Nourish + Hots will always be a better tank heal than glyphed HT. Glyphed HT is predominately for raid healing.

So I'm curious, is there a general consensus yet on letting lifebloom bloom?

You can make an argument for throwing lots of regrowth around during phase 2, but there's no real case to be made for nourish spam.

Using some rough numbers taken from my gear which is mostly Naxx level healing gear:

Rejuvenation gives you about 13,000 healing every 1.2 seconds (with latency factored in), or 10833 health per second of casting.
Regrowth gives you about 6000 initial heal (averaging crits and non crits), followed with another 10,000 over 27 seconds, for 2 seconds of casting (again with latency). Living seed adds 2100ish if you crit, which you'll do about 50% of the time. About 17050 total healing, or 8525 health per second of casting. This is improved with nature's grace.

Nourish on the other hand heals for about 4200 on a target with no hots, and crits just about 50% of the time for 6300, seeding for 1890. That's an average heal of 6195 performed about every 1.5 seconds, for a total of 4130 per second of casting, improved with nature's grace. Even if you cast this only on targets with wild growth for the 20% boost, you're still way way behind rejuvenation and regrowth.

In reading the posts (well skimming) and being fairly new to deciphering the intelligent conversation on elitist jerks, I feel somewhat out of my league in here. So, I will be brief, and pray forgiveness for sounding incredibly "new" to druid heals.

I'm reading much useful information - like the switching from tank heals to raid heals (this almost seems counter intuitive to me - as I'm still constantly watching my MT take damage, and I hate for him to pass without a hot or two).

However, I have a couple of questions regarding gear stats. First, is there a cap on my sp to bonus heals or at least a point where continuing to push it is not going to do any more for me? Currently, unbuffed in tree form, I get ~2200+heals. Also, since spirit is not effecting druids as it did before - this pretty much just effected mana regen as far as I could tell, but did it also effect the stack to bonus heals and should I now be looking more at int for gemming/enchanting? Where is a good aim to have my spirit? Finally, I'm a bit fuzzy on the crit/haste for druids. I know haste is fantastic for picking up casting times and speeding up my gcd, so where is the cap for druids? Finally, on the crit, I'm a bit fuzzy on it. Is it something I should investigate putting into my gear, or is this so low on the totem pole as to be an insignificant detail.

Thank you so much for your assistance in shedding some light on this for me - even a point in the right direction to look would be helpful.

Chameelia

I may be a little outdated on some of this, take your thinking cap to the Resto Itemization thread to be sure. That has detailed info on the haste cap too.

SP is always good, it makes your hots bigger.
Crit is low prio.
Haste you want 1s GCD, you might want a CF+LS build if you're short. Beyond that it's better than crit but pretty bad.
AFAIK you want approx Spi = Int. Don't neglect them, but don't gem/enchant them either.
Effect is a noun, the verb is affect.

Some math I did on guild forum. Nourish will be far, far worse than RG.
Mostly agrees with Lord Beef. I didn't calculate LS or NG but I doubt it'll make up the difference since the HOT is the vast majority.

--

I put up 18 rejuvs which tick every 3s for 2130 (710 HPS) according to the latest WWS. That’s a potential 12780 HPS.
WG heals every second for 6sec for avg 750 or so on 6 targets, or 4500 HPS, so by sacrificing one RJ / 6s I can gain ~3800 HPS.
So WG+RJ spam = 3xWG + 15xRJ = 4500 + 15*710 = 15150 HPS. (I’m only counting WG once because they run consecutively not simultaneously)
This is quite mana intensive but there are usually some breaks which mean I can handle it. I’m assuming a 1s GCD.

My other option, RG spam, provides an average 6310 hit plus 1191/3s over 27s. It’s approx 1.5s cast on average so I can get about 18 hots up simultaneously again, for a very rough approximation of 11352 HPS. It might be a bit higher if I literally chaincast due to higher NG uptime, otoh if I want that I can’t mix in WG.

@ lxsli

For consistant raid wide damage there is no doubt in my mind that Nourish is the worst spell we could possibly use (Well, maybe an unglyphed Healing Touch). In addition to the numbers you meantioned, Rejuvenation also has the advantage of being much cheaper than Regrowth (Or Nourish) which allows for longer sustained healing as well.
Any fights in which the boss dishes out long periods of sustain raid wide damage a Rejuv Spam is and should be your best and first line of healing. In addition to the numbers you posted above, you also get to Swiftmend a target every 15s, which also helps the other healers deal with dangerously low targets. Off the top of my head, Sapherion, Ignis, and Iron Council (while Steelbreaker is still alive) are all cases where a druid can supply superior amounts of healing this way.

The conversation about raid healing comes more interesting when a boss fight is not set up in this way however, and other healing spells (Regrowth, Nourish) do start to come more into play. I know more than a few druids who sit back and blanket the raid in Rejuvenations any time they are assigned to raid healing. I'll argue that this is not the way to heal. Rejuvenation is a great spell, but anytime that I see a healer have 1 spell make up a vast majority of their healing on a consistant basis, regardless of the fight...I start to question their skill as a healer. They become more of a 'healbot' than a raider, yes usefull in keeping people alive, but not the type of person I would want to put in charge of my health bar when my back was against the wall. Personally for raid healing I enjoy Rejuv > Wild Growth > Swiftmend > Nourish > Regrowth as a priority (Meaning I check to see if each spell makes sense to cast for the situation and/or if the CD us up), although I do know some that will place Regrowth much higher.

I'm becoming sidetracked, all this is to say is that I agree with your points to a degree.

@ Chameelia

I'll answer all of your questions individually

Is there a cap to Spell Power?
No, Spell Power remains our highest throughput stat at all levels of gear. Due to the nature of druids spells, (our lack of ability to crit on a majority of them, and a cap to the effect of haste) there is no reason why Spell Power would ever get dethroned from this position.

Does Spirit not effect druids as it did before?
It depends what you mean by this. In Burning Crusade ToL Aura increased the raids healing by a percentage of a druids spirit. It was a pretty unique buff. They;ve changed this, Instead of being based on our spirit, it is now a 6% buff (and this is shared by a Prot paladins Improved Devotion Aura). Now each point of spirit gives you a .15 Spell Power. In actuallity, when fully raid buffed 1 point of spirit on gear will equal roughly .2 Spell Power.

How much spirit should I am for?
I would recommend stacking spirit and intellect roughly evenly. Due to most normal gearing, you should acheive this without to much effort. The only real choices you have deal with trinkets, enchants, and gems. You should take these on a 'what you feel is needed' basis (More Mana, more spell Power, etc)

Is crit worth anything?
To say its worthless would be misleading. While not a priority it isnt as bad (on paper) as it was before 3.1. With Living Seed and Nature's Grace it has great synergy with our direct heals. This being said, both Haste and Spell Power have a greater effect on HPS on the direct healing spells, and have the advantage of also working with our HoTs. So to answer your question, I'll never go out of my way to gain crit, but i'm not going to avoid it either.

Hope this helps, also, don't sign your posts.

If you ignore the advantage of instant healing (in other words, if you say a heal 18s from now is as valuable as a heal right now) and you only consider the effect on rejuv:

Suppose your 4t8 tick is 1700. Your overall rejuv coefficient (not counting 4t8) is about 3.89 (Base coef, ER, IR, Genisis, GoN, MS, ToL, Splendor). That would put your tradeoff at about 440 SP.

If only half your healing is from Rejuv, you'd cut that roughly in half (some of our other spells have a better coef, some worse).

Of course having an instant component to rejuv increases the value. As a rough guess, I'd probably break that set if doing so increased SP by 300 (again, assuming your instant tick is 1700), perhaps a little less.

No amount of spellpower will make rejuvenation tick instantly. The amount of spellpower needed to get the same total healing does feel sort of useless. If you can get more healing done in the first 6s or so seconds when it's arguably more important then over 18s I'm choosing the former.

Personally I don't see me breaking 4t8 this expansion unless there's some seriously good set bonuses on t9. An extra 15-20% healing does seem hard to beat though and anything better would probably make us way too good. True the set bonus might "steal" some healing from our ticks making it look better then it is but having the health come instantly instead of gradually is better.

There is always the possibility of them adding a new glyph (or changing the old one) to allow us to move on from the set bonus like what happened (or rather was attempted) with Nourish but if they did not make it incompatible with 4T8 I doubt it would allow us to move on instead of locking us down to something else we can never change.

Then again they might make the next tier of content more unfriendly to the types of damage Rejuvenation excels at like Razorscale is to some small degree and they could make the tank damage more like Sunwell where you have a stream of damage incoming with occasional bursts rather than what Ulduar is having where you relatively slow large hits on almost all bosses.


While blanket RJ might not be perfect for all encounters it is a very strong method of giving people more time to heal once the damage is done.
The example here could be Hodir where having Rejuvenation up for Frozen Blows is very useful and outside of that there is little need of it. Having 10~ people with RJ on them as Frozen Blows starts without any significant 'cost' gives you and your raid a much larger freedom on how to heal the raid once it happens. Kologarn is similar where you can start prehotting people before the Smash(?) happens to make sure once it happens there is more healing there while people react... or before a Tremor, or Tantrum or quite a lot of the raid damage that happens in Ulduar.

There isn't an overall consensus but in general it seems people agree that letting it bloom is good when using it on anyone not the tank for mana efficiency reasons.
As for MT healing, some roll LB, others slow stack and let it bloom, others quick 3 stack. Look back around page 42 for numbers on the mana efficiency of those 3 MT healing options.

For those still speculating as to the use of lifebloom in Ulduar, I have to assume you all have at least seen the bosses on normal mode. Given the immense variety and situational adaptation required for each individual fight, there really can't be a "Here's How to Use Lifebloom!" Guide of any sort. There are two fights where I always use lifebloom on the tank. Phase 1 Mimiron, and Phase 3 Yogg. I used to use it on the Auriya pull, but that got nerfed. It used to help when 2 constructs were active on Ignis, but that got nerfed. There are so many uses to the new lifebloom that you just have to understand how to be creative with the mechanics.

Vezax for instance, you can toss them on people in the vapors as you're running over. You can keep a few rolling as you top off your mana and snag the return after loading the tank back up with hots, back to full mana. You can time it on the gravity bomb for XT.

Pretty much anything you can think of using the spell for except permanently rolling on the tank will be right. Most fights/phases go one of two ways: Intense tank damage, intense raid damage, very rarely both. Your paladin/shaman/disc priest on the MT should do just fine solo healing the tank when you're needed to heal raid damage and lifebloom shouldn't even be an option. When there's no raid damage, or little enough that a WG can cover it, what else are you going to spend your mana/gcd on?

Bottom line is that if lifebloom ever comes in more than 20% of your healing on any ulduar fight, you're probably abusing it, and hurting your healing overall.

I fail to see the point in NOT rolling lifebloom on the tanks. Surely you can afford the mana cost and 1 gcd in 10secs. The only fight where I explicitly avoided doing that is Thorim hardmode since I found just casting on the raid all the time better. I would not recommend dropping it in other encounters, as it's still solid healing at a very low cost.

Actually depending on the raid comp, fight, and your role you may not be able to afford that mana cost. We're currently working on Mimiron and I was healing various tanks through 3 phases except for 2nd one where I was raid healing. And, with our healer comp, I found myself barely surviving through p4 without running out of mana - literally a couple refreshes of LB anytime throughout the fight without letting it drop off would tip the balance and make me dry at some point of p4. With conservative casting I can definitely do my job but I can't afford simply rolling anything I feel like on anyone I feel like at any point of the fight.

So, I guess it depends whether in anyone's particular case they can actually afford it or not.

I apply Lifebloom situationally as a Raid Healer.

Enrages
Before Dmg Increasing Debuffs
Tanking Multiple Mobs

I have not once rolled LB on the tank for the duration of an encounter, or even 90% of one since Sunwell. Once you can identify If and When the tank may need that extra healing, that is when I use Lifebloom. With the intensity that Raids take dmg in some fights those GCDs you are using on the tank may be doing more harm than good.

For me, the rule of thumb with whether or not to roll lifebloom on the tank is this: Is he in any danger of dying? If the answer is "yes" then I try to roll LB on him. It's not about raw HPS or mana efficiency it's about filling a niche that no other healer can fill. If there are other pressures being applied to the raid I'm less obsessive about refreshing it as I used to be, but a Lifebloom 3-stack remains a powerful stabilizing force on tank HP.

After reading the first 10 pages of this thread, I'm under the impression that for MT healing, I should consider Regrowth spam as a viable (if not superior) option.

My understanding is that this has recently changed, and that Nourish is more likely the spell of choice once the target is HoTed.

In the interest of serving the (large) population of people returning to the game this summer, might we settle this issue? I'm most interested in knowing priorities for 1 or 2 healer situations. My best guess (based on the first and last 10 pages) is this:

Rejuv
Lifebloom
Nourish until HoT Refreshes or raid healing required.

The first 10 pages of this thread were written for 3.0, where Regrowth was stronger and Nourish was decidedly not as strong. Since 3.1, cast Regrowth over Nourish for tank healing only when there is no existing regrowth HoT effect on the tank.

Here is WWS report:
Wow Web Stats

My raid healing rotation is like: 4xRejv, WG, rinse and repeat (and occasionally Swiftmend/Nourish for dangerously low-health targets).
My tank healing "rotation" is: keep Rejv up, keep Regrouth up, spam Nourish (occasionally Swiftmend/WG/Rejv to help raid healing).

I think, Lifebloom just don't fit in either rotation: HoT ticks are insignificant, bloom uncontrollable, HoT uptime is too low to effectively boost Nourish.
Is there any use for LB other than PvP now (I mean not occasional pre-HoT tank before pull, but consistent addition to healing rotation)?

Lifebloom has the HPCT of rejuv and more HPM than holy light. It is both efficient and strong. Ask yourself, are you really casting on every single GCD? Are you really so drained for mana? I think that if you're not, then LB on the tank is the best course of action.

In regards to Lifebloom:

We did a quick run of VoA yesterday, and we were a bit short on healers so I was assigned to a tank (along with another healer) and the raid. I kept Rejuv, Regrowth, and Lifebloomx3 on the tank while using Rejuvenation and Wild Growth on the raid. For Lifebloom, I kept it stacked to 3 and refreshed it if the tank was topped off or had high health when it was about to run out, and let it bloom if he was under 60% health or so. If he was under half, that plus a Swiftmend would get him up quickly if the other healer didn't snipe me.

I can't say if this is definitely the way to use Lifebloom, but it worked out well for me. Your mileage may vary, of course.

I found it useful on certain encounters to stack it up scheduled to bloom during damage increasing buffs phase, or simply hit them with 1 LB during a movement phase with intention of letting it bloom. But I agree that "rolling" it in the old sense is not really that useful anymore. In Naxx you could keep a tank up pretty much using just lifebloom and maybe occasionally something else and it was perfectly viable idea since the mana cost of that was next to nothing, so I would roll LB on 3 people and most other healers would pick their noses. Now I find that I can't generally afford that sort of luxury.