No NG was assumed in these calculations. A chart was made for spell usage over the course of a minute, tracking timers on HoTs, and when they would need refreshed. I then assumed that any time I wasnt actively refreshing a HoT (Rejuv, Regrowth, or Lifebloom) I would be chain spamming Nourish. From there it was a simple manner of counting how many seconds each was dedicated to the uptime of each spell. When given the choice of refreshing a second to early or late, I errored on the side of refreshing early. If I refreshed a HoT, I would not count that 'second' as a HoT tick, just in case refreshing the HoT reset the HoT Timer. The results?

57s of Regrowth HoT
4s of Regrowth Direct
55s of Rejuvenation
52s of Lifebloom (3 stacks)
44s of Nourish Spam

From here its a fairly trivial excersice in finding the HPS of each spell and adding them together. I did have to find a value for living seed on both Regrowth and Nourish, which was easier than expected, and since I wanted to reflect my own gearing, I needed to find how much the glyph and t7 bonus would improve Nourish.

Living Seed was easy. Simply multiply the average crit heal by .3 to find the average value a living seed will Heal for. Then multiple that value by the spells crit Percentage. This can give you the expected healing value of LS per cast. Lastly, Add 'Effective LS HPS to the base HPS. So Nourish looks like:

(Edit, the Living seed Proc will need to be reduced based on cast time. In this current setup I have 1.375 cast time for a Nourish, changing my Living Seed Proc)

Base HPS – 6264
Average Crit - 10432
Crit Percent – 47.73
Living Seed Proc – 3129
Nourish Cast Time - 1.375
Living Seed HPS - 2275
Effective LS HPS – 1086
Effective Combined HPS – 7350

You might notice my Nourish values are a bit large. Using both the 4p t7 set bonus and the Nourish Glyph, a 3 HoT rotation will increase the power of Nourish by an addition 22% (Assuming the values are additive, and not multiplicitive). Simply multiplying your HPS of a Hotted Nourish should give you similar values for Nourish HPS.

My HPS values for each Spell:
Regrowth HoT (27 Seconds) - 402
Regrowth (Direct) – 4585
Nourish – 7350
Rejuvenation HoT (18 Seconds) - 749
Lifebloom (3 Stacks) (10 Seconds) - 1387

I don't feel any need to take this further, but it is a simple matter of then finding the total amount healed over the 60 second window, and then dividing by 60 to give you an average HPS over this time.

Results:
22914 (Regrowth HoT)
18340 (Regrowth Direct)
41195 (Rejuvenation)
72124 (Lifebloom)
323400 (Nourish)

477973 (Total Healing Done over 60 seconds)
7966 Average HPS sustained over the course of a minute
9888 Peak HPS

Obviously factors such as lag and overheal are removed from this simplified simulation. I would argue that using this you also know what you are getting. Very little of the actual healing done is by the 3 second HoTs, (13% in fact) as Nourish would do the bulk of the healing. 82.7% of this healing is either done by 1 second ticks (Lifebloom) or 1.375s Casts (Nourish). I readily admit that my haste is lower than desired, and that cast time should go much lower. The main point of stacking HoTs in this case is to prop up Nourish.

Edit: If I get bored tonight, I might try the same excersice also weaving Wild Growth into the mix. It will be a more complicated rotation, but it might give higher single target HPS.

I just read 22 pages of threads without an answer, so this seems safe to ask:

What is the thinking on if the 4pcT8 heal will be able to crit? Renews instant can crit, and if it can, there is a whole lot of synergy going on.

This post gives initial testing of the 4t8 bonus:
Restoration Itemization

It apparently cannot crit.

Did you all stop reading at this line? He already countered your arguements in the same post:
-----
No one is. We are agruing that:

1) Besides SM/NS, direct heals should be the lowest priority for druids. HoTs/CH/PoM/CoH/PoH will eventually top off someone that IS NOT in immediate danger.
2) If someone IS in immediate danger, and SM/NS are on cooldown, GHT will save them the fastest.

These are facts. Obviously, you can play your Druid however you want. But this thread/forum is not about doing "really well". It's about finding and bringing your greatest benefit to your raid.

GHT is indeed faster than Nourish on one target. Nourish is more generally useful (it's a great tank heal too). There are too many good druid glyphs in 3.1 for many people to spend a slot on the HT glyph. Nourish probably has more HPS than GHT due to living seed, random hots sitting on targets. Direct heals are not always the lowest priority for a druid -- it depends on their assignment.

If a lot of people come to the same conclusion, your first instinct shouldn't be to assume they are all idiots.

I would say that the way you glyph would have to be based on
1. What your play style accomodates.
2. What your role in the raid is.
3. What your talent points are spent on.

If you're raid healing, you usually would go one of 2 ways: GHT or stacking up Nourish, along with the SM and then WG. You're raid healing, you should be trying to provide some synergy to the dps and Revitalize should be in your talents (having casters semi-grouped up and then hitting WG on them does provide a good amount of mana)

If you're healing the tank (which IMO should be a team effort if a druid is healing just because we don't have those hard hitting spells), you'd likely be taking the RG, Nourish, and LB gylphs.

