I was under the impression he meant clinch moment saving abilities, but I see what you mean. Druids are not alone in their lack of "saving" abilities in that sense. The only CDs our guild can use safely are those of a priest... or Divine Sacrifice combined with something else (or obviously a tank CD). So we aren't alone with this problem.

As far as shields, I concede the point, but Blizzard shouldn't be designing (and isn't really) fights around the idea that 50% of the time your tank might get one shot. All the hard modes have a significant amount of damage, but the one shots are limited to special abilities which you can prepare for.

I think if the tank dies and we use Brez as our saving ability, half of the melee will be dead. Normally Brez is considered "utility" and not a "healing CD" since most raids function under the assumption that people shouldn't be dying.

While i do agree that Brez should be classified as a "utility" spell, it is also is an excellent compliment to the niche of our healing, which is raid healing. It can be considered a microcosm to how we preform compared to other classes.

We have the ability to resurrect any member, which pairs perfectly with our most assigned role, raid healing. It is the perfect pair for this role because it is a cool down that can be used after the fact, which takes the role of having to 'predict' who will die. By this i mean that yes a priest could turn their GS into a battle rez only if they can predict the death, which, in a raid role, is next to impossible to predict. Both will meet the same end (other than possible mana or buff issues), but the battle rez is more suited for the job.

Now on the other end of the spectrum, healing a tank, GS takes the lead because the damage is predictable. This is where you hit the nail on the head. Brez can be used on a tank, but it is to the job as GS on a raid member, it is ineffective, or less so than other possibilities.

This is why a diversity of healers is needed in all challenging content, because every class and spec brings their own skill to the table. Some will surpass, beyond a shadow of a doubt, all other skills. And that same skill will be surpassed by others in a different role.

The short version is that arguing "this skill vs. that skill", and then coming up with an undisputed winner, does not make that skill inferior in general, but merely inferior in that narrow field of judgment, whereas it might take the cake in another field. Just because druids don't have a GS or LoH does NOT mean that they are inferior in general, but only in the category of "tank CD's. (taking the skills herein mentioned).

Aside from a crit-scaling talent and meta-ToL, I don't think we'll be receiving anything new this expansion. They might alter tranquility and HT, but as stated its low-priority because we don't need it. Since we're in groupthink mode I did have an idea, should hots ever get nerfed across the board to compensate for Chots™ (critical heal over time!).

One huge strength of tree, and arguably an OP aspect of the class, is our mobility without losing throughput. I think a good talent, should hots get nerfed, would be something akin to Surv Hunter's Sniper Training, that is basically a stacking +heal % buff, when you move it either ticks back down or goes away altogether. Call it Nurturing Roots or something like that. It's too easy and somewhat unfair to other healers given current encounters' constant mobility requirement, it would be good to encourage trees to choose smart places to stand that would allow them to stand still and be rewarded for it (fires on hodir, a good shroom on Freya etc). I don't think this is warranted though unless hot spellpower scaling or base healing is nerfed, we have enough throughput as it is. It would make pvp more interesting too, where the decision to kite or tree-tank isn't so clearcut and proper positioning is absolutely crucial.

I really think improved barkskin should allow it to be cast on others every 3 minutes or so, or on yourself for the bonus 10% every minute as usual. They reeeeeeeeeeeally want to give us more variety and tank healing viability because they keep buffing nourish every patch, but without this kind of "out" or any mitigation buff we really can't fill that role. These sort of cooldowns were absolutely clutch in Ulduar, if they're going to continue along with this sort of boss design its really time this should be done to keep things balanced for 10 mans, 5 mans, etc. I always thought this sort of thing should be put on the tanks, but blizzard apparently doesn't think so since they keep nerfing DKs rather than giving other tanks more outs.

As far as a Chot-extension rather than 150% tick, I'd be all for it. One major aspect of druid healing is how consistent our hots are. If I cast a rejuv, I know with 100% certainty that it is going to do about 850 HPS and 15,000 healing. I don't want it to have a 1% chance to do 22000 healing. Nor do I want it to have an 18% chance to do even less than 15k (assuming it was nerfed). Who would actually enjoy this sort of RNG when it comes at the expense of raid members died ("Sorry, you died because I didn't get any Chots"). Realistically I don't see Blizzard doing anything else besides this unless the druid community really came out in droves against it. Hey, it worked for lifebloom... err... wait no. We're at the whim of Ghostcrawler and he's kind of an idiot.

