You still ignore the application of 4T8 which makes you use Rejuvenation reactively though which inflates the numbers of not just the bonus itself but the healing done by Rejuvenation as you use the spell more frequently (I do not believe any amount of SP will account for this). The "snipe" mentality is really what causes the bonus to look so good and it's very similar to how CoH was back during Hyjal/BT when it got buffed up and got abused as soon as any tiny amount of damage was delt.

Without 4T8 you will (eventually) use Regrowth and Nourish slightly more often and obviously you will cast Rejuvenation less as a result. You may very well end up initially seeing your healing done decrease overall as you mentally adjust to the change (where you will see someone take a spot of damage, cast RJ on them and it will get overhealed before the first tick where before you had 2k healed at that point) and your 4T9 may end up not actually increasing the amount of healing done by your RJ in comparison to when you had 4T8 (ignoring the bonus heal). A further result of you using different spells will be your mana consumption going up but that may end up being counterbalanced by the hefty increase in mana you gain from the 226/239->245/258 level gear.

I think that if you attempt to compare 4T8 to 4T9 healing you will be disappointed at first as your healing goes down and when it starts to go back up your mana consumption follows suit giving the illusion of it being a nerf.
As I have said before 4T8 has been a really unfortunate bonus for us and perhaps the conjunction with the general mana nerf did not help things either. The sad part is that the attempt to test how critical strike on HoTs will work for us via 4T9 will end up being poorly tested and influenced by the loss of 4T8, resulting in there being poor data for Blizzard to utilize (granted it might end up making them "overbuff" any attempt to make critical strike useful for us which few if any of us will complain about - until they nerf it).


All that said it will be interesting to see real world data when people finally start getting it and to find out if my general assumptions are correct about its affects on our playstyle.

After looking through your logs it appears the reason the numbers for T8 4PC are inflated for you is because, frankly, there isn't enough damage going around in the normal encounters. Using LJ as an example, you have 6 healers all of whom did about 350,000 healing. That's it. Over the course of an entire 25m fight, that's all the healing you did.

This really hits the nail on the head. The bonus is good because you use it. A lot. With such low raid damage in the normal encounters, there really isn't anything big to heal, so the little tick you get from the initial application is 'enough'.

Honestly that's not a fair way to look at the set bonuses. The entire point of throughput increase is that on fights where you need extra throughput, you have it. Doing 350k healing on an entire fight is not a good example of the benefit you're getting on a hard fight that actually pushes your gear and bonuses. I can say that the T9 set bonus wont be netting you a 20% throughput increase, because it wont have that 'snipe' heal factor. Then again it'll be hard to say. Add to that, on fights like Twins, you're working against yourself with the set bonus, stealing heals your Rejuv ticks would otherwise heal up later, perhaps with a 4pc t9 crit. They're hard to compare. What I do know is that the bonus in SP and Regen/int from the newer gear I love.

Then again, on fights so easy where your set bonus is the majority of your healing, you could easily replace two or three healers with DPS and still be just fine.

EDIT: Wanted to point out, on the fights such as NB Heroic, your T8 bonus is doing a lot less for you. Here's one of your wipes:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Rejuvs are such a good/cheap heal that I cast them anytime there isn't another heal needed. I agree that rejuv blanketing isn't going away, its effectiveness my be diminished a bit, but we will still do it. I have found myself casting Nourish and regrowth a lot more-which is a good thing. IMO the T9 bonus actually encourages you to cast more rejuvs. Without the instant heal it is almost more important to have that hot running on people. Part of the problem is that our one decent/quick casted heal is tied to having a hot on the target already. I don't know if Blizz wants us to be rejuv bots or not, but they really haven't done anything to change that with T9. I remember before T8 the one complaint with rejuv was it took sooo long to get a heal out of it-3 seconds is like an eternity in this game sometimes.

So now we go back to waiting 3 seconds for a heal from rejuv with a casted heal that is based on a hot already being on the target. In addition we are being encouraged to actually take all the haste above 359 off our gear and stack crit. So that casted heal which was taking 1.2-1.3 seconds is going up another tenth or two. Maybe it is just me, but this all just doesn't seem to flow for me. I will of course upgrade to T9, but I will surely pick up most other pieces first. At the rate spell power is going up, by the time all non tier pieces are upgraded that 50% nerf to T8 bonus will probably actually work out to be a 25% nerf. compared to pre-coliseum numbers.

That's the funny thing though because it's not.
There are two spells we have which Blizzard have thought out poorly on a psychological level which still plague us today - these being Nourish and Swiftmend.

Swiftmend heals less if you use it on a target which has RG on them which makes you feel like it is bad to cast the spell unless the target has RJ on them instead. This makes you then dislike using RG as much because it will give you an inferior Swiftmend when needed. I have a slight gripe that Swiftmend tends to be ignored on all except one set bonus per expansion and this is a prime example of an aspect that needs updating. The most ideal way to amend it would be to have it changed to be a fixed value heal and only require RJ or RG on the target to be consumed and heal the same amount regardless.

