On encounters where the raid is taking steady, predictable damage, druids should be and usually always are on the top of every 'meter'--whether it be raw healing or HPS. But the nerf to lifebloom was to specifically address tank healing, an area that we certainly do not dominate by any means.

Looking at something like this is sort of staggering:

WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay

Not a big surprise, holy paladins are fairly insane at the moment, but still fun to look at and /boggle.

While that is funny it is hard to compare that to Druids because our overhealing is not shown for the most part which cuts it down significantly for us.

If you looked at the EHPS table you will see Druids rocket to the top for a fair amount and generally this is because we spread our healing out a lot and say a couple of ticks on a MT get sniped we still have hot ticks on 2 other tanks and half the raid chugging a long. Compare that to if a Paladin gets his direct heals sniped it is a signifcant loss.

Sarth is a great fight for a Druid because it has multiple tanks that is not all spiky, random raid damage quite often and a chunk of time with high periodic damage on the raid. If the current pinnacle fight of T7 was some heavy spike encounter on both tanks and raids we would jump down a fair amount while Priests/Paladins (and maybe Shamans) would go up quite a lot.

We could really use Blizzard coding it so that HoT ticks were displayed in overhealing for these kind of discussions and comparisons as I think it would surprise us how high it is.

I don't understand what that means. Are you claiming that a 3-stack of lifebloom plus Rejuv + Regrowth + Nourish spam with the glyph is less raw HPS than, say, Holy Light spam? I think resto druids in the current state would be rather good on a fight like Muru. Their combined HPS on tanks + raid is unmatched once they get going.

Note: none of this factors in overhealing at all, it is raw HPS.

3x LB is 1500~ HPS
1x RJ is 750~ HPS
1x RG is 400~ HPS
This means hots make a 2650 HPS on one target.

Nourish in 3.1 with Living Seed and the glyph (or set bonus) will put out around... 9000 HPS if spammed constantly but it would drain mana at a rate of 2300 MP5 which is something we -cannot- sustain for very long at all unlike Paladins which can sustain HL for a lot longer.

I believe the Paladin HPS was assumed to be around 9000 too assuming full BiS gear and for a duration of 5-6 mins~.

IMHO we dominate on raid heals more to do with the 1 sec ticks from WG and LB than their raw HPS output. We simply end up sniping heals from the other classes. As for raw single target HPS we are far lower on reactive peak healing and about 20% lower on single target nuke healing assuming we can maintain a full LB/RJ/RG stack on the target at all times.
(I'm actually playing with a google docs spreadsheet that covers all of this. I'll post it once completed)

@Playered:
From my calcs, 9K HPS of nourish in 3.1 assumes min of 2900SP, 1 sec casts and doesn't factor in the lost GCD's maintaining the HoTs. If you factor those in, you drop in real world terms about 2/9 of that output to about 7K HPS. However, that is balanced by the HoTs themselves which roughly return nourish spam + RJ/RG/LBx3 to 9K HPS but an insane mana cost.

Every 9 secs you're looking at 1xLB, 0.5xRJ, 0.33xRG and 7xNourish: (740+223+240+3563)/9*5=2647 MP5
The holy pally in comparison is consuming 1 holy light / 2 secs at roughly 700 mana /cast after illum ~= 1750 MP5.

Now, this is only single target healing. If you factor in a Beacon and Holy Light glyph into these calculations, the holy pally throughput could be significantly higher (albeit with overheal as high as our nourish spam). [I'll also leave aside the WTF P0wn of JoL in some fights as it is a beast of a different stripe]

I am glad you are making the spreadsheet, it will be useful. Two things:

(1) If you are comparing 3.1 Lifebloom numbers to Holy Light, you might as well compare slow stacking also, which has the same HPS and 3.0 mana costs (the reason to do this is while slow stacking has much higher variance, e.g. lower tank stability, Holy Light has EVEN HIGHER variance. It's not a fair comparison otherwise). Even with 3.0 numbers, druids would spend something like 2200 MP5 on their full burn rotation. So they are matching paladins in HPS, but not in HPM. This seems like a pretty reasonable tradeoff, considering how many other healing tricks druids have. I raised my questions originally because I wasn't sure druids deserved compensation for the nerf. Even after these numbers I am not sure they do, at least not in terms of increased HPS (as that would increase their HPS past paladins which are the tank healing specialists).

(2) I emphatically disagree on your point about 1 second casts. If sniping becomes an important determinant of heal meter position that just means you have too much healing. A lot of the times what happens is, a bunch of damage comes in, and shamans start casting chain heal, priests blow their AoE cooldowns, while druid HOTS (which were on the raid the entire time) tick and tick and tick. Druids excel at raid healing because they just keep a lot of it preloaded. This makes it overheal but that's ok because HOTS are efficient. Meanwhile if a bunch of people drop below full hp, it's very hard for any class to keep up with the aoe healing these HOTS immediately start doing. If sniping was as important as you say, Wild Growth would not put out the kind of numbers it does, it would get beaten by priest spells (for a 6 second cooldown non-instant heal it does rather a lot).

