I'm currently specced into Celestial Focus for the haste. With the changes to NG, it's going make continuing to spec into CF a waste of talent points. Great, I have more points to spend in the Resto tree but I now need just under 100 Haste rating to make up for the loss of the talent.

How would you weigh this change? Considering; increased focus on mana regen, possible benefits of increasing crit, and the likelihood of gear having higher and higher haste values making it easy to reach the soft haste (w/ GotEM) cap. I don't have enough experience healing yet to know just how valuable a 1s GCD is on my HoTs.

I just switched to healing after tanking and I want to be able to go into 3.1 with my eyes open as I'll definitely be both a healer and a tank with dual specs. Thanks for the education.

The Soft Haste Cap I believe is a little overrated, simply because server lag is going to kill you way more than haste ever will. I play on two different computers, one connected wirelessly and the other via an ethernet cable. My HPS will often be 10-15% higher with a smaller latency, but I notice I will run out of mana faster. In fact I would say that haste is almost counterproductive past a certain point. I think if you can get your GCD down to 1.1-1.2 seconds, then you will definitely will be able to cast faster, but sometimes at the expense of casting too much and thus doing too much overhealing.

As a resto druid, your #1 stat currently is Spirit (although that is likely to change in 3.1) and then MP5 and intellect and spellpower. Once you feel like you have enough mana regen to sustain you through tough fights (Sapphiron, KT, Maly, Sarth) then you can look at getting yourself some crit/haste, but again, by this point, you probably won't need it.

Don't spread misinformation. Spirit is not more valuable than spell power, and is worth less per point than intellect. I'd argue that haste and crit are both more valuable than mp5, too.

It's never about "getting more crit/haste" at the cost of spell power, spirit or int, because the way things are currently itemized, you're going to get crit or haste anyway in addition to everything else. The reason the itemization thread is so overflowing with crit vs haste discussion is because that's basically all there is to discuss with itemization.

I assume that no one has the 4T8 set yet to test if the revj glyph functions with the set bonus?

A 50% increased heal on the front loaded tick could be very handy indeed, assuming it works correctly, my current revj ticks are ~2.1k so we would be looking at 3.2k (heading towards 4k assuming gear improvements) instant heal on someone <50%

Nature's Grace at the moment is long lasting, allowing u to "save" it for later use. It is more reliable with regrowth since regrowth has +50% crit talent. Those are definite advantages over the 3.1 version.
3.1 however offers other advantages - the ability to get more spells hasted from a single crit. Even though regrowth will crit less often, if you are chain casting regrowth (or nourish now) you only need 1 crit every 3 casts to keep the buff active. So even though your are critting less, as long as you chain cast you dont need every single spell to crit to keep the buff active. This is all "on paper", in reality you might not be chain casting without delay and will only enjoy 2 casts from the buff but still its will be more than just your next cast hasted.

Again looking at Nourish, a -0.5 cast time would instantly bring you to the haste cap assuming you have 0 haste rating and 0 raid haste buffs. Obviously that will never be true so you are actually GCD capped by the live version of NG when casting Nourish. With the 3.1 version you should be pretty close to 1.0 seconds Nourish, but that is with all your haste gear and raid buffs, so none out of the bonus 20% haste will be "wasted".

I am not a big fan of Nourish and almost always used Regrowth instead. I am thinking now that maybe i need to change my view. This is the new ability we got in wrath. Blizzard will most likely make sure it is at the very least usefull and at best extremely good spell for us, just because its our new ability and they want us to feel we got a new good spell in this expansion.

Now if only the damn thing didn't require an existing hot on the target to be useful...

Consider holy priests are getting the talent Empowered Renew - Spell - World of Warcraft.
I did a little math, and a priest with the right holy talents and renew glyph, and with only 2000 spell power (after SP from spirit and inner fire, which is not high at all) is gonna have renew heal about 7600. The talent will add an instant heal of ~1140, or ~1280 on targets below 50% hp.

Personally i rather have this sort of ability as a talent than a set bonus which will either be too good and I wont want to upgrade to later tiers or i will have to give up eventually (not to mention having to use 4t8 in pvp hurts your resilience rating). So no I don't think our version is too good when compared to that, especially when we are the "main" hot class, so our hots should be more powerful than that of a priest. And like you mentioned, priests also have POM and PW:S for instant heals (remember PW:S has a glyph that adds an instant heal to it also).

Since when is a 2k~ instant heal overpowered? DPS classes are running around raid buffed with 20-25k health, and in arena gear about the same. 2k is hardly a dent in that health pool, but it actually makes us a reliable raid healer in the face of resto shamans (who are slowly becoming the best healer again with these stupid Ulduar AoE raid damage fights).

I would honestly not even go there right now without some pretty hard evidence to back this up as from the few encounters I have done so far Druids do perfectly fine (generally similar positions on the meters) in comparison to other healers.

Well I don't want to derail this thread into a chain heal cry thread. So I'm not going to further provoke it.

On another note though

11/0/60 - is the way I'm going to go. I'm finding that the 3 point investment of NG isn't worth the return. Also hitting sub 1.0 Nourish casts is just bad.

We can dish out the same and even better HPS than most healers where the raid damage is steady and predictable, but chain heal still has that direct "pick me up now!" heal that is so good in Ulduar for a lot of fights. HoTs have their place but they have difficulty saving lives unless they're pre-stacked and already ticking when the heavy AoE damage is incoming.

I was on top of the meters last night testing Ignis, but that fight isn't exactly great for resto shamans since everyone gets knocked up into the air and has to wait to fall to the ground again to begin casting. Fights like Kologarn or XT-002 Deconstructor may favor resto shamans just because of the type of raid damage mechanic and group position.

Every healer has enough tools to heal raid damage now about as well as resto shamans can, chain heal just seems easier.

This is also LIVE not PTR. My statement is based upon the PTR encounters thus far. Similar to what Zuel said, Ignis not so much a problem. Deconstructor, Hodir, Council, Mimiron, even Kologarn are all fights to where 2-3 resto shamans can be the easy source to top off the raid again. Again, this is merely my opinion from what I've observed so far.