I can't see taking the Rejuv gylph because there isn't really going to be much of a situation where someone is going to sit under 50% for more than one tick.

Nourish would have more HPS than GHT if you had the gylph and all your HoTs stacked on your target. Living Seed is highly situational, because many times it will often be OH if you've got HoTs on the target already.

I agree completely that if you're healing a tank, Living Seed is amazing. I was just saying that for raid healing it's often hit and miss on the proc actually doing a lot of effective healing (it could be that I'm still used to the pre-3.1 mechanics of it though... I haven't looked through healing done on fights recently to see if it actually does more healing now).

We had some trouble with our WWS reports lately, but recount shows my Living Seed healing at upwards of 5%, spiking at 10-11% sometimes. That is mostly raid healing. That should be effective healing, right? In any case, what I have seen so far of the Ulduar encounters it seems that raid damage is occurring frequently enough to ensure that Living Seed can do its best.

Sure druids can MT heal well, nobody said the opposite. The point was the field where druid excels, where you can use the full potential. Paladins can raid heal, but I hope nobody would argue that they excel at MT healing. If your raid has 2 very well skilled holy palas and a disc priest, would you insist on MT healing? I hope not.
And just because you're on raid healing it's not like "Oh the tank is low but I'm on raid, I'm forbidden to help out". A good druid will always keep some hots up on tanks and is ready to SM/NS+HT/Nourish spam no matter what role he is assigned to.

It seems to boil down to personal preference. I do think that if you're using nourish mostly as a raid heal, then you should consider GHT, as it has a number of advantages over nourish (faster cast-time, hits harder, doesn't require setup).
Personally I feel like the massive HPS boost regrowth features via its HoT trumps the 0.4s or so faster cast time of nourish in most cases. I think most tend to underestimate how much healing the HoT portion does, not to mention leaving a long-lasting fodder for SM (or even nourish ).

My entire point was based around the fact that it was a technique I used for Frozen blows, which you can 100% predict is going to come immediately following the casting of flash freeze.. usually within 10 seconds. It's not so much predicting, as it is preparing.

On the current topic of conversation: Revitalize is 100% not worth using right now, due to the fact that Wild Growth is bugged. It will still proc the revitalize energy gain even if you have 0 points in the talent.

Ad. 1 - That's up to the heal leader whether druids are assigned to this or that - I understand that partly this discussion is relevant for druids are are heal leaders or could be forwarded to heal leaders who are not druids. However, ultimately noone is stacking 7 holy priests or 7 paladins so there will be fights where druids have to do direct raid healing.

Ad. 2 - To use GHT you have to spec for it and have the glyph. With dual specs technically you could pick GHT spec as your second spec but even then you're tied to that spec and glyph for the duration of at least that fight. Nourish requires you to press the button that you happen to have it bound to. So the question is: is the difference worth the cost of setting up GHT in the first place?

I converted everything into a HPS, which should remove the need for converting everything into actual casts. Lifebloom uptime was assumed to be less than 100% to err on the side of caution. I couldnt remember if refreshing a Lifebloom stack reset its timer. With a 1s tick timer, this was hard for me to notice in game. This is also the reason I didnt cast a Rejuvenation until the previous one had expired.

As for my Nourish values, I found my HPS, and not my average hit, Based off Paininabox's Spreadsheet, my single hotted Nourish has an average HPS of 5135. My Nourish Glyph and T7 Set bonus Give a 12% and 10% bonus to Nourish. I'm assuming these are additive, but I could stand to be proven wrong on this point. Together they would then give a 22% increase over a once hotted Nourish. 5135 x 1.22 = 6264. To find my average hit, its a simple matter of Multiplying my average HPS by my cast time (1.375). 6264 x 1.375 = 8613. So my average Nourish Hit is 8613.

Average HPS of Nourish (1 HoT) - 5135
1 HoT Nourish increased by multipliers - 5135 x 1.22 = 6264
Average HiT of Nourish (Average HPS x Cast Time) - 6264 x 1.375 = 8613.

You would also need to find a way to factor in Living seed Procs to an average hit. Your post (and making me go through this, did help me to find a mistake in my posting earlier. I do need to take my average Living Seed Proc and divide it by Nourishes Cast time (and do the same for Regrowth). This should lower my HPS for living seed from 1493 to 1086, about a loss of 400 HPS for Nourish, slightly less in the final calculations. I will edit my previous posts to reflect this change.

But, since I was using the HPS values and not actual hits, there is no real need to figure things out by actual casts. This is one of the reasons I elected to use such a large time frame (1 minute) and find the average HPS of the entire
time frame was to minimize this behaivor. Keeping everything in terms of a HPS value eliminates the need for the more complex calculations you are trying to do. Is my HPS model perfect? Likely this isnt the case. Is it a reasonable approximation of our maximum output? I believe the answer is yes.

Another loss to using the Glyph of Healing Touch is the overall power of Nature's Swiftness + Healing Touch. Not a huge loss, but still worth mentioning, in my opinion.

The loss of the NS+HT Really Big Really Fast heal is exactly why I unglyped my HT. Really, the decision comes down to "How often do I need a huge emergency heal?". If the answer is "More often then NS comes off CD", then maybe the glyph makes sense. I tend to need it maybe once a boss fight. Almost never on the tank, because the tank's got a stack of HoTs I can SM, which then buys me time for a Nourish or a RG to top him off. I tend to burn it when things have gone south - I've had to do something which prevented me from healing and I have to catch up on damage fast (think battle res-ing someone, getting stuck on the wall by the spider, frost tomb, things like that), or if a DPS pulled aggro, and letting them die means losing DPS that we have to have to finish the fight.

The game is about min/maxing and tradeoffs. With 2 pallies and a priest, I would assign 1 pally & 1 druid to the MT and the other pally to the OT. If there is no OT, I would have the 2nd pally raid heal and beacon the MT. I wouldn't have my priest go disc. I would have him raid healing as holy. If I were raid healing, I'd love to do it on a priest. Imagine this burst healing for XT-002's tympanic tantrum: PoM at -7secs, PoH at -2secs, CoH at 1secs, PoH at 2 secs, PoM at 5 secs, PoH at 6 secs, etc. So I ask this. What is the tradeoff of DiscPriest MT healing & Druid raid healing versus the Druid MT healing & HolyPriest raid healing?

I think what makes druids great is our versatility with 1 spec. We excel in any role. I would argue that priests are better raid healers than us, but it's easier to do it as a druid. Check the leader boards for EHPS. For the most part you have shamans and priests at the top: I would argue that holy priests are better raid healers than druids (refer to WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish).

This brings up an interesting question. If you were heal lead how would you setup your raid for Ulduar. My ideal comp would be 1 Pally, 2 Druids, 2 Shams, 2 Priests. In general, I'd always have 1 pally & 1 druid on the MT, the shams always raid healing, and the 2 priests & 1 druid raid/OT healing.

May some moderator answer if it's allowed to post healing strategies for different fights?

How can druid MT healing be min/maxing when a druid has the potential to keep hots on up to 15 targets simultaneously and you force him to do it on 1 and spam a lesser version of flash heal?

Disc priest brings synergy with holy pala that resto druid doesn't have. You really underestimate the power of shields. And we shouldn't really be discussing this in the druid forums.

You should also care about numbers less. Leave that to dps. Different specs and classes do different things. Druids are good at healing off dot-type aoe damage. Holy priests at burst. You can't compare healing meters on these things.
On fights like Mimiron there are both dot and burst aoe damage, I can't really imagine myself sticking to MT and letting some holy pala or disc priest with handling the dot portion.

I view the druid healing role as playing midfield or halfback in soccer/football. You may tell the halfback to play some more on the D end of things, but he's still going to run up and help the forwards. Likewise, with druids, even if you tell the druid to heal the tank a good druid will know to toss out WG's and rejuvs when they can. We may not be as good as holy priests at raid healing or as good at tank healing as paladins, but we are the best at doing both and simultaneously.

I never thought I'd read that on these forums. Numbers mean things and are a huge tool to improving yourself. Of course, while one may recognize the power of mathematical calculations, it is probably equally important to realize the limits of them. The proper mindset with regards to it is somewhere in the middle, where the two extremes are obviously wrong.

I never thought I'd see somebody take a sentence out of a context and base comment only on it. It's so bloody obvious I was talking about healing done meters, which mean something only when comparing 2 same classes on same targets in a same raid enviroment with same gear level and same spec (and even then it will be so off it's near useless, unless one is a really bad player, doing 50% less than the other).

Healing meters are not useless. It's just as stupid to claim the meters are proof of who is a bad/good healer as it is stupid to claim that meters are a bucket of lies. At the end of the day we all make red bars go green, despite mechanical differences in how it's done. I'm not advocating that priests and shamans are way better raid healers than us simply because of some meters, but I'm not going to deny it simply on the premise that the meters lie. Your thinking is too black-and-white, in my opinion. Healing done meters may be flawed in some ways, but it's way better than going into the cesspool of basing one's opinion on how you perceive your performance, like the WoW forums are notorious for. It's simply important to take it with a grain of salt.

Total healing done tends to not be a very useful number because classes often have to stop what they are doing (either they are unlucky with having to move out of the way of boss abilities, or they have to dispel or battle rez, etc.) However, you can get useful numbers out of healing meters. For tank healing this number tends to be total HPS (including overheal). For raid healing this number tends to be effective HPS (without overhealing). Caveat: druid hot overheals don't show up on meters so estimating their tank healing effectiveness can be difficult. Caveat 2: obviously an important part of being a good healer is reaction time and ability to save people from death. Obviously meters will not show this.