My guild has tried it both ways, and I personally like to keep up hots on all the tanks. Sometimes I'll get assigned to heal one tank, and then I have spammed Nourish between keeping up hots. Regrowth/HT doesn't seem like a bad idea because it's not as mana intensive, but it also seems like there is more room for wasted heals, imo.

I'm using Healing Touch as my main (and only) direct heal, glyphed and fully talented of course. I like it alot, works perfect with my style of healing. I'm not quite sure how to spend my last talent points though. I'm chosing between 3/3 Nature's Grace, 3/3 Natural Perfection and 3/3 Living Seed right now, where I can spend 6 points. I'm using Living Seed and Natural Perfection right now, though I have no idea what-so-ever how much my Living Seed actually heals for in raids.

And another thing: When can, or even should I, take points out of Naturalist as I get more haste? I'm at 0.9 sec casting time right now with around 365 haste rating. Yes I do know about the global cooldown and how it works! That is also why I still consider to get 3/3 Nature's Grace - seeing someone taking damage and within 0.5 seconds I've healed them back to full is really neat. Anyone with experience got any tips or ideas?

I'd suggest (if you're not going for CF in balance) picking up NG and Natural Perfection, to boost your HT a lil bit more - however, the NG proc is not THAT beneficial imo - you've already got a fast, hardhitting heal, if you make it that much faster it's not really going to be a HUGE benefit.

Having said that, I agree, the 0.4-0.5 second HT that keeps the OT alive when he gets Frost Blasted by KT with 20% left while the other healers charge their huge heals up... it feels awesome.

I'd recommend this talent spec. It seems to fit nicely with your "playstyle". If all you want to do is spam FoL then atleast do your raid group a favor and reroll a class that has FoL (and blessings, auras, and judgements). The last time spamming HT was the premiere healing strategy for druids was like 1.12 or something.

I need some advice.

I'm getting really frustated with my WWS numbers versus another druid with the direct-heal playstyle. Here is one example (I wanted to post our Saph/KT kills from last night but they're not up yet and I'm obsessing over this atm):

Wow Web Stats

Ignoring that our DPS was doing badly and dying (we're still learning; this is only our third full clear) and I was dps-ing on the last Thaddius fight and our other druid healer's computer was broken and so he was playing on a laptop ....... Could everyone look at boss fights for me (Aamaretto) and Krete?

Here's my frustration:

If he's not spamming WG (which I really try to stay far from on boss fights because of the impending 6s CD - I do a lot on trash but just because it's trivial and hots get overwritten otherwise), he's tossing out Regrowth nearly exclusively. Last night when we did our first Saph attempt, I did a lot more HPS with a paladin healer also on raid healing. Then the paladin got booted and they brought in Krete. My HPS plummeted and his went up compared to mine.

My raid healing is Rejuv's and Lifeblooms, and I usually try to keep rolling hots on the tank. If there's a big couple hits and people are getting low, I'll use WG and sometimes if someone is looking really low and another aoe is incoming, I use swiftmend and regrowth. I try to use my whole arsenal of spells - I'm even saving DKP for my headpiece so that Nourish can become a larger part of my rotation.

I'm frustrated because 1) I feel like our greatest strengths are our ability to spread healing across the raid and to be mobile with instant casts, 2) he's overhealing my hots by doing all this direct healing, thus drastically cutting back on my benefit (and he's a druid and should know better!), and 3) he's outshining me on the HPS meters with only slightly better gear. If I should go glyph up for Regrowth and spam it, then I guess I will.

Someone just tell me that HPS meters don't matter? But in the end, if he's doing that much HPS, then maybe his method is better. It's about getting the job done, right?

HPS (or DPS for that matter) meters matter only as a diagnostic tool. The person who tops meters isn't the best healer simply because some classes aren't set up to top meters. For instance, a lot of discipline priest healing for example is invisible due to PW:S, or implicit due to increased mitigation from inspiration procs. Even a stellar discipline priest will generally be dead last in effective healing done -- this doesn't mean discipline priests are awful to bring. Some classes will shine in healing (or dps) on some fights and be substandard on others.

About your Thaddius fight: you have too many healers. Thaddius 25 can be healed by basically 2 healers (see my WWS link). If you have too many healers for a given fight then relative healing % is meaningless since it becomes a race for who can heal the damage first (a race the Regrowth spammer will generally win). It is only when you have barely enough healing resources does it start to matter whether you do something one dimensional like spam Regrowth or do something more varied like use all the spells a druid has.

I am linking our last Naxx 25 clear which was done with 3 resto druids, 1 holy priest, and later a holy paladin who joined for the last few fights. Since there were a lot of druids, perhaps it will be helpful to have it as a way of comparing notes.

Wow Web Stats

The Kel'Thuzad kill, in particular, I think shows that a variable spell strategy can do better than a Regrowth heavy strategy if you have barely enough healing and the fight doesn't favor direct healing. (Of course we didn't have any Regrowth spammers in that raid per se, even druids who used Regrowth a lot also used other spells).

I'm in a similar position as I mentioned a few posts back. A new Druid in the raid has a drastically different play style, much like the one you describe. At first I was shocked because I saw all these Regrowths all over the raid. Then I stepped back and saw that we killed the bosses, so in the end it didn't matter. He didn't complain about going OoM and I had no trouble as usual, so all's well that ends well.

I usually keep my meters on DPS and ignore HPS, Healing Done and generally only look at Overhealing. I'm usually at or very near the bottom on overhealing and that is how I judge myself. Of course, I like to be on top, but if any Druid beats the CoH Priest then I can smile. Sometimes its good to celebrate with your fellow than try to beat them all the time.

Blizzard has really worked hard to create many options for the same activity. I feel it is wrong at the very least to condemn one play style as rubbish and lift one up as the best hands down simply because we did it that way in patch x.y.z.

If the bosses go down and you aren't going broke on consumables, then sit back, relax and enjoy the game.

In addition, it doesn't make sense to let people get low enough so they can benefit from the full direct heal component of Regrowth when you can keep a Rejuv on them and never let them get lower than maybe minus 1k. Perhaps the burst-risk on Sapphiron isn't that big and people running around with 70% isn't such a huge risk, but it's not good practice in any situation in my opinion.

Spam is one thing and heavy usage is another. I've sometimes used a high amount of RG on Sapph for example without much issue because the HoT is always going to do a hefty amount of healing.. and because RJ alone is not enough.
Combine that with WG tending to be somewhat inferior beyond post ice-block and melee healing well... your only other option is to throw LBs off on people and quite honestly I almost never use LB for raid healing anymore due to the general changes to the spell in 3.0.

I think I'm also very surprised at his heavy usage of Regrowth because I find that every time I cast a Regrowth, it seems that one of the paladins or a shaman has beat me to it with their faster-cast spells. Now, that is on trash, since I focus on putting out the most number of Rejuv's (and decurses; thank you for pointing that out) that I can on Saph, which spreads the healing across the raid. Obviously it works for him on bosses, so I kept wondering if maybe that was the right way to go about healing.

I knew I was focusing in on healing numbers too much, but it makes me nervous when someone is blowing my numbers out of the water. I'm afraid the raid leader may see that and say, "What's going on with Aamaretto?" And I wouldn't have had an answer for him. But now I do!

On your first and third Saph attempts he did throw out twice as many WG's as you. Looking at his numbers on attempts 1 & 3, Krete seems to be just casting RG when someone is too low and spamming WG the rest of the time (hence his low over heal %). What I've found to be the problem with this tactic, is you get BIG numbers on the meters, but the heals are not necessarily going where they are needed. So, his big numbers can either serve as decent cushioning for the more targeted healing, or just detrimental to the raid's survivability. Don't ask yourself, why is he healing so much with RG? Rather ask, why is the raid getting low enough for the RG's to be such a high % of effective heal?

You decurse more, die less quickly, and use more spells. I'd be happy to have you in my raid. I'd try to keep an LB stack up on your tank; that would close the gap you're seeing.