I think it's safe to say that any effect that can result in an exponentially growing, self-perpetuating healing aura is unintended and if it were to ever sneak into the game, it would be swiftly hot-fixed.

I have a weird question for some players out here.

Does anybody know if the [Idol of Longevity] still works with the higher ranks of Healing Touch? I ask this because we're using resto Druids on P3 Anub and I'm wondering if it could be a good idol to use on that fight.

Resto druids are extremely powerfull on anub 3, and for that you're somewhat smart. However using healing touch for anything other than in conjunction with nature's swiftness is risky at best. It has been extensively proven that HT glyph + HT spec results in sub-healing so you shouldn't be using that if you are. Also on the fight the only place I can see a use for HT is on the penetrating cold targets, and even then it is best paired up with NS and not cast repeatedly. Rejuv + swiftmend is much stronger in that scenario. Now if you are using HT on just random raid members against the leaching swarm then you're just hindering yourself and the raid. The overall healing done to low overall health dps will bring them over 50%, bad move/ wasting time casting HT and not hotting, another bad move. In essence HT heavy druids are a waste except in very specific fights, and anub is not one of them.

Dasr,

If your Druid is assigned two PC targets (repeatedly need to heal two non-hotted targets for more than 7k each, in under three seconds, counting reaction time and latency) Glyphed Healing Touch is probably the right tool.

Khiran,

It may still work (but with 25% less mana savings because of the HT Glyph). However it dropped in the old level 60 Naxx. I wouldn't expect many Druids to have one, and nobody can get one now.

I found a use for Glyphed HT on Jaraxxus and Faction Champs, as well. Sometimes healing is about removing danger as quickly as possible, not HPS.

Sometimes it's worth putting in your 2c even if you haven't done a fight, mostly when not many people have. But 900~ or so guilds have done anub heroic and I'm assuming from what you say you're not in one of those guilds. If you're a druid and you're assigned to PC, and you don't have GHT, you're selling yourself short. It's as simple as that. No one who isn't completely stupid will use GHT to heal "random raid members against the leaching swarm." Otherwise you're assigned to a tank (as 2 disc priests can cover 4 PCs on their own and having a paladin beacon tank and deal with last one is best use of resources, my guild found that we didn't have the dps to deal with paladins spamming HL glyphed) leaving 4 healers to deal with 3 tanks. It's quite easy from here on to see that GHT is not your friend if you're assigned here, but neither is Revitalize so you can drop that and 2 points in subtlety to get your 5 in naturalist then drop your third glyph for GHT. Meaning one spec you can do either job, allowing whoever does your healing assignments more flexibility.

p.s. It's highly unlikely that you'll get two GHTs in before every PC, so I advise against trying that unless you live next door to the servers.

Just makes healing 1 PC that much easier, and why exactly would you not want to make it easier? Without GHT, we're worse than Shamans for dealing with PCs. If you're in a guild low on paladins/priests, it's best to put GHT druids there imo. Though saying that, my guild actually puts 2 shamans, 2 priests and a paladin on the PCs then me and another druid on all three tanks with beacon from the paladin (FoL spam).

If you can't cover 2 targets with GHT then what's the point? Surely you can just nourish one target.
Just seems all backwards to me, paladins should be FoLing / HLing the tanks (without the glyph of course). Druids should handle PC with rejuvs, not direct healing. Rely on priests to handle the initial ticks and let the hot do the rest.

GHT to top off the person, and everyone who gets a PC instantly uses a pot/HS. GHT > Nourish, to have more time to Rejuv the targets with r14.

"What's the point?" You ask? Well, the answer is in the post directly above yours; it makes it easier, so why wouldn't you? You can just Nourish the target, but if you're slow to find your target and your Nourish lands 0.1sec too late, your arrogance by using a weaker spell for the job just cost the raid that person and potentially caused a wipe. If you're trying for Insanity (which you will be if you've killed Anub once) then your arrogance has just potentially cost your raid the achievement for this week. If you had used GHT and done exactly the same, you would've saved them, since GHT is always faster than Nourish. Finally, if you honestly believe you'll never be just too late with a Nourish cast, you're lying to yourself; everyone makes mistakes, you may as well mitigate that as much as you can.
FoLing a tank isn't enough and HL is more mana intensive on the raid than using a druid. You can't predict when you need the HL or the FoL so trying to mix it up is the worst of both worlds. Druids can keep HoTs up and Nourish spam for a hell of a lot longer than HL, not to mention it stops the boss from getting so much health as you never really top off the tank for them to take a full tick of insect swarm (which would happen after almost every HL). There's also the added benefit that if you can put a paladin on PC, you'll have their beacon healing on the tanks, meaning they're covering way more than any one else who does PC. I agree with Druids handling PCs, just only if you don't have the classes/people who are more suited towards it (read: paladins/priests)

At the health you leave people at, a potion is usually not enough. Also, it's much better to just use a resistance potion(absorb frost) at the start of P3 instead of having to react to it. Even if you pot first, HS second, what happens if you get a third? I've seen one person get 5 PCs in a row, let alone 3 over the course of p3.

Your raid setup is just ideal for Anub, only you're doing it wrong. You can have both paladins beacon the MT and heal an offtank each. If you're worried about mana than they can alternate HL and FoL, as FoL is enough for the offtanks especially when coupled with druid hots which you can throw around. As in, one uses HL for a while while the other FoLs and then they switch.
I just don't see how GHT (or nourish for that matter, I don't direct heal PC at all) are enough for PC healing. A nourish/GHT should hit for what, 6K? If they get a leech tick and a PC tick they are in serious danger of dying.
That's the beauty of pw:s, it doesn't increase the damage taken by leech.
What I like about hots for PC is that they relieve the other healers once the initial rush is over. This means they are never mid-cast or, god forbid, gcd locked when the next PC hits.

Nourish may also not heal for enough, in situations where GHT will.

Target has 1000 health. You hit him with Nourish. At 3500 SP, Nourish may heal for as little as 5980, so his health is 6980. Leach (30%) drops that to 4886. PC, with 10% resist is 5400, so Leach+PC is a dead raid member (514 overkill). Even a 20% resist on the PC drops his health below 100, where the next Leech will kill him (you should get another heal in first, but sometimes things go wrong).

At 3500 SP, GHT heals for at least 7148.
1000+7148 -> 8148
8148 * (1-30%) -> 5703
5703 - 5400 -> 303

+303 > -514

HT lands faster. Even ignoring the speed issue, it will keep someone alive against a 5400 PC tick, in situations where Nourish might not keep them alive against a 4800 PC tick.

Where GHT works, you need Nourish+something (another heal, higher starting health, or good luck) to do the same job.

Why isn't the target hotted? With Rejuv on him, a Glyphed Nourish is bigger than a Glyphed HT, and the (Glyphed) Rejuv will tick for 4500 in there as well. There's no chance of death healing one target in any of these schemes. You have ample HPS to keep one target up if that's your sole interest; it's not too interesting to debate various ways of doing so. I'd just rather not do it in the way that uses a Glyph slot and 5 talent point to do something I was doing anyway.

The bigger point though is that if your raid sticks on one target to maintain through PC, they're wasting their Druid. Glyphed Rejuv on all 5 targets is a very strong counter to PC and makes it very easy for everyone to keep people up through them. If I were a raid leader, I'd bring two Trees just to stack two Rejuvs on all 5 targets. Each of those GCD's spent casting it is doing about 4 times the healing of Nourish or GHT.

The solution of 1 PC per healer (2 for non Druids) is the most basic and simple one though. With two Druids using RJ on them you still need to cover the first 4-6~ seconds of healing needed on each target until RJ can manage them and then it hardly seems worth it over just having the assigned healers manage it themselves. The only hard part of PC healing is the initial 1-2 ticks anyway as after that point keeping them up should be predictable and easy to manage - gRJ or not.


If you really wish to advocate the gRJ option then I think most people (myself included) would benefit on being informed on how you manage to keep people up until RJ can manage as the most common tactic seems to use VE/JoL/HS to cover swarm and then specific healers on the PC.

If you do mark assignments for PC, you are open to bad luck without 2 resto druids (can't hot the entire raid by yourself). Handling Anub PC is actually a very good example of a general point about burst healing -- better worst case performance trumps better average case performance every time in healing. This is why GHT is better than GNourish (for this task and many other tasks where raid members' lives are on the line).

