCD locked situations.

The other throughput options, regrowth, nourish, and rejuvenation are not nearly as good as innervate, here is my reasoning. Regrowth and nourish - situational, the spells rarely account for more than 5% of my healing and thus the glyphs would account for considerably less. Under no circumstances should a druid be spamming Regrowth on the tank or the raid, and nourish spam situations are quite rare and do not occur on most ulduar fights making the glyph nearly useless.

Rejuvenation is our most powerful spell but the glyph is just underpowered. In numerous empirical tests the glyphed heal accounted for 1-2% of my healing and did not really 'save' people in the way I thought it might just from reading the tooltip.

Innervate however, is awesome. The glyph functionally gives you full mana from nearly zero if used on yourself. On the only ulduar fight that I routinely innervate myself, Iron Council hardmode, I spam down to about 1000 mana then innervate to full allowing near constant rotation. But the glyph really shines on fights where you could maybe use the innervate but probably don't need the entire effect like Mimiron between phases, Freya +3, and XT heartbreaker. At those times I can give my innervate to a PoH priest or a CH spamming shaman or even an OoM mage and the self mana return has provided considerably more than any of the other throughput options. The glyph provides the freedom to use your innervate as utility (following a rebirth or to sustain an aggressive holy priest) while still allowing you to pump out high HPS with less regard for mana sustainability. This freedom leads me to believe that the innervate glyph provides more throughput than any of the obvious throughput boosting glyphs although it's actual value is harder to calculate.

Unless new glyphs come out I suspect I will use Wild Growth, Swiftmend, and Innervate come 3.2

I currently don't really value the Innervate glyph highly. While I can certainly understand your arguments, I've found that:
A) I don't need the extra mana when I have to use it on myself (I nearly always end up with half a mana bar left if I innervate myself)
B) On fights where I'd be able to give it away, nobody else needs it either

In 3.2, where Innervate is much more granular, I think I might swap to the Innervate glyph, because those two problems should go away.

I get full mana pretty much from innervate right now unglyphed I dont understand how it seems better when glyphed? maybe I am missing something.

One other pro of Swiftmend is that it is instant, though I hardly use it myself I have considered switching to something else just due to me not using it.

I am one of those that just rarely use swiftmend, though I have gotten better at it of late.

I have considered going wild growth - nourish - regrowth. Why? just might fit my style more, I start casting regrowths when counter is at 2 sec just in case of lag or anything like that so my regrowth, hasted, should almost always hit with last regrowth on it and therefore that 20% boost every time might be good.

Then again... it might make me overheal more as well? I dont know yet.

I will say though the wild growth - nourish - swiftment combo does seem to work in more varied situations, I dont have the tier set bonus for Nourish yet which I am working for, I think then I will like Nourish even more.

I have been experimenting with the glyph of nourish. I have been using castsequence macros to see how many nourishs i can get max benefit from this glyph. So far my spell rotation looks like
Regrowth, Rejuvenation, Lifebloom, Wild Growth, Nourish, Nourish, Nourish, Swiftmend, Wild Growth, Lifebloom, Nourish, Nourish

My goal is to spam as many nourish as i can while Regrowth, Rejuvenation, Lifebloom, and Wild Growth are ticking. so far this is the rotation i have does anybody have any better rotations or suggestions?