Sans inspiration, shamans are inferior to resto druid for single target healing in every way. Our hps is better, our mana regen is better and our cds are better. And that's before the 3.2 and before speccing/glyphing for nourish. Now toss in superior raid healing, healing on the move, a unique hot niche and you can see why asking for inspiration is not gonna happen.
I have yet to see a reasonable situation to bench a resto druid unless you have more than 2 in the raid.

That's not a "saving" ability - you can't use it on MT. Point is we don't have something like pain suppression. Bears do with barkskin on themselves, but that's it. Make barkskin castable on others (and possibly buff it up slightly) - as is druids cannot effectively support MT on fights that require damage reduction cooldowns besides MT's own cooldowns.

Also, if we're lacking severly anything now is burst healing on MT. Nourish doesn't hit for nearly enough to fulfill that role.

I feel that if I can't cast a heal that's as a baseline (before crits and other possible buffs) 1/3 of my MT's lifebar, I'm fairly inadequate as far as MT healing goes. Currently before crit, and even including HoT buff / glyph, nourish isn't even close to that.

No, we don't have a damage reduction ability on CD. But, neither do shamans, and the paladin ones are usable by all specs.
We have SM for burst healing which heals for the same as HL/HW and is instant. Nourish has a practical cast time of 1s if spammed and heals for quite a lot (comparable to LHW for instance), with X2 healing on crit that works on overhealing.

That's a ridiculous metric unless you're talking about a tank in blues. Nobody has a heal that big.

Nourish will be there in 3.2 gear. Most tanks have about 45-50k health now, maybe 55k in t9. Assuming you have all hots incl. WG you're looking at 14-15k crits *1.3 (living seed), nearly a 20k heal with 3200-3500 bonus healing (I hit 14k with about 2800 SP on PTR using 4pc t7.5) Managing that many hots on the MT while still raid healing would be inane though. More realistically you're going to get about 15-18k effective heal on the tank, which definitely hits that 1/3 benchmark.

Changing topics, did anyone get a chance to test the uptime on Idol of Flaring Growth on max rejuv targets? I know the feral one is basically 100% uptime, so here's to hoping.

It's up 100% even with only one rejuvenation going. Also featuring critical hot ticks not procing nature's grace.

He specified before crits.

This is going to be retardedly OP inwhich I foresee it getting nerfed hardcore.

Before any other upgrades this relic alone would provide 3600-3700 w/ uld BiS at 100% uptime. Take into account current known leather healing from 3.2 and druids could be pushing ~3900sp.... :0

I find I already skip the Awakening idol on most fight, and I'm pretty much chaincasting already for minutes on end without running out of mana. Seeing as mana pool / regeneration will only be getting stronger with the new levels of gear, moving from an MP5 idol to a SP idol seems like a natural transition.

As far as damage on MT in Ulduar works, HoTs provide very small benefit for healing actual hits on the tank since the damage is coming in large hits that happen not that often. To make it a bit more interesting, most encounters have "health checks" where you have to keep your targets over certain level for them to survive at certain point (usually repeatedly). Problem with this model is that simply you need a lot of burst healing and in that case the main purpose of the HoTs is to buff Nourish. The only HoT that actually meant something by itself for MT healing has already been nerfed to oblivion and is going to take another hit (probably along the lines of making sure people don't play in an "unfun" way...)

Fine - count crit if you want (technically if you can do it at ~50% or better, it's almost given to crit once on 3 casts). Why is that ridiculous, in particular? Paladins will top off MT in 3 casts without any problem. Disc priests don't generally have to because they get a 10 - 15k or so buffer on a hit. We don't have that sort of luxury. Now, I'm not necessarily saying we need to get such a heal - I'm saying that I won't consider myself an MT healer, especially for 25man raids if I don't such a tool. Also no need to nerf anything - if you had to spec for it in such way that it would sacrifice a lot of your HoT throughput, but it'd make you a good MT healer with a damage reduction cooldown and good burst heal - there would be no problem of being OP.