Sure, Nourish gains 20% from a hot, and crits 65% of the time, and pops living seed, and if you critted recently, will cast quickly. But in the worst case, GHT is better. The worst case has to be good enough.

It's true by the way that 2 resto druids putting glyphed rejuvs on 5 PC targets will in principle outheal the damage, if the first two ticks are handled. But handling the first two ticks is what makes PC hard. Subsequent healing is trivial.

I don't how see it's not trivial to sustain one assigned PC target either way. Mark appears on target: Rejuv, Swiftmend, lazily cast Nourish while watching HP. I regularly do this to two targets simultaneously in 10m, and while tricky, it's possible. One healer healing one assigned PC target is easy--that's my whole complaint. It's a waste of healing power.

People act so confounded by PC. For everything beyond the first tick, the healing crew doesn't have to do anything unusual. Leverage your healing power properly by having everyone use their best heals. Druid HoTs on people taking periodic damage, other healers supply direct heals as necessary. I don't why this would be treated so differently from any other time you have to sustain multiple people through a heavy DoT effect.

The only novel challenge is the first tick. And some other healers are far better than us in handling that anyway.

I healed Anub HM on 10 men several times and even with GHT, being responsible for both Penetrating Cold targets feels hard. Ideally, when PC hits, I'm able to do GHT on PC target no1>(GCD lock)>GHT on PC target no2.

That amounts to:
- reaction time: let's say 0.2 sec (?)
- GHT + GCD lock: I think my GCD on non hots it's close to 1.1 sec
- as GHT can't be queued, I guess there's another small delay here (I imagine latency dependant) between the GCD end and when my next cast starts, as GHT is not queue-able, so let's say another 0.1 sec
- the second GHT: 0.8 sec

That's 2.2 sec, which should be enough to heal both before first tick. The problem is when PC lands with me already being GCD locked, which, with the hots I try to keep on the tanks, does happen...

PS Anyway, I have a small question if I may: how do PW:S and Leaching Swarm interact?

Very favorably. The Leeching Swarm tick is computed against the current HP level and then is absorbed by the shield. This is why PW:S is the best way to handle initial PC ticks.

I did some testing with Trauma on PTR and here's what I found out (a few patches ago):
- It will apply the aura to targets, then stick with those targets, the healing is attributed to the caster
- It will tick for 239 (master shapeshifter & treeform aura are probably what boosts it from 217)
- It has no internal cooldown
- The heal will only affect targets party, it does not spread to the raid
- It can proc on hot ticks
- It can proc on 100% overhealing hot ticks (and probably direct heals as well)

--
It was about 1.5% of my total healing in a very limited number of encounters tested after acquisition.

Strictly anecdotal: the proc chance *might* depend on whether the heal is actually overhealing. It would often seem that I was spamming the raid up with rejuvenation, then after a big aoe many groups would "light up" fairly quickly (I added the heal in grid for a little while). The testing was nowhere near conclusive, though.

I just want to point something out...if u hot all targets in raid...u will simply overheal, with simple rejuvenation, cause if u take in consideration that ppl have very good gear atm that rejuvenation is ticking like crazy...with 2 druids...omg....too crazy....so point is too keep all raid as lowest possible so they dont die( around 2k health ) with totems etc etc...(u all know fight so cba) so if a druid is on PC target and target has only 2k hp when he gets pc u have 3 seconds to heal it...so i think that glyphed HT is best for that job...fast and good heal is what those targets need. With nourish there is a big chance target will die since there are no hots on raid.

If you have 2 resto druids (my guild usually does) you can say have one cover group 1 and 2 with rejuv, and the other cover groups 3 and 4, and either have the healers just watch out for themselves or have another healer class in the raid watch that group. When the first PC comes if your using this strategy you already have a rejuv on all of the targets. (I rarely ever see a PC in the healer group, I don't know why but it rarely happens. If it does then yes you will have some extra work/thinking to do but it shouldn't be that big of a problem) Now all you have to do is SW one of them and nourish the other, and since nourish gets the buff from rejuv and a greatly inceased crit chance over GHT I find it works so much more here.

Being party-only does seem to limit the usefulness by quite a bit, mostly to constant aura fights. Was hoping for a WG-style effect but that would probably be too strong. In aura fights, you can boost the effectiveness by striping healing over all groups instead of covering specific groups, which doesn't play nice with PoH but works for most others.