This discussion has sort of strayed from glyphs. Perhaps we should move it to the PvE Resto Healing thread?

The short answer is, I think druids aren't very resilient to 'bad luck' events with burst raid damage. Examples: Kolo arm crush + shockwave in rapid succession, a lot of people getting napalm for whatever stupid reason on Mimiron, bomb + tantrum on XT, etc.

Meter positions aren't everything, there's also having the tools to handle crap luck or even cover mistakes of other players to an extent. And being able to repeatedly do it attempt after attempt. That's what makes a good progression healer, imo. Sadly, druid's ability to handle 'bad luck' burst-wise isn't very good.

Please stop posting nonsense and maybe the tread topic will thrive.

All of these 'bad luck' situations can be handled by druids. Most of what you've mentioned I've seen and overcome (even in a 2 druid raid heal setup). Just because you feel inadequate in your raids doesn't mean all resto druids are inadequate. Please analyze the incoming damage and the tools you and your fellow healers have to deal with it. Your comments suggest this has not been done and are just throwing out how you feel about things. Play as a team. Coordinate heal strategies with your fellow healers.

So, about these glyph things...

What Rij is posting is not nonsense, well not all of it at least. For bursty raid damage druids are capable, but not the best at healing large amounts of damage quickly, which is important in many encounters. As a raid healing leader AND a resto druid I know of our difficulties. We can put out obscene HPS numbers by rolling Rejuvs on certain encounters...numbers that would put all the other classes to shame, but we often lack enough abilities to give health NOW when a target is low. Yes we have swiftmend (once every 15s), yes we have Nature's Swiftness and Healing Touch (once every 3 minutes), generally this is enough, however (and I see his point) it could be handled better with a Holy priest in the mix. There is no reason to be mean to Rijndael over this. Can two druids be stuck on raid healing and handle it? Sure, Is this the best possible setup? Not even close. In fact, I would likely laugh at someone who would even suggest that the BEST raid healing setup involved stacking druids. Capable yes, optimal no.

Also, he makes a good point which you skimmed over rather callously. He admitted that a druid can heal these bad luck situations, but argued that doing it on a consistant basis is not something we are good at. I would agree whole heartedly with this statement. The question is not 'can we?' but 'can we do it consistantly?'. I beleive that yes we can, but it is more the exception than the rule. You sir (Nut) are talking more about feeling than Rijndael. He has looked at his tool set and the tool set of his fellow raiders and how came to the conclusion that he doesnt have the best tools to do the job (which is correct)

Lets separate raid damage that is raid-wide and random-target damage. Druids are excellent for healing the first, but not so good for the 2nd type, as it tends to be more burstly and lethal. Raid-wide raid damage is, at least in Ulduar, usually in a form of the dot and thus druids shine.
For nearly every fight in Ulduar, having 2 druids is better than 1, as the hot coverage gets a lot better. You can laugh if you want, but I suggest actually finishing the instance first.

Your rather have no other class on raid heals than druids? That would be your prefered setup? I just want to make this clear. Able to heal it? Probably, but is it the best? As a general rule in Ulduar you'd like to see Resto druids and only resto druids heal all raid damage? I understand that we're strong, but i simply feel we'd be better complimented with a Holy Priest also on raid heals.

(As an aside, I do run with 3 resto druids and no Holy priest. We're making it work, but an Holy priest would be nice.)

Druids and priests are both excellent raid healers. I can see having 3 druids and no priests as a bit excessive, as a balanced mix of healing classes if always preferred. But my ideal healing group, if there is such a thing, almost always includes 2 druids.

No swiftmend? Personally that's the one glyph I'd never go without. I've moved away from the rejuv glyph of late. Used it in naxx but looking at the logs I found that while rejuve frequently was at least 20% of my heals up to 40% depending on the fight the glyph of rejuv proc was less than 1%. There are a few situations such as tantrum or frozen blows where it might provide more of a benefit but otherwise it is rare that someone is likely to stay below 50% for more than one tick without some other healer trying to flash heal them.

I dunno you guys but I'm kinda disappointed about glyphs' situation right now.

First of all I still don't understand why Blizzard si doing completely wrong itemization on druids, giving us only crit on most of the loot, when we're far superior as raid healers instead of MT healers. I hope druids in other high-end guilds can confirm and support this statement.

So basically, apart from Wild Growth glyph and Swiftmend (a must), what other glyph is now useful for trees in PvE?

The Innervate one is now a real joke, I always liked the previous version, but it seems really useless now. What is it, like 3k mana? Nothing, with our mana regeneration.

Nourish one? We never use a tree for MT healing, since both paladins and discipline priests are far better and mana savers than us, hands down.

HT one? Do people really use HT glyphed/specced to raid heal? I just use Rejuvenation and Wild Growth and there's nobody except holy priests who can even get close to me (or other resto druids) on healing done on raid (not that meters matter so much of course).

Any thoughts? I may even stick to the Innervate one, since I don't see any worth option so far.

The obvious ones are Swiftmend and Wild Growth. The debatable third ones for me would be Nourish or Lifebloom, but lately I've taken to glyphing Rebirth as it's invaluable for hard mode learning attempts. Too often battle rezzed folks would simply be killed upon rezzing due to the large random raid damage flying around.

As with most druids Swiftmend and Wild Growth Glyphs are my personal favorties for PvE. For the third one I use Nourish for lack of better alternative. Rejuvenation Glyph works very very seldom as logs have shown to me and other people. Lifebloom one is now pretty moot. I never used HT since MC. Maybe HT is meant for PvP with Glyph and Talents. Innervate is very situational. There are a few combats in Normal mode Ulduar 25 where mana is an issue but Innervate Glyph will not solve it. You need to play a little on your gear and play style to last the fight. Maybe in hard modes mana can be more tight and then it might be useful. I do not have any experience on such as we only did normal modes until now - sigh.
At least I do use nourish now and then and if there are 2 druids, it creates a synergy. So its better than other available Glyphs.

If you often innervate yourself, I can see why you would think it would not be worth it as youd be hardpressed to find a situation to burn your entire mana bar twice. I usually have to innervate priests, and with the recent change I can see this extending to paladins occasionally. The glyph is worth its weight in gold when not used on yourself.

I think that simplifying one's decision-making process during healing spikes is a real benefit that is well worth a glyph slot. Sure, it's probably possible to relearn how to heal and make better non-glyphed Swiftmend decisions. But realistically, is anyone going to get more return out of for instance 1 more second of LB than the improved reaction time etc. that you get from glyphing Swiftmend?

If I need to hit someone with a 13k instant heal, I really don't care what effect that's gonna have on their 3 second HoTs. I don't think that lack of the glyph has ever complicated my decision making.

This is exactly why I de-value Swiftmend glyph for raid healing situations. If this glyph is valuable to you as a raid healer then you are saying that you expect someone to take additional damage after you make the decision to Swiftmend them.

I believe that most raid healing Druids are pre-hotting for many fights (particularly hard modes) which means that at least some ticks of some HoTs are going to be wasted. In terms of the Swiftmend glyph usage:

For an event like Tympanic Tantrum or Frozen Blows, let Time X be the onset of the damage spike for which you are pre-hotting.

Intuitively we know that applying HoTs long before X is a poor investment of time because the trade off of spending GCDs in a relaxed healing period to have them available when it gets hectic is drastically mitigated by the expected wastage of the portion of the HoT that ticks out prior to X.

Most raid warning mods give a timer for 10 seconds to go and I suggest that window is the time where many (most?) of us start pre-hotting and thus ~10 Rejuvs will be ticking by time X with a maximum of 8 left to cast. Each WG application reduces this by 1.

So, of these targets, who is most likely to need the swiftmend? The pre-hotted targets with decent duration left to go at time X won't - they'll be covered by 2 or 3 ticks post X. The people who receive a HoT at X or shortly after X shouldn't - they'll still receive the benefit of 4T8 + a few ticks.

The people who are most likely to need the Swiftmend are the ones who happen to be last on the HoT rotation and thus the ones who are receiving heals after having taken significant damage and who are receiving heals at the tail end of the event triggered at X. The benefit of the glyph of Swiftmend on those targets is very low because, once the event is over, GCDs are no longer at a premium and incidental healing can restore their hp.

The converse scenario is where damage is sporadic in which case the value of glyph of Swiftmend is that you can use the spell and not interrupt a pre-hotting cycle eg. Freya.

Sorry for the wall of text, I'm trying to justify giving up the Swiftmend glyph crutch myself.

Someone in the raid who has taken enough damage that I need to swiftmend them is more likely to continue to take damage than other members of the raid. And if I'm using it for tank dip, there's obviously value in not having to refresh the HoT, both in saving me a GDC and in not delaying the next HoT tick.

Plus, what would you replace it with? It's not like druids are swimming in awesome glyphs.

@Lightflower - I agree with conclusion but not with the reasoning.

Honestly I don't see why you'd need Swiftmend for any typical person taking damage in tantrum or frozen blows or oblivion. Hot them up and let the residual healing from chain heal and such do the work. This is predictable raid damage and normally people are not in danger of dying from it directly.

For me Swiftmend is great to save people who do something stupid (or "get unlucky") right before those type of events, where they go down below 50% and tantrum is about to start - what are you going to do with them? Swiftmend then is a great option.

I think the glyph itself is OK - it saves a bit of time and mana - nothing wrong with that. The question is: can you live without it? If you don't have it then this changes your approach to some things (like tantrum and such). I think, for me at least, removing the glyph resulted in better overall play because I stopped throwing Swiftmend like mad left and right and started to make more conscious decision about it = less wasted hots, better overall EHPS, less people dying.

I'm currently running with Switmend, Nourish and wild Growth.

I'm also considering swapping out of Swiftmend, the reason being that I tend to rarely use it.
There are two reasons why I am still running it, one is because it would eat a part out of my rejuv cycle. When raid rejuvenating I have my steady circle of rejuvs that expire in the same order with minimal mouse movement (mouseover healing) to recast. If swiftmending someone would eat the HoT I'd be recasting rejuv out of order on said raidmember which would be a nuisance (and a slowdown in the HoT order).

I'm considering swapping it out for Glyph of HT, which has it's advantages for raidhealing (as has been said plenty of times before). When pushing hard modes and more people are failing, it may be handy to have a lower CD spell to use instead of Swiftmend.

Do any of you ever cast a bloom over a rejuvved one that needs some extra healing? While not isntantly effective, the bloom usually tops them off before a next burst of AoE comes in.

One thing I can say about 'Rejuv cycles' is that while they may have an advantage of less mouse movements, I think you can get better results hotting people who are actually at less than full hp (especially with the 4 piece tier 8). This is because you may have a slightly longer reaction time, but at the same time your hots will overheal less. Personally, I find that if I go straight down my raid frames, I am limited not by mouse movement, but by the GCD.

edit: my current thoughts on glyphs: Nourish and Wild Growth permanently assigned. For encounters where I predominantly tank heal (and raid damage is moderate/not spiky): glyph of Swiftmend. For encounters where I predominantly raid heal (and raid damage is spiky): glyph of Healing Touch.

Rationalle: Wild Growth is always worth casting on raid, even if you sit on the tank. Hots are almost always worth putting on the tanks, even if you raid heal. That means helping out with a Nourish on the tank during a burst (or to assist a tank healer temporarily out of commission due to, e.g. arm grab) can be a good thing to do, and the Nourish glyph is an insane boost to HPS on the tank. If you predominantly tank heal an encounter, your primary limitation isn't HPS, but having spare GCDs to save a tank from burst, since it is burst that kills tanks. Swiftmend glyph saves you GCDs exactly when needed, so while it's healing returns are horrible, its spike response potential is good. If you predominantly raid heal an encounter, you generally need a better tool than Swiftmend to respond to people getting burst. While other healers are better at burst, there's little reason not to help out, especially if doing so prevents raid deaths. If you predominantly raid heal, you don't need NS+HT as much, as it's primarily a tank cooldown. Thus GHT is a decent idea.

In practice I don't bother with Swiftmend because I just haven't seen situations where that missing hot made a difference on the tank. This might change on hard modes.

The only encounters that I can think of in Ulduar where it would not be in the raid's best interest to keep 3 lb's on at least 1 tank are Yogg-Saron, and phase 2 Mimiron. Unless your raid setup and healing assignments allow you to abstain from keeping lifeblooms on the tank(s), you should be glyphing it.

Lifebloom > Wild Growth > Swiftmend imo, and those are the 3 that I use. I always keep lifeblooms on tanks, unless the damage is truly trivial AND I run the risk of going OOM during the fight, and highly recommend that all druids do the same. Lifebloom is the best glyph that we have.

Why? I don't disagree that you make a valid argument for keeping lifebloom on the tank, but it's less clear to me why glyphing for it makes sense. My gear is good enough for Ulduar in general, but not good enough to allow me to roll lifebloom on the tank if I'm on raid healing...so is having lifebloom last longer really a benefit if you don't roll LB?

I like your choice of WG and Swiftmend, but my 3rd glyph is Nourish, which would also seem to be helpful for tank healing (and raid healing, of course). With rejuv, regrowth and LB on the tank, the Nourish glyph adds a respectable amount of extra healing...does the LB glyph measure up?

I'm somewhat of an advocate of the rejuv glyph, on a WWS it usually accounts for around 1.5% of my healing, which is quite nice, and it's always "useful" healing, since it ticks at sub 50%.

Swiftmend is nice for not eating a HoT, but generally I'm using swiftmend as a last resort button as a raid heal, and it generally tops someone off, if I have to refresh the HoT after, not a big deal in my opinion.

When healing tanks, lifebloom rolling is naturally the way to go, but stating that Lifebloom is the best glyph we have seems a bit farfetched. When running HoTs on tanks (even on two tanks) I never run into GCD issues to make the extra second neccesary. And excluding GCD problems the only reason to get the LB Glyph is manaconservation.
For tankhealing the HT glyph or Nourish glyph both are alot more interesting. (Both help more with the spikes in damage than the LB one does)

So basically, while you can make the argument that the LB glyph is handy in case of mana problems, I do not see much other use for it.