21000 mana pool~ (full buffs/bis) and a pretty high uptime (I think 200 MP5 would be 100% at 20000 mana pool - late night assumption on that), it errs on the better case scenario and as stated as the start it was only meant as a rough set of values to give some idea. Throw 100-200 MP5 difference either side if you want but it should be suitable for some basic estimations to look at for 3.1.

While I understand we are using Paladins as a point of comparison, I don't think it's fair to either class to compare them as equals when paladin mechanics focus in on single target healing that is efficient. It is more like apples to oranges, and most people would agree that paladins are overpowered, but would disagree as to the extent. Let's instead focus on what these changes do to druids as healers by excluding comparisons to other healers. I think the main questions are: Are we overnerfed? Will our mana pools keep up in future content? Is lifebloom still worth using as the buffer heal, if at all? Are nourish and regrowth both usable in certain circumstances?

My thoughts are that I'm sure that healer mana pools in general (I have suspicions about druids) will make it through Ulduar, but I predict that we will be over-mana'd again come a couple weeks of Ulduar being on farm because of a couple reasons. The first is that the part of regen they nerfed is a minor portion of raid buffed regen, as I have said in the Itemization thread. The other reason is that Replenishment scales fabulously and without diminishing returns. I think we will still use lifebloom, but we will be strapped for mana and have to alter gear for regen which will hurt healing output. If we slowstack lifebloom in order to keep our gear from being totally converted to regen, then we will still be hurting healing output though it is up to debate which is the lesser of the two evils. Without having crunched any numbers yet, I think nourish and regrowth have finally achieved some unique roles where nourish is the tank patch up heal and regrowth is more of a raid heal, but the nerf of improved regrowth will also hurt our healing output. As to the overriding question, are we overnerfed?, I think it depends upon the answers to the previous questions, but I fear we are after having been caught in this pincer attack between a variety of sources.

I think another interesting question is, did we deserve these nerfs? A regen nerf was warranted, but I'm not sure it was done correctly. Lifebloom was nerfed on the suspicions that we would grow OP in the soon-to-be tough mana conditions, and I severely dislike being nerfed because they thought something might happen. The nerf to regrowth was needed, though I hate that our healing needed to suffer for it, and I'm glad nourish might have a place now. Prior to these, I didn't really see druids as dominating healing meters at all, so I'm confused that Blizzard is handing these down to us without some kind of move to mitigate their effect on healing power.

More specifically about the lifebloom nerf, I am frustrated, not by the nerf itself, but by my inability to conclusively prove that lifebloom isn't as wonderful as it looks on paper. The combat log restrictions on hots ticking on someone with full health, the weird stacking mechanic, and the bizzare mana return on the bloom make this impossible to model hypothetically and we can't even evaluate it experimentally because of the combat log. This terrible landscape for methodical testing boils this down to a "Blizzard thinks this" and a "we think differently" and we can't show any kind of evidence to the contrary. It also irritates me that the impetus for the nerf is the potential power of rolling it on multiple tanks where most encounters feature only one tank. Compounded on this is the fact that this is the third nerf since beta to the spell. Huge nerfs, might I add. This spell will be about half as efficient as it was at 70 when we had 10k mana.

After having read over this, it seems I have painted a grim picture. However, I don't think we're totally broken or useless, though we may struggle to keep up with other healers who have largely remained relatively untouched (or so I can say from my knowledge).

Use Sartharion 2/3d as a test encounter on live.
Roll LB on the drake and add tank once Tenebron lands and stop using it at all when Vesperon dies (note the time of death).
Check WWS on how many ticks landed and work out how many should have landed in that time frame, you could also work out the expected amount healed too to compare as well. There you should have some basic figure of LB overheal and even if you wipe provided you get the time of death you can roughly work out the values.

You are completely right that we can guess how many ticks should occur throughout the fight, but we run into the problem of stack clipping and falling off that will skew how efficient lifebloom is in the field as opposed to theoretically. We could do it if we counted the # of times lifebloom was cast, but as far as I know there are no mods that count that and only count the number of ticks that happened. So unless you count out loud to yourself every time you do it (89...122...damn I lost count), it will remain largely an enigma.

