Yes I believe the topic of blanket hotting has been covered in the past, either in this thread or another. While it is supremely effective at topping the healing meters, it provides little to no benefit to a group of people that are about to receive a burst heal via lifebloom, chain heal, prayer of healing, CoH anyways. You are much more useful providing heals to the melee while making sure the tank stays up as well.

Impressive.

However, I was just commenting on your "you always get 15 people + 3 WGs" thing. Unfortunately WWS doesn't separate 4T8 procs from normal ticks so it's hard to estimate anything from the WWS stuff. I've had similar % numbers on a number of fights. Obviously this is very mana efficient, sustainable and high HPS approach - no question about that. I don't see any competitive strategy that can achieve and sustain +10k effective raid healing for any extended period of time.

Looks like the Hodir kill is the most consistent (well, there is the least surprise raid damage there, too). So let's assume that it was exactly according to 5 RJ + 1 WG plan (we can discount the two swiftmends over 3 min duration). I find the % breakdown interesting: 77% RJ, 19% WG - 4 to 1 ratio. According to the math above, theoretical ratio is 3 to 1 (so you'd be looking more at 75% to 25% or discounted for other procs, 72% to 24%). Since WG is a 1 sec hot, one would expect the opposite - WG stealing from RJ, not the other way around...

EDIT:

@ malthrin - IMO the whole point of 4T8 bonus is that people can make a rejuv blanket smarter than rejuv a group, hit WG, rejuv a group, hit WG. In fact, based on the above from Vazu's stats, constant rolling WG doesn't really make any sense. Constant rolling RJ does because of its long duration, but WG can be hit anytime it's actually necessary on people who actually need it instead of randomly smashing it in rotation, so for example you can hit it right before the start of frozen blows and then again, but by the 3rd time people should be pretty much maxed and RJ will take care of the aura damage just fine - WG would seem to be more of a waste of mana if nothing else.

I guess I really don't understand. If someone gets Gravity Bomb on XT, a Priest shields that person. Why would I LB? I'll throw a Rejuv on them as they run back, but Lifebloom isn't necessary. It's not BAD, but it's not like the person will die if I don't choose Lifebloom to heal them with. I think that's probably the biggest flaw in any arguement people make about how to heal. People always look at theoretical numbers and maximum HPS. How can I take this spell which isn't very effective and make an arguement about why YOU think it's good. See what I mean? Math only works in theory. Practice presents all kinds of different problems which you simply can't plan for with HPS math.

Regarding your other point on IC.

If a handful of people are soaking, are you only healing those soakers? Why wouldn't you just cast a HOT on every single GCD? Blanket hoting is only bad if you're running OOM. I can't remember how many soakers we have, but let's say there are 5 + 1 tank. Are you seriously going to just Rejuv 6 people, cast Wild Growth and then stand there? Why would you do that? Why not Rejuv the soakers, WG and then start throwing Rejuvs on other people? You use DoTimer don't you? Look at your bar for the first soaker. When that Rejuv runs out, re-apply it to all of them. It's not like nobody else in the raid is taking damage except for the tank and soakers. Everyone is taking damage pretty much. Why heal reactively? I'm a proactive healer. That's why I blanket cast hots. I think what you're implying is that I just randomly mash Rejuv on the entire raid, ignoring who might be most likely to take raid damage. Nothing could be further from the truth. I may blanket the raid with hots, but I'm doing it with a strategy.

GBomb has 9 seconds duration - same as LB. If you instantly hit the person with GBomb with a LB - LB will bloom fractions of a second after the GBomb "blooms".

Whether the person dies or not depends on a lot of factors besides yourself.

Also, now I don't understand something: first you show examples why math is the king in your opinion, and then you say it doesn't make practical sense.

I think it makes perfect practical sense - if the math doesn't apply to some practice then it means that the model is flawed, not that the math is bad.

Also, if you do your job on a certain number of people, and then have some free time, I can think of at least one reason why you'd want to simply stand around: it makes you available to take care of stuff when things go south - both time and mana-wise. Although personally I'm also throwing hots on as many people as I can regardless of the fact that they may be full on health. I believe that this is how druids take care of stuff when the things go south - prehot before the things go south.

Unfortunately, if they get shielded, the LB bloom will do very little healing because most of the damage would have already been mitigated. So, if you have a Disc priest assigned to shielding XT's damage target, you're better off just ensuring he has an active rejuv, unless during a tantrum.

Look, I am sure clever play can compensate to some extent, but having 3 hots to maintain is a weakness, not a strength -- if you have to also respond to burst events. You don't want your tanks to burn their cooldowns to compensate for shitty tank healing mechanics, you want to save those cooldowns for when the fight calls for them (e.g. big telegraphed hit is coming). Druids on the tank have the following unpleasant choice:

(a) Make sure all 3 hots have a lot of tick time left, at all times.

(b) Refresh hots at the last possible second.

If you choose (a), you will have time to nourish spam/swiftmend during a burst event (like Fusion Punch or Plasma). However, (a) completely destroys your mana efficiency, which is already not very good on the tank.

If you choose (b), the hot portion of your healing will be more efficient, but you open yourself to either having to spend GCD on putting up a hot, or using Nourish with less than 3 hots during a burst event to catch up the tank's hp to full.

This is just not an issue shamans have to deal with.

Swiftmend and hots are something druids can provide to another tank healer while staying on the raid 90% of the time. Because they are 'outsourcing' dealing with tank burst to another healer, keeping up 3 hots can be done efficiently then.

By the way when I say 'druids on the tank' I mean the main tank, the guy getting hit for 30k a pop. Druids are excellent offtank healers because offtanks tend to take so little damage a lot of the time that a full hot stack with an occasional Swiftmend takes care of most of it, and leaves them room to do other things.

I highly doubt your priests shield for 15k. Also, you're commiting the same fallacy of "it's not like people will die", by that argument sitting in a corner and doing nothing is an equally valid healing strategy since "it's not like people will die if I don't cast that rejuve, ad infinitum".
The one looking at theoretical HPS numbers in this case is you, I'm not making a case for maximizing your hps, I'm simply stating that the first responsibility for any healer should be to minimize the probability of anyone in the raid dying. When you have people that are going to predictably take damage which would kill them if unhealed, you prioritize them with all the tools you have, even if it means using less effective spells. You don't heal plasma blasts with just rejuve ticks since it's most effective, do you?

Unlike you seem to think, there are other spells druids can use besides rejuve and wild growth. 5+1 is enough people to keep every gcd used on just those 6 people. Those 6 are in the most direct danger of dying and you should be doing everything in your capability to keep them alive. Raid is adequately covered by JoL+HL glyph+random chainheals/wg/coh.
And please don't patronize me, I've been playing a druid far longer than you have. Also, nowhere in my post did I even hint that you should heal reactively, in fact my point was quite the opposite.

That's not the point. The point is a shield is plenty to prevent someone from dying on XT to Gravity Bomb. So your example of needing Lifebloom or that it's somehow useful here is moot. Now if our Priests were terrible, I'd agree with you, but they aren't.

Now that you mention it, I actually do just leave a Rejuv on the tank for Plasma Blast. Our Priests and Paladins plus tanks use their own cooldowns and tank saves to make it work. Our direct healers don't need my help with it.

Edit: I may Swiftmend my Rejuv to help them, but that's about it.

We don't have a resto Shaman chain healing. We have 2 resto Druids, a holy Priest and a ret Paladin who heal our raid. I'm not saying there aren't other spells we could use. I'm saying Rejuv/WG are so far ahead of the others in usefulness as to not need much else. I guess if someone is dying and HOTs aren't keeping them alive, I'll use Nourish. Example would be last night on a sloppy Thorim kill. Two of our MT healers were dead. Well of course I'm not going to just HOT the tank and go "Well, that Rejuv should do it!". All of our healers have a role in my guild. My role is to raid heal 95% of the time. As long as Rejuv/WG alone are allowing us to complete hard modes, I'll keep using them primarily. If people are dying and another spell would work better, I'm game to try it out. But that hasn't been the case yet. So far I'm convinced that resto Druids could just cast Rejuv/WG in most raids and as long as the other healers are doing their jobs, it should be fine.

I donno man. My guild is about the same progression-wise as your guild is minus 1 more elder Freya. Not sure why this matters. If I can heal 10m Firefighter hard-mode, I think I might know what I'm doing. I've been playing this game since 4/2005.

I noticed there is a large discussion on whether or not to blanket HoT the raid... I love blanket HoT'ing because we have a lot of direct healers like resto shamans, disc priests, and holy paladins; and my blanket HoT'ing provides a cushion for the big healers to have time to get off the big heal before the person dies. Also I understand that by blanket HoT'ing I can be locked in a GCD when i need to use Swiftmend or some other clutch heal, but I've never really had that problem do to using some common sense and using my judgment skills in determining if I need to hold off for a few secs on blanket HoT'ing because I might have to use a clutch heal ability on the Tank. So honestly I don't believe that I need to stop blanket HoT'ing to be a better healer. I'm not having any trouble keeping the tanks alive and keeping rolling HoTs on the raid.

This will change on say, something like hard mode council. If you are one of two healers on the steelbreaker tank, and it isn't a DK, you spending all your GCD's doing nothing but hot'ing the raid and leaving only hots on the tank, he will die. Period.

All blanket hot'ing does is inflate your meter numbers. If your raid has competent priests (a 25 man raid should have 2), then you blanket hot'ing does next to nothing. This cushion you speak of is laughable, if not non-existent. The heal cushion that druids provide comes from the 3-4 hots that we can put on a person simultaneously, not one singular tick every 3 seconds.

If you're in a guild where keeping the tank alive is the Druid's responsibility for more than just HOTs, you either have direct healers who aren't very good, or you need more of them. We can tank heal, but we're not tank healers.

Are you serious?

I actually agree with some of what you said - if you're tank healing on any vaguely difficult fight you cant really afford to be 'wasting' more GCDs than the occasional WG on the raid. But calling the cushion provided by blanket hots 'laughable' is a pretty ludicrous statement. Taking the example of Tympanic Tantrum - a blanket of Rejuvs and a WG will be enough to keep at least 10 people (thats two entire groups) out of the 'danger zone' long enough for the priests to PoH the other groups, then deal with any spikes that might've occurred, all before PoHing the groups you had hotted up. If you're really trying you could probably do 15 people. If you're lucky enough to have another tree in the raid, then you can have the entire raid in a state of 'never in danger of dying' - which sounds like a very good thing to me (and believe me, keeping someone out of the 'danger zone' is a very big issue on a fight like Freya+3).

I came to this conclusion from doing hard modes.

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You know, hard modes?

There's no problem with 5-10 people, the problem comes when someone takes this strategy and applies it to all 25 members of the raid. It's very plausible that someone reading this thread would come to this conclusion. I agree, keeping a group up by yourself on mimiron requires blanket hot'ing, but just your group, and with multiple hots. Someone on council putting rejuv's on every single person in the raid serves next to no purpose.

Oh I see, hard modes suddenly strip a druid of their single target HPS. Makes sense to me. Perhaps you should stick to the debate at hand

Grats to your guild though.

No, but perhaps if you actually did hard modes, you'd understand why Druids aren't tank healers.

Edit: By hard modes I mean more than post-nerf FL, Hodir and Heartbreaker.

Steelbreaker is terrible example for you here. I mean, come on, he has a raidwide aura that ticks every 3 seconds.

And yeah, we had 3 Trees for Steelbreaker last night, but that's probably the only time I can see putting one on the tank.

---

The value of the blanket hotting might be hard to see when you're always thinking about just one target and what kills them. If someone eats a spike and a direct healer hits them within 3 seconds, the Rejuv likely didn't do anything. But issue is the limiting cases--the hard fights where the raid has to process as much incoming damage as possible without wiping. These fights have more people taking damage at once than there are healers, so there are going to be gaps. The raid healers are trying to trying to get to as many people as they can before the next damaging effect hits. If person has Rejuv ticking on them while they wait for a heal, the incoming heal can be smaller, can become unnecessary and allow the healer to save someone else, or the target might survive the next hit where they otherwise wouldn't have.

The argument is almost self-working. The very fact that Rejuv is ticking at all means that people are frequently staying below full HP for more than 3 seconds. That only happens if the direct healers can't cover all the damage immediately--which is the case on any hard fight. The fact that this heavy hotting produces great effective HPS really is the most important piece of information. All incoming damage has to be healed off eventually, and the bigger the chunk of damage that you cancel out, the less the others have to heal off and the lower the chance that they'll fall behind enough to let someone die.

Grrr. I'm not sure what to say other than "that is blatantly not true". Blanket hotting is an extremely powerful technique for healing raid damage, and is especially good against predictable damage. Aura damage - like High Voltage - is othing if not predictable. The way we do IC hard mode, we have 2.5 tank healers, 1.5 raid healers, and a healer for the Disruption soakers. The 0.5 tank/0.5 raid healer is a shaman, who basically bounces CH through the tank. It keeps the armor buff up, and it provides useful topping up on raid members who get low for whatever reason. The raid healer is me. How would you suggest I heal in this situation? My method is to do my level best to get a hot on every single member of the raid - you say this serves no purpose, I say it keeps everyone alive. Our last kill I was on about 9k HPS overall, and I can only assume given the tiny raid damage in P1, my HPS in P3 must have been a lot higher. Its literally impossible to reach that kind of HPS using our direct heals. RJ+WG spam genuinely is the way to go for a fight like that.

Ok..

You mentioned that Druids can tank heal. I agree with you. I'm simply saying that Paladins and Priests are better suited to the task. Their cooldowns are better. We have no tank saves apart from Swiftmend, if you call that a save. The moment you remove a resto Druid from raid healing, you lose HPS on fights and healing gets behind. Some of these fights in Ulduar such as Thorim hard-mode or Freya +3 (we're working on it) have such a ridiculous amount of incoming damage on the raid that we're forced to be extremely efficient. Efficient healing means you bring the best possible classes for the encounter and the bare minimum because the DPS check is real too. Provided you have a good comp (which hard modes really require), there just isn't a single fight in all of Ulduar where a resto Druid should be assigned to direct heal a tank, unless something goes wrong.

To take it a step further..

Blanket hoting the raid works with a strategy. I would hope anyone reading this post gets that. I'm by no means saying a resto Druid should mash their Rejuv key and just throw the HOT on random people. Heals over time are a cushion because it frees up GCDs that we might need when things get really bad. So say you get to a slow portion of the encounter and most of the ranged are at 100% or near that. Do you just stand there and wait for people to take damage? I don't. I start throwing Rejuvs on people that I know will take damage soon. I want them up so I don't have to PUT them up when things get hectic. Make sense? There's nothing wrong with blanket HOTing the raid provided two things are true:

1. People are topped off and nobody in the raid is in danger of dying at the moment.
2. I won't run OOM.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing to have a rejuv ticking at all. But I still question the value of spending all your time hot'ing the raid. The scenario that most often comes into play for me, is a group will get rejuv's on them. Shortly thereafter, they receive a certain amount of damage. The rejuv's start to tick in succession, but then a priest's PoH lands on them. The question is, did those rejuvs save the lives of that group? To me, it's just inefficient. I'm as much a believer of high HPS as targeted high HPS.

Edit- Vazu that's much more congruent with my line of thought. Pre-hotting predictable damage on downtime is essential, I agree. But I still disagree that priests make better tank healers. As far as cooldowns go, GS might be a tank saver, but that can be applied regardless of heal assignment.

As far as the council thing goes, it just doesn't seem like it's a big deal for a group to go down to 50% because they will receive a PoH that will take them to full anyways. What's the difference if they receive the PoH at 50% or 60%? Just wasted mana on the priests and gcd's spent for the druid. That's not to say that hot'ing the melee isn't an effective strategy either. I guess the important thing to keep in mind, like Vazu said, is to not only have a strategy, but do it strategically. I still think it's also important to do it in moderation, because I maintain that druids make excellent tank healers.

The amount of incoming damage you are dealing with in YOUR guild isn't the same as it would be for a guild trying the hard-mode version of that fight. That Priest throwing POH/COH after damage can't possibly heal the entire raid up on 3 elder Freya, after a trantrum on XT or toward the end of hard-mode Vezax. The purpose of HOTing people ahead of time is to be ahead, freeing up your GCD when you really need it most. Think of your hots as a "set it and forget it for X seconds" kind of deal. Alot depends on your raid too. I mean, if you raid with TWO holy Priests and both of them are raid healing, of course Rejuv will be less effective. But I'm telling you right now, some of the harder hard modes can't be raid healed by COH/POH (from 1 Priest) by itself. You absolutely need to get ahead with HOTs and have a strategy for blanketing the raid.

What if PoH didn't land on them so fast? We usually have 2 priests in 25 man raids and one of them is on tanks duty. It's not very likely for a single priest to cover 15-20 people with PoH regularly and timely. Blanket HoT'ing helps a lot in such situation.
In my opinion better to waste some of rejuvs than let someone die before they got PoH or attention from direct healer.