Nourish always feels inferior (or wrong) to cast unless the target has a HoT on them for the extra 20% healing and despite all the buffs it has received this perception remains and Blizzard are being.. silly in thinking it just needs more buffs to get it used more. From what I was aware during the beta the intention was for that bonus to be able to make it a good spell for also healing tanks with while being a typical flash heal normally. I posted about this back then in beta that the bonus should be additional critical strike because that retains the general higher healing on tanks and also links with Living Seed well while keeping the normal functionality of the spell as a flash heal to be thrown around without much issues.
Please note I wasn't implying it should have the 20% bonus healing done baked into the spell and they decided to have the additional crit on Nature's Bounty instead which felt slightly awkward to be honest.

The importance of how people perceive things is often shrugged off but it is a very powerful aspect to most things that we don't even notice. Just look at how meters influence how people play/heal because the general belief is that if you are low on healing meters you did a bad job

From those parses, I think it shows truly the opposite of how good the set bonus is. As others have said, the set bonus accounts for so much healing because you use it a lot, not necessarily because it's good. I could just as easily have worn 4pT7 and shown how much more % healing nourish does than everything else, but that doesn't mean the set bonus is good, it just means you probably used nourish more than everything else. Just look at your overheal numbers; 90% overheal on rejuv? Is the 2k heal so good that spamming a spell that's going to overheal 90% is worth it? Just by seeing that the set bonus is only 13% behind a heal that heals 6x more and cast just as many times indicates that most of the time you're not getting more than 2-3k healing or so per cast.

Honestly the worth of 4pT8 is blown way out of proportion. Yes it's good. However, I think most of it is psychologically rooted. People forget that we spam rejuv because the content supports it, not our gear nor that that strategy is good for all situations. Ulduar was full of high volume, high spread, gradual delivery damage, which conveniently matches the healing profile of rejuv. The set bonus was a 12% increase on the best healing style, so it was good, though I would argue that its worth lies more in the volume side of healing and not so much as a reactive heal. Now, new content is, for the most part, moving away from the Ulduar damage model, and instead of changing most are trying the rejuv spam method, which is understandable since playstyle shifts take a little time to take effect. Now that content is more bursty, the random hot delivery on rejuv is going more to overheal than before (90% for example), but since we can control where the initial set bonus heals we can ensure it doesn't overheal as much (50% for example). This then inflates the set bonus's % healing value artificially. This makes it look good, but it's not. People forget; we spam rejuv because of rejuv and how it fits the content, not because of the set bonus.

Obviously, rejuv spam isn't completely defunct right now, but I don't think it's quite as king as it used to be, thus making the set bonus not as king as it was either. Other healing styles are possible right now, perhaps better, even. I don't think people should be skipping entire tiers of gear because of a 2k heal that somehow makes rejuv a reactive spell. I don't think you need 200+ more SP from upgrades to make up for 4pt8. Maybe I don't understand how good it is because I've never had it, but I don't see how orgasmic it is when you're overhealing 90% on rejuv.

Overheal is high because damage is lower on Normal mode content. You will not see this amount of overheal on a hard mode parse. The parses are not ideal for displaying the bonus -- they were simply the only ones I had for TotC which was the temporary discussion at hand -- i.e. does the bonus display as much value in TotC as in Ulduar.

If I wanted to show a parse with less overheal and the same effective throughput value, I'd show something like this:

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

11.8% of total effective throughput on the bonus, overheal specifically on the bonus is 38% range (largely from the ticks that get wasted on pre-hotting) -- total overheal below 50% range for hard mode Ulduar parses

I suspect we will see a similar profile on TotC but, again, I need to widen the sample size by looking at other guild's parses of heroic mode pulls of this content. I used what was immediately available to me which I will admit is not ideal.

That's an Ulduar parse. I'm not arguing that the set bonus is bad in Ulduar, since, as I've said, rejuv spam is tailor-made for Ulduar. You could just as easily throw up a Saph parse where you two heal'd it with a pally or something and say rejuv+wg is amazing, when in reality you could probably do that encounter in your gear with nourish spam + wg and a priest. People are forgetting what % healing done distribution statistics are showing you.

You use a lot of rejuv because you think it's good. Your % healing done by rejuv is high because you used it a lot. Whether it's a good strat for the encounter is irrelevant because whatever the outcome, rejuv will be high and subsequently 4pt8. If you repeatedly fail to perform well, then you might question rejuv, but as long as bosses drop and you're not way below other healers, you'll probably think rejuv is dandy (like in Ulduar). The key here is that the % healing done of your spells is much more controlled by how good you think they are and how you use them much more than it is controlled by how good those spells are for the encounter you do. These data can't just be looked at face value and used as some kind of objective metric of the worth of spell if you don't consider the human element behind those numbers.

The truth of a statement that the spells I think are the best and use the most will make up the highest % of my output is hard to argue with.

However, it's not like I'm some numbnut out on an island who has decided that Regrowth was the bestest spell ever. I and 99% of other druids progressing through hard mode content began to use Rejuv alot because it was effective. My premise from my limited experience in TotC was that I had not seen anything in that content that would change rejuv blanketing continuing to be equally effective and thus the T8 bonus should likely continue to be relevant there (i.e make up at least 10-12% of effective healing in TotC).

My mistake was I used the parses immediately available to me which did not include heroic mode. Apologies for that but I was extrapolating from the data I had. But this is nothing a little research couldn't cure. I submit to you WoL parses from guilds that are clearing heroic mode encounters in ToC:

NRB Heroic: You'll find a slew of parses at World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis that look like this: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis over 10% effective healing from T8 bonus.

Lord Jaraxxus Heroic: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis 18.2% from bonus.

Faction Champions Heroic: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis 18.7%

Twin Valkyr Heroic: Quite frankly most of the parses I found with druids on this fight were crazy skewed by Val'anyr which was responsible for like 80+% of all their healing (jeebus): World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis. However, the one I could find without Val'anyr looked like this: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis 10.3%

Anub'arak Heroic: can't find a parse atm.

Anyway, from the above, looks like the bonus is alive and well in TotC, which was my entire point. Which means it is still a relevant calculation when considering the move to T9. Maybe Rejuv blanketing was a strategy some folks were hoping to see go away with TotC-- but early data does not seem to indicate this. More to come I suppose.

If you look at the proportion of healing done by rejuvenation and the 4pT8 bonus in the first 3 encounters you'll see that rejuvenation itself does just over twice the healing of the instant heal. This means on average barely more than one tick of rejuvenation occurs before the target is at full health, which again means that all the bonus really does here (in general terms) is transfer healing from either the rejuvenation ticks or other healers.

What I'm getting at is that in all those logs I can just about guarantee that the instant heal from the set bonus made no overall difference on healing.

On the twins you can see rejuvenation doing 5 times or more the healing of the bonus which means that the extra throughput could very well be much needed and this is where you would want to consider how much extra spellpower (and accompanying stat increases) you want before you break up the bonus for this particular style of fight.

As Paininabox said the 4pT8 bonus was excellent in Ulduar for two reasons; it was on close to the best gear and many of the hard fights were as made for raid wide hots and actually devoured most that healing making the extra throughput a big benefit. Now you have to look at the new fights (and gear) and see whether it really does anything for you before you automatically hang on to it.

T8 content didn't need the T8 4set upfront heal because most raid damage was spread over time. In very few situations the 4set bonus will have made the difference between a player dieing or staying alive. When someone died in T8 content it was due to a fairly long gap in healing. We considered the 4set bonus good because it effected our most suitable heal (RJ) to counter progressive damage intake. I will admit the bonus certainly made for some entertaining big HPS numbers but I don't consider it to have been a defining factor in our strength..

T9 content has much more 'bursty' raid damage where healing needs to land within the first few seconds or the raid member can quickly die. In these situations I struggle to resort to heavy Nourish use because I begin thinking another class should be brought instead, who can do this Flash Healing and provide other utility which I cannot. Landing a RJ with a small upfront heal, followed by its rather strong ticks that can help cover any future damage, seems to be a good strategy, and a mana efficient one too.

If we do not use RJ + T8 4set Bonus to allow for some reactive use of the spell then we have two options: To increase Nourish use or blanket RJ in the hope those players are the ones who take damage a few seconds later. I don't particularly enjoy blanket healing with RJ as the only skill is to click an almost random raid frame every 1.0s and results in a strategy which is too repetative to want to do on a regular basis. Nourish is still just an ugly spell that admits to a reduction in potential HPS and MPH and is a heal type that is better build into any other healing classes.

Despite my concerns about HPS and MPH I am a practical healer in that I am more than happy to drop out of a Rejuvx5 WGx1 rotation in order to use a more appropriate heal for the current situation, which usually means applying RG because it seems more in keeping with our role of keeping constant healing up rather than short bursts. I still try to keep Nourish use to a minimum and use it only when players are extremely low, or likely to take more damage very soon.

I'm sure the greater SP on the T9 gear will outweigh the T8 4set eventually but I don't think I will commit to the transition until I get all four T9.25 items in one week/raid, until then I am quite happy for our other raiders to make use of Tier tokens. The T9 4set bonus I am less enthusiastic about because it goes against the idea that our healing is steady and consistent, we cannot plan for the 4th or 5th tick to crit! and save the day and looking at T9 damage patterns, our 4th or 5th tick are likely to be late anyway. I enjoy the T8 4set because we do have control over it.

I think what's missing from this otherwise very good T8.5 versus T9 discussion is the fact that T9 also gives you an increase in other stats besides SP/crit. Your stamina (and thus survivability) is higher, your intellect (mana pool) is higher and your spirit (SP/regen) is also higher.

From everything I've seen i just don't see the T8.5 4 peice bonus (especially post-nerf) make up for the cumulative benefits of T9. I've only got 2 T9 peices atm but I plan to get 4 ASAP. That said, i mostly heal 10 mans and i do have to heal tanks in those so I probably use nourish a lot more than people focusing on pure raid healing in a 25 man. For me, the two peice T9 bonus, coupled with the much higher crit with T9 gear and talented nature's grace are quite useful. When I get 4 peices I can't wait for rejuv crits rolling on tanks/raid members. The uptime on nature's grace from this should be extremely high which would make up for less haste on the T9 gear.