What? you have a starting time of like 0:30 and an end time of say 4:30 (hence the "and stop using it at all when Vesperon dies") with a full double LB roll which is not exactly hard to maintain. 4:00 will be 240 ticks and if you only had 120 ticks that means there was a 50% overheal. It won't be perfect but it is the kind of figure we can get a ballpark estimate on with enough samples which while not accurate will be better than the complete unknown we have now.

Well we could just simplify it hugely. Currently probably the most lifebloom rolls that would ever be useful is 3-4 on 3D, that would be max 6000hps from rolling lifeblooms. So as far as Blizzard saying that it's rolling lifeblooms on as many people as possible that is the overpowered part, then I would say what it comes down to is 6000 potential hps overpowered?

Unfortunately, the answer would probably be yes because you would have other hots on the tanks besides that of lifebloom, so you'd end up with 6000hps+ something like another 4000, I'm not sure. Even then, is it fair to nerf a spell so hard because in this one situation that could happen if you decide to do the full hard mode of this one instance where there just so happens to be 4 tanks on the bleeding edge of content when the spell is used from those who are so wonderfully geared to fresh 80's that already have enough mana regen problems as it is? If you haven't noticed by now, Blizzard's rationale irks me.

The combat log has an entry every time you cast an instant spell.

That's good, then perhaps an addon author could parse that information. While this wouldn't clear up the multitude of variables that constitute lifebloom, it would provide data that could be used to analyze trends, etc. We could then safely assume not only the value of lifebloom, but other hots as well across all classes. If Blizzard implemented hot overhealing in the combat log, we could also settle other age old questions such as, does the tick interval play a role in effective healing?

On 3d 10 man is there anybody else having issues getting huge threat from the whelps, is there any tips on how i can adjust myself when a batch of whelps target me besides prey shadowmeld works, barkskin/lifebloom because consistanly as soon as they spawn from the portal they take me out.

This isn't really the best place to ask for help on that, but you need to coordinate with your whelp tank. If every attempt ends with you dying to whelps, he's probably not reacting fast enough.

Yep, this. I healed the sarth tank for this. The whelps almost always would attack me straight out of the portal. I'd make a point to be standing on the tank's AOE though, so they never hit me more than once. Usually as whelps spawned I would start casting a heal on myself, and their initial hits would bring me down to about 50%. The add tank has be really on the ball about picking them up.

I'm on the same page as you on this. It would be really nice if we were privy to the rationale or math blizzard is using to conclude that Lifebloom is overpowered.

From my own napkin-math, I'm wondering if come 3.1, we will be eschewing Lifebloom except as an extra HoT for the Nourish synergy. We may end up deliberately letting Lifebloom stacks drop off the tank after 3 applications, and slowly reapplying the stack instead. The long-term effect of this strategy would be to cut the average HPS to 2/3rds while maintaining the same MP burn rate. This strategy also provides the extra HoT for Nourish synergy at all times.

If my wild-guess assumptions about Lifebloom's efficiency are anywhere near correct, the HPM on Nourish 3.1 versus rolling Lifebloom may be similar, with Nourish perhaps edging ahead if the glyph and Tier 7 bonuses stack. At that point, it will become a question of which is easier to use effectively. I think I'd prefer Nourish because the healing is front-loaded and thus less susceptible to being overhealed, and less likely to be entirely wasted if the tank subsequently goes on a dodging spree. Reactive healing seems to be the way to go if mana endurance is a major concern.

Blizzard's stated vision for healing is a less-spammy world--at least, that's the rationale for the out-of-combat mana regeneration nerf. If that comes to pass, future encounters will probably be less favorable for Lifebloom, as this suggests more ticks will be skipped due to the target being full health.

I have the same problem, things that have fixed it for me are marking the add tank (green triangle in our case), I have my DMC:I shield up, a shield from the holy priest, the pally tank has a bubble + taunt macro for me, and I have my finger over my stopcasting + healthstone macro.

That's kind of my point though, that the nerf is to lifebloom, but rejuv is what about 600hps, on 10 people that's also 6000hps, and if anything a lot more common to do than lifebloom 4 people. It just seems to me that they're zeroing in on lifebloom to nerf it, when it might be more the mix of everything that's a problem. For one thing rejuv is a much easier spell to use, because you don't have to refresh it every 10 seconds, it's just as good any time you cast it, where lifebloom gets better the longer it's been stacked. I think that it would feel more justified to me if they just slapped a 20-40% or something increased cost on all our hots, because in my mind I can't figure out how lifebloom is so much more overpowered than rejuv.

Just to focus on LB clipping for a moment, it seems as though clipping becomes more of an issue as the number of tanks with active LB rolls increases. I know that personally I find it very difficult to always refresh LBs at the last possible second if I'm juggling several of them at once. In the situation that Blizzard has specified where LB may be too powerful, it is certainly not as efficient in practice as the paper calculations make it appear.