Edit: if we get something like 20k after crit, and make it 10k before since you won't be getting living seed either, then if we crit twice out of 3 times, we'll be at 50k heal / 3 casts which would be really good = makes me hope I'll be actually capable of doing some MT healing for a change. But that also means we'll have to stack crit for a change to reach 65% or so effective crit after talents and raid buffs.

I also was thinking of an idea like that where you could spec one way or another towards MT or raid healing like maybe last few talents in the tree make you decide between some talents in Balance and get MT or HoT -or- give up something somewhere and you can beef up MT and HoT healing.

Something along those lines.

Does it strike anyone else as a little odd when people include the Living Seed heal when modeling Nourish Spam?

Unless the boss has an attack speed in the range of 0.9 - 1.2 sec, Living Seed will get overwritten fairly often, especially if you add tank avoidance.

On my druid I have little problem with burst healing on the MT. When you organize it correctly it is no big deal to do somewhere between in 15-20k healing in 2 seconds. (3 hots, 2 nourishes) which should be sufficient as burst healing. Sure, healing a MT is (for me) usually a Nourish spam with Hots renewal at appropriate times but it is sustainable and works well on the hard modes I have done (havent done them all).
For bursts that need huge healing in less than 2 seconds you have to rely on your CD's but that is the case for the other healers too.
I don't see much wrong with druid healing as it is. We have our preferred niche ( raid healing) but we can do well enough in any other role.

Its not as odd as one would first think. Living seed only applies to crits, Druids have roughly a 50% crit chance on most spells that can apply LS. Even if we were spamming Nourish non stop on a target, that gives a swing timer closer to 1.8-2.4s. Living Seed also will be released from any damage that the target takes, which is more than simply his swing timer. Take this into account that if you are paying attention to the tanks health you will either be cancel casting or pausing between Nourish casts a good chunk of the time. Even a half second of hesitation would bring that timer closer to 2.3-2.9s between any hits damage at all. Between melee swings, AoE damage, special abilities there is a good chance statistically that the tank will take damage in this window, thus triggering LS.

Technically you could make two separate models, but for all intents and purposes modeling Nourish + LS is a reasonable.

Precasting and canceling Nourishes isn't really that viable once it has 1 sec cast time (or close enough). It's not a 2 or 3 sec cast. When I include my 250-300ms (or more when things get busy) server lag into this equation, I can't effectively precast and cancel a spell with that short cast time - I cancel it 2/3rds of the cast time and it still gets registered as successful cast most of the time. I could do that game with Regrowth because it was generally 1.6 to 2 second cast unless bloodlust / heroism was in effect. In order to make this sort of technique viable, I'd need sort of "reversed glyph of healing touch" for Nourish - lengthen cast time, increase healing. You need some cast time to even make the decision that you want to cancel / recast or finish. Maybe I'm not used to this type of healing, but between 250-300 ms lag on start (so the health bars won't even update before that), and the fact that I have to cancel before say 600-650ms mark for it to actually cancel all the time (1 second - ( the lag + actual reaction / key hit time) ), the 300-400ms left over to decide whether you want to proceed or cancel seems like an awfully short amount of time for that sort of thing. For reference, that's the duration of a normal eye-blink.

But since it has a fairly short cast time, the only time I actually spam Nourish is during special abilities (Plasma Blast, etc...) where the tank takes that 10k damage / second after damage reducing cooldown. Since most of those are fairly predictable, it's a pretty simple game *yawn*.

Problem is with cases when the tank gets spanked badly due to random unpredictable elements (parry haste, whatever else...) In those cases I find myself in a healing hole that I can't really climb out of without someone else's help - Nourish just doesn't hit for enough. In other words, it's adequate to heal normal swings, but there is no "leftover" there to cover for emergencies. With damage reducing cooldowns already tied down to regular "mini-enrage" elements, there is no other way to cover this than just healