Personally I disagree with this at least. In many 25-man raids in many encounters there's no reason to ever stop casting other than lack of mana. As long as you got mana to throw around there's almost always* some value in casting rejuvenation on someone who does not previously have it (and in 25-mans there's always someone unlike in 10-mans). With top end gear and decent regen you should have the mana to chaincast for extended periods.

I don't really see why outgearing an encounter should make you cast more instead of less. Mana pools at T7 are perfectly suitable for chain casting in a wide variety of encounters so why should Blizzard expect healers not to do it?

You're saying you don't see how outgearing an encounter makes you cast more. And yet you're also saying with T7 you expect people to chaincast. :o

At this point in the expansion, anyone who has T7 gear outgears everything. Raid difficulty is undertuned for the gear that's currently available.

Outgearing an encounter makes you cast more because you just don't worry about mana. You can spam in a pinch, you can pre-cast HOTs on everything, you can overheal 50% of the time, and you still won't die. Basically you just brute force your way through it. If you are undergeared however, or rather geared at the level appropriate to the encounter, then you have to pick your heals. Time your ticks, limit your targets, conserve mana. You can't just put HoTs on everything ;p

Nature's Splendor increases the length of the hots, and consequently the number of ticks you gain.

Unfortunately, the only thing haste does for us in terms of hots is to decrease our GCD, which is further made less-than-fabulous by the fact that Gift of the Earthmother takes us almost to the cap already. This is why druids don't much like haste, because we gain like tidbits compared to the benefit we could receive if they reitemized the gear more optimally for us. For our casted heals, haste is nice, but the majority's playstyle hasn't adjusted much past the "MORE HOTS!" mentality of BC. I expect blizzard will change something about haste so it will actually be noticably beneficial, such as the things you suggest in your question. Or, they could leave us out to dry. I hope not.

Ticks of all hots do not crit. This is why your friends are probably passing on crit rating, because they're still playing mostly with hots and they gain almost nothing from it. I do not know about Living Seed, I have not done much testing with it as of yet.

Of course playstyle will dictate gear choice. If you think glyphed HT is the greatest thing since sliced bread, you will probably like crit rating more than the trees that like to run circles around the raid while chucking out hots like rain.

Living Seed is currently bugged and *should* be fixed in 3.0.8 - needs confirmation if it has been.

I wouldn't base your value of the talent on current reports as it is rather worthless until fixed (and who knows, it might remain somewhat useless then too).

I have written a mana regeneration analysis document that attempts to mathematically determine the value of intellect and spirit versus mp5 in order to make accurate gear decisions. It's nine pages long, divided into two sections. The first section is the in-depth mathematical proof of my formulae, and the second section is designed for the average wow player to understand and apply in the game without being bogged down by the math. The article makes frequent reference to my spreadsheet, which I highly recommend using; however, the analysis document only reflects features that are present in v1.3 of my spreadsheet, which is still in development. I *think* v1.21 (the one linked in my signature) is pretty good, but it has an error and lacks flexibility that is present in v1.3. It is still a good indicator, though it may be somewhat inaccurate. Please read it through and let me know of any errors or fallacies that I may have missed. Thanks!

Mana Regeneration Analysis

[Nobles Deck]

Do you guys think the base Int is better then get the spirit to proc (even with 90 int, I can make myself have more spirit) or just get the raw +90 Spirit and have it proc Spirit.

I'm thinking the raw spirit, seeing Spirit does add some Spell Power.

If I use [Illustration of the Dragon Soul] I think it would make an awesome combo.

Take the intellect version because it is so superior in the mana department that you could easily swap some gear/gems/enchants around to make up for the 17 spellpower the spirit trinket gives you.

At 1000 intellect, 1400 spirit and 7m fight the intellect version gives you 6032 mana if you innervate yourself and 4547 otherwise while the spirit one only provides 2529 mana over the same period. 17 spellpower just doesn't make up for it. Formulas here if you want to change some values around (make sure to add in living spirit/kings correctly).

I wanted to ask what you would prefer after you reached the "hastecap" (1sek globalcd for LB,RJ,WG)
crit / haste?

I'm not sure what to prefer, since i haven't found any good calculations about it...

(thx in advance)

After many runs this weekend, these are my impressions.

* No matter how wide our arsenal of spells, we are still primarily HOT healers in raid environments. This is because quite simply, other classes are better at direct heals. While at the same time, we are gifted in the hotness department. Invariably this means our assignments, particularly in 25-mans, will favor us using HOTs.

* Because HOTs don't crit, it becomes less desirable as a stat. As such, we should favor haste over crit, since haste lets us throw HOTs faster.

* That said, in the end crit = mana. We all know the routine. We throw HOTs on everything. Then when our targets lose too much life, we do a direct heal with Nourish/Regrowth. If this doesn't top them off, we usually follow this with a HOT. Thus the more you can get Nourish/Regrowth to crit, the less followup you need to do, which turns into saved mana. Crit also has the side benefit of making single target (tank) healing more effective. As we can put out more average HPS, while at the same time not spending more mana.

So while crit is not as desirable as haste initially, because haste helps our primary function more. There comes a point where more haste won't help spread the HOTs any faster, ie. the "softcap. From that point on, crit should have a higher priority since our remaining spells (direct heals) and mana benefit more from that stat.

That's my take anyway :o

To sum it up.

1. Crit > haste until you don't have any mana issues. Most important thing in any fight is don't run out of mana, and crit doesn't hurt.
2. Once mana regeneration is good, then it becomes haste > crit until you achieve 1-sec global cooldown with 5/5 Gift of the Earthmother. This is to benefit our HOTs, which are our primary function.
3. After reaching the soft cap, then crit > haste again. To benefit our direct heals after we've polished our HOT effectiveness.

Also don't get MP5 if you can avoid it. Get spirit. Or even get haste+crit. Straight MP5 is just not worth the cost in terms of item budget ;p