Look, I am sure clever play can compensate to some extent, but having 3 hots to maintain is a weakness, not a strength -- if you have to also respond to burst events. You don't want your tanks to burn their cooldowns to compensate for shitty tank healing mechanics, you want to save those cooldowns for when the fight calls for them (e.g. big telegraphed hit is coming). Druids on the tank have the following unpleasant choice:

(a) Make sure all 3 hots have a lot of tick time left, at all times.

(b) Refresh hots at the last possible second.

If you choose (a), you will have time to nourish spam/swiftmend during a burst event (like Fusion Punch or Plasma). However, (a) completely destroys your mana efficiency, which is already not very good on the tank.

If you choose (b), the hot portion of your healing will be more efficient, but you open yourself to either having to spend GCD on putting up a hot, or using Nourish with less than 3 hots during a burst event to catch up the tank's hp to full.

This is just not an issue shamans have to deal with.

Swiftmend and hots are something druids can provide to another tank healer while staying on the raid 90% of the time. Because they are 'outsourcing' dealing with tank burst to another healer, keeping up 3 hots can be done efficiently then.

By the way when I say 'druids on the tank' I mean the main tank, the guy getting hit for 30k a pop. Druids are excellent offtank healers because offtanks tend to take so little damage a lot of the time that a full hot stack with an occasional Swiftmend takes care of most of it, and leaves them room to do other things.

I highly doubt your priests shield for 15k. Also, you're commiting the same fallacy of "it's not like people will die", by that argument sitting in a corner and doing nothing is an equally valid healing strategy since "it's not like people will die if I don't cast that rejuve, ad infinitum".
The one looking at theoretical HPS numbers in this case is you, I'm not making a case for maximizing your hps, I'm simply stating that the first responsibility for any healer should be to minimize the probability of anyone in the raid dying. When you have people that are going to predictably take damage which would kill them if unhealed, you prioritize them with all the tools you have, even if it means using less effective spells. You don't heal plasma blasts with just rejuve ticks since it's most effective, do you?

Unlike you seem to think, there are other spells druids can use besides rejuve and wild growth. 5+1 is enough people to keep every gcd used on just those 6 people. Those 6 are in the most direct danger of dying and you should be doing everything in your capability to keep them alive. Raid is adequately covered by JoL+HL glyph+random chainheals/wg/coh.
And please don't patronize me, I've been playing a druid far longer than you have. Also, nowhere in my post did I even hint that you should heal reactively, in fact my point was quite the opposite.

That's not the point. The point is a shield is plenty to prevent someone from dying on XT to Gravity Bomb. So your example of needing Lifebloom or that it's somehow useful here is moot. Now if our Priests were terrible, I'd agree with you, but they aren't.

Now that you mention it, I actually do just leave a Rejuv on the tank for Plasma Blast. Our Priests and Paladins plus tanks use their own cooldowns and tank saves to make it work. Our direct healers don't need my help with it.

Edit: I may Swiftmend my Rejuv to help them, but that's about it.

We don't have a resto Shaman chain healing. We have 2 resto Druids, a holy Priest and a ret Paladin who heal our raid. I'm not saying there aren't other spells we could use. I'm saying Rejuv/WG are so far ahead of the others in usefulness as to not need much else. I guess if someone is dying and HOTs aren't keeping them alive, I'll use Nourish. Example would be last night on a sloppy Thorim kill. Two of our MT healers were dead. Well of course I'm not going to just HOT the tank and go "Well, that Rejuv should do it!". All of our healers have a role in my guild. My role is to raid heal 95% of the time. As long as Rejuv/WG alone are allowing us to complete hard modes, I'll keep using them primarily. If people are dying and another spell would work better, I'm game to try it out. But that hasn't been the case yet. So far I'm convinced that resto Druids could just cast Rejuv/WG in most raids and as long as the other healers are doing their jobs, it should be fine.

I donno man. My guild is about the same progression-wise as your guild is minus 1 more elder Freya. Not sure why this matters. If I can heal 10m Firefighter hard-mode, I think I might know what I'm doing. I've been playing this game since 4/2005.

I noticed there is a large discussion on whether or not to blanket HoT the raid... I love blanket HoT'ing because we have a lot of direct healers like resto shamans, disc priests, and holy paladins; and my blanket HoT'ing provides a cushion for the big healers to have time to get off the big heal before the person dies. Also I understand that by blanket HoT'ing I can be locked in a GCD when i need to use Swiftmend or some other clutch heal, but I've never really had that problem do to using some common sense and using my judgment skills in determining if I need to hold off for a few secs on blanket HoT'ing because I might have to use a clutch heal ability on the Tank. So honestly I don't believe that I need to stop blanket HoT'ing to be a better healer. I'm not having any trouble keeping the tanks alive and keeping rolling HoTs on the raid.

If you're in a guild where keeping the tank alive is the Druid's responsibility for more than just HOTs, you either have direct healers who aren't very good, or you need more of them. We can tank heal, but we're not tank healers.

Wait wait wait. Seriously? We are slightly behind, if not matched or better, than paladins in the single target throughput category. I honestly cannot fathom how you have come to this conclusion.

Are you serious?

I actually agree with some of what you said - if you're tank healing on any vaguely difficult fight you cant really afford to be 'wasting' more GCDs than the occasional WG on the raid. But calling the cushion provided by blanket hots 'laughable' is a pretty ludicrous statement. Taking the example of Tympanic Tantrum - a blanket of Rejuvs and a WG will be enough to keep at least 10 people (thats two entire groups) out of the 'danger zone' long enough for the priests to PoH the other groups, then deal with any spikes that might've occurred, all before PoHing the groups you had hotted up. If you're really trying you could probably do 15 people. If you're lucky enough to have another tree in the raid, then you can have the entire raid in a state of 'never in danger of dying' - which sounds like a very good thing to me (and believe me, keeping someone out of the 'danger zone' is a very big issue on a fight like Freya+3).

There's no problem with 5-10 people, the problem comes when someone takes this strategy and applies it to all 25 members of the raid. It's very plausible that someone reading this thread would come to this conclusion. I agree, keeping a group up by yourself on mimiron requires blanket hot'ing, but just your group, and with multiple hots. Someone on council putting rejuv's on every single person in the raid serves next to no purpose.

Oh I see, hard modes suddenly strip a druid of their single target HPS. Makes sense to me. Perhaps you should stick to the debate at hand

Grats to your guild though.

No, but perhaps if you actually did hard modes, you'd understand why Druids aren't tank healers.

Edit: By hard modes I mean more than post-nerf FL, Hodir and Heartbreaker.

Steelbreaker is terrible example for you here. I mean, come on, he has a raidwide aura that ticks every 3 seconds.

And yeah, we had 3 Trees for Steelbreaker last night, but that's probably the only time I can see putting one on the tank.

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The value of the blanket hotting might be hard to see when you're always thinking about just one target and what kills them. If someone eats a spike and a direct healer hits them within 3 seconds, the Rejuv likely didn't do anything. But issue is the limiting cases--the hard fights where the raid has to process as much incoming damage as possible without wiping. These fights have more people taking damage at once than there are healers, so there are going to be gaps. The raid healers are trying to trying to get to as many people as they can before the next damaging effect hits. If person has Rejuv ticking on them while they wait for a heal, the incoming heal can be smaller, can become unnecessary and allow the healer to save someone else, or the target might survive the next hit where they otherwise wouldn't have.

The argument is almost self-working. The very fact that Rejuv is ticking at all means that people are frequently staying below full HP for more than 3 seconds. That only happens if the direct healers can't cover all the damage immediately--which is the case on any hard fight. The fact that this heavy hotting produces great effective HPS really is the most important piece of information. All incoming damage has to be healed off eventually, and the bigger the chunk of damage that you cancel out, the less the others have to heal off and the lower the chance that they'll fall behind enough to let someone die.