Not to beat a dead horse, but: of course he is. Lets focus on raid healing for a moment. You should ALWAYS look at the 'worst case', because if you assume the 'best case' or even the 'average case' scenario on a single cast, whoever you're healing might die if you're unlucky. Healing is about ensuring that everyone stays alive, and do that you have to assume your heal won't crit, and/or will heal for the lowest possible amount. This (deservedly) inflates the values of our more consistent spells like Rejuvenation, and devalues spells like Nourish that rely on some randomness for their efficiency.

You can use the 'average case' if you're talking about sustained HPS and HPM over a long period on a single target, which pretty much encapsulates tank healing. As pretty much everyone seems to agree, Nourish is great for tank healing. I think (aside from those areas that Vazu mentioned, which are honestly more akin to tank healing than raid healing, as its a single target taking relatively high sustained damage) that Nourish is lacking for a raid healing scenario.

I don't want to be spiteful about this, but by this argument it would be best if we all respecced to boomkin, since dead things don't hurt (usually). But more to the point, I completely disagree with this idea - we have spells like swiftmend and glyphed healing touch that are uniquely designed for the sole job of saving people. The only class that can compete with us in the "saving people" category are priests (especially disc priests, but holy priests are not far behind.) Saving people is especially crucial on first kills when usually things go south at least once and you have to save a bunch of people quickly then dig yourself out of that sustained healing hole.

I agree.

In the past 2 months, I went from severe need of gHT, to a partial need, to zero-need this week.

We have the normal mode bosses on farm, so my SM and NS/HT are quite enough to get me through the rare mistakes our raiders might make. Nourish is making up less than 3% of my heals now and my HPS is also looking much better for it

A lot of the discussion in this thread is focused on nourish and it seems slightly misguided as it is a highly situational spell and should not account for a large amount of a properly played resto druids healing, especially in 25 mans. Rejuv and wild growth are much better for raid healing, and lifebloom x3, rejuv, and the occasional regrowth are better on the MT. Thus I continue to advocate a build that skips most talents buffing nourish in favor of added utility and survivability (see post #1590 on the previous page). I will probably continue to use that build or something very similar in 3.2 barring significant changes.

A little bit of reasoning... Generally swiftmend's short cooldown and large heal makes it my go to spell in what other druids seem to be thinking of as 'nourish situations'. Case in point, for the examples quoted swiftmend is significantly better in terms of HPM and HPS. On fights like IC hard and Vezax hard (towards the end of p2) I am spending all of my GCD's on rejuv and WG to cover the heavy raid damage and simply trust the MT healers to get it done with a small HoT buffer on the MT from me. The extra GCD gained from swiftmend vs. nourish directly leads to increased HPS, while nourishes higher mana cost makes it less favorable in mana stressed situations. Furthermore, the lack of a cast time on swiftmend is extremely useful on fights with high movement components like Freya +3 and Yogg-Saron.

Nourish is really a highly situational spell and theorycrafting regarding the use of nourish is overdone in my opinion. People should be focusing more on the proper use of swiftmend, and to a lesser extent NS/HT. To illustrate, the only time I cast nourish is if:

1) Swiftmend and NS/HT are on cooldown and someone is going to die if they don't get *my* heals quickly.

2) There is a large tank healing event i.e. plasma blast.

3) Something has gone wrong and I need to pick up the slack of a dead paladin or disc priest.

#2 is predictable and does not occur in most fights, #3 should hopefully not happen very often, and #1 happens infrequently enough that nourish rarely exceeds 5% of my total effective healing on Ulduar fights.

In farm situation - that's precisely correct.

But this is exactly not how progression works, at least in my experience. First kill means that this is the first time where you (and the rest of your group) execute the fight with approximately correct approach. This is also the first time where as a healer you get the full picture of the damage taken profile on the fight. While you could work out mathematically what you should be casting when, the problem with that is that there are too many variables on most "first kill" fights to make this really effective - people are not going to follow the strat 100% correctly, and you are not going to have the luxury of being able to provide 100% "solid healing foundation" because by definition you can only define what "solid healing foundation" is for given fight after your first kill. You can call those variable factors "poor play" but unless you got 24 bots running around with you, you're pretty-much guaranteed to have to make life-saving casts on your progression fights and you're bound to miss some, too. Out of curiosity, how many people were saved by Hodir on your first Yogg kill? Would you call your first Yogg kill "poor play"? Usually, any first kill is great execution and hard work of quite a few people, no matter whether it's 22 people dead and 3 healers finally finishing off the boss 10 seconds after the enrage timer, or nobody ever dying - counts all the same and you get the same loot.

As to sniping, obviously this plays out different in 10 and 25. But even in 25, if everyone goes by the same idea that sniping people who are low is bad, then nobody does it and your raid is dead very quickly. If my job is to heal the raid, then it includes getting people who are low up as fast as possible (unless the leader tells me specifically otherwise). I have incoming heals indicator to avoid overhealing people who are low by 100% - if I see someone nearly at 0, I can decide whether they can wait for that 1.5 second cast from someone else or whether maybe I should swiftmend them. And the other healer(s) can decide whether to complete their 1.5 second cast or cancel it. And I can see people's debuffs and aggro indication so I can tell whether they are under some sustained damage or not.

I think we have differing interpretations on what a solid healing foundation is. When I used the expression I'm really only referring to a situation where the number of people (tanks or otherwise) dropping into danger zone is reasonable (and progressing through mostly manageable into eventually reliable).

This can also happen because too many people are trying to do too many saves. I think I made it pretty clear I'm not saying people shouldn't be saved but rather that healers shouldn't indiscriminately save people over managing the raid's HP as a whole. On a similar note I think people shouldn't only think of saving spells in terms of it's lowest possible effect but also account for the fact that it can help in avoiding further risky situations (nourish crits, for example).

Hots are superb in a wide range of situations in helping manage the overall raid HP. Swiftmend is an excellent saver but past that you are very fast sacrificing your efficiency. Sometimes you can afford to sacrifice efficiency but that's just not always true.

In the same line of thought as this save people or max hpsc debate...

I found varying the raid healers strengths works well. There are two resto druids in our raid every night (one of them is me). The other druid uses 4pt8 and I use assorted high stat Ulduar gear with a regrowth glyph. Both of us are of very equal skill, and are almost exactly equal on charts for fights where we perform the same role. On a stand still fight, such as Iron Council hard mode, we both heal the raid intensely, and with his 4pt8 he restricts himself to wg and rj, and with my regrowth glyph I consider myself the spot healer for those that dip low, while still using wg on every cooldown and rj when no one requires big heals.

I've never actually used 4pt8 so I don't know if it is blatantly better than my assorted gear with regrowth glyph. Has anyone else played around with 4pt8 vs regrowth glyph and found one to be a clear favorite? Please elaborate.

Hi all, just to check a couple of things(ok maybe more than a couple).

1) Revitalize vs Celestial Focus - I am still in a dilema. I took Celestial Focus over Revitalize, as I can throw more heals around. However, many restos in my guild have pointed out to me that Revita gives more dps to raid as a whole, and killing boss faster = less need to heal

2) Upcoming 3.2 - With the change to Empowered Touch, would it now be worthy to take that talent for the 20% bonus to Nourish?

3) Addon - Still on a hunt for an addon that shows the status, debuffs, value of hp/mana, and whatever hots you got on your raid. X-Perl atm is awesome looking, but it doesn't show me which of my own hots r on the target.

4) Wild Growth - It's CD is 6 secs while it heals over 7 sec. Do I run a risk of clipping my own WG if i spam it?

5) Innervate - Yet again, still a contest of whether when calculating if my mana is enough for me, should I put innervate into it. I 've had ppl telling me trees got more than enuff regen, and innervate shld be given to other classes, others tell me I should factor it into my own regen.

6) Haste proc trinkets - Are trinkets like Egg and Embrace of Spider worth using, or should I just go with [Titan-Forged Rune of Audacity]. I can see the movement free being useful for healing.

7) Lifebloom - Is it still any useful as a single thrown hot(not refreshing) on the tank along with Regrowth and Rejuv, or is it so useless now that it isn't even worth that?

8) Does ToL aura still stack like BC?

Thanks.

Okay, so as a Resto Druid who healed pre-wrath, I can see how much worse lifebloom is now. However... what are the alternatives for healing 5mans (heroics, specifically). I've basically been doing pretty much the same thing as before, that is, rolling lifebloom, Rejuv (and swiftmending at end of cycle if appropriate) and Regrowth sometimes. WG too.

Basically, I can see how for raids, if you're not healing a MT, how Rejuv/other spells would be great, but isn't LB kinda what you have to do for 5mans?

My opinion is as follows:

4. I've noticed that my WG do not clip. They simply go to whoever needs the healing. I believe it is acting as a smart heal now.

5. I save my innervate for myself. However, now that my regen is getting better I don't seem to be useing it often. My advice is to tell the ppl that say it should be going to others to stuff it. But, when you get your regen up, then you can spread the love.

7. Lifebloom is useless unless you are assigned to heal only 1 or 2 ppl. I seem to get best results with rejuv, regrowth, swiftmend and WG. I do try to keep at least a rejuv on the tanks, and a regrowth if possible. You will waste more time keeping LB up on tanks than you would by spreading Rej and regrowth.

I do still use LB on the tank in 5 mans. You get 1/2 your mana back so it isn't more costly.

Keep in mind this is MY opinion and YOUR mileage may vary.

mimiron hardmode plasma blast would probably be a better example