Master Shapeshifter increases healing done by 4% for 5 talent points.
Living Seed gives 2-3% healing for 3 talent points.
Celestial Focus wastes 1 talent point and does not really improve your healing right now because you have no viable alternative for haste from gear.

Just because Living Seed is actually noticable on a WWS report and others aren't doesn't mean it is somehow worse or should be treated differently.
There are issues with the talent but that is for other reasons than just "it only gives around 1% healing per point". For example I am of the belief that Living Seed does not technically give you an extra 2-3% healing because that would of been done by HoTs after a couple of seconds regardless.

If you take Celestial Focus you generally ditch 1-3~ points in Gift of the Earthmother too because you don't actually need that much unless you go out of your way to avoid haste on gear. Wanting a raid spec while purposefully 'wasting' talent points in something you stated was for Heroics and 5 mans.. well that just doesn't sit right and you need to decide what you actually want.

I thought about this for awhile. Brambles being a better choice aside in my opinion as it is a filler point, here's what I see as the problem:

3/3 Celestial Focus is a good talent choice. It increases healing done overall for every single spell you use, whether it's a casted spell or a hot, assuming you are not haste maxed. However, your choice of moving out the Living Seed points is, in my opinion, not the best choice.

Now, this goes to playstyle, but both 3/3 Nature's Grasp and 3/3 Living Seed work off the exact mechanic: Proc on spell crit. So it would make sense that if you had one, you should have the other, because why are you choosing one over the other? In this case, you're choosing Nature's Grasp instead of LS - but why?

Whether you should choose them as a package would also go towards playstyle - I personally specced out of Nature's Grasp because I don't use casted spells very much. And I have my 4/4 set bonus, so when I am casting spells, more often I'm using Nourish. At <15% crit, the benefit I get from either of those is minimal.

I would say that 3/3 Celestial Focus would be a good talent choice for a druid who plans on using a lot of casted spells and who stacks crit, only for the fact that if you do not, then you're basically plopping 4 filler points into the balance tree instead of just 1.

I suppose I'm planning too far ahead. Right now content can be done with any spec. I'm thinking when encounters get harder, how do you want to approach them. Do you want to elevate your strengths and push them even further to the max? Or should you try to shore up some of your weaknesses? I suppose it's a matter of preference.

I figure that we're already pretty strong raid healing wise. Just toss RJ on everyone, WG on cooldown, Swiftmend if needed and Nourish to spot.

Our hots are strong in keeping a buffer for the tanks so that other healers can top off.

I'm thinking our biggest weakness (if you can even call it that - druid healing is strong these days) is single target healing a tank who is getting the snot kicked outta them. Think undergeared tanks for Patch. Another scenario would be only having 3-4 seconds to top off a tank singlehandedly from below 25%. Think Loatheb type encounters.

In those cases, our long hots won't count for much and you're almost stuck spamming either RG or Nourish at full speed. It is in this situation I was contemplating if Living Seed or if Celestial Focus would be better. Living Seed "effectively" only works on RG whereas CF works on both.

I guess my main question was is the haste wasted since I'm at a haste soft-cap already? I currently have 325 Haste Rating. Has anyone here ever been in that situation and was wishing that they got an extra RG or Nourish off?

Of all the classes to be locked down into chaincasting direct heals on the tank we would (as generally seen on Patchwerk, but not to imply Druids have not been used for this role) be the ones assigned to do it last due to our strength of multi tank healing which is only eclipsed in a 2 tank encounter with Beacon of Light.

Celestial Focus will be more 'interesting' when we are required to spend far more of our time using direct heals rather than HoTs and when we have the gear to go down to 3/5 GoTEM~ and remain at the haste softcap.

The problem of having us locked down into near constant tank healing (as stated in your case) would be that we're unable to support it due to mana constraints. As a result of this we would need to adjust our gear for more regeneration which would cost us haste, retain 5/5 GoTEM due to the loss of haste and the necessity to keep our HoT GCD at 1.0 and spend 5 talent points on Tranquil Spirit for the efficiency. Oh and lets not forget that Living Seed would be more useful here because of the huge amounts of healing we would have to do on one target which is the main area where Living Seed shines.

With that in mind you get nearly the same results in terms of itembudget for ditching crit rating on gear in favour of haste and picking up Natural Perfection which does not incurr the wasted talent point and will get you the same net result because crit rating would be viable considering you are focusing on direct heals.


All in all there is very little reason to pick up Celestial Focus right now and hopefully there will be even less reason in 3.1 (Ulduar) where Replenish and hopefully other talents will get a little nudge toward being better giving you even less options to waste more than 14 points in Balance over actual Resto talents.

I've tested this out a bit, with the 4 piece bonus from Tier 7, Nourish, with all HoTs on the target (hard to do and i manage i know) it does go above Regrowth, even in critting I got about 200 more heal from it, but thats with ALL HoTs on the target and the 4 piece so overall, Regrowth is still better, just by my rough judging in a raid and watching my floating text.

There should never be a time where you are "topping off a tank from ~25%" and you do not have hots on the tank.

Assuming ~2000 SP, My hots tick for about 1200/sec 1800/3sec 600/sec and I have no idea what regrowth ticks for 8) Lets say about 800/tick ? that's a grand total of 1200 + 600 + 600 + 400 = 2800 HPS.

If a priest is spamming greater heal and it hits for ~ 10 000, that's 4000 HPS. Spamming Flash heal/nourish yeilds about the same.

2800 HPS on the tank + nourish whenever required means that we probably have the highest single target healing output of any class, save for a paladin's Holy Light.

On two tanks, two full sets of hots is hardly a strain, and increases our HPS to about 5400 HPS. This greatly assists healers in keeping the tanks topped off.

Personally I think our real strength is still multi-tank and raid healing, but our single target HPS is nothing to bawk at.

Also I'd like to reiterate an idea that I read a long time ago: Having hots hitting the tank every one, two and three seconds means that the tank will receive SOME healing between boss hits. This effectively raises his "effective health" in a way, making him less likely to be gibbed on a fight that requires heavy tank healing.

the glyph also increases the HoT of regrowth as well. 20% extra on a HoT that had the potential healing of ~9000 at ~2000 spellpower isn't something to sneeze at.

Okay, WWS is being brought up a lot. I have to ask..

Are you guys using the macro that increases your combat log to 200 yards instead of the default 40 yards? And do you find it lags your connection at all?

The *one* night I have had brutal lag was when I tried this out. While horrible lag isn't unheard of on tuesdays, this was the worst I've ever had. So I've been to scared to try it again.

I'm really interested in using WWS, but not at the cost of not being able to heal properly.

Enkoopa, I record my logs with the full 100yd range. This does not cause any "lag" or performance issues for me. I suggest you try again, and if it continues to slow down game performance you should ask others in your raid to also try it. Assuming you rule out the server being the problem, look to upgrading your computer.

Thanks Orin.

I'll try it out again tonight. I'm running a C2D E6600 and 8800GT so I shouldn't be that bad. I might drop some of my GFX settings since I run at 1680x1050 to hit native res. Drop off the shadows and stuff perhaps completely.

Can anyone confirm this? I'm going to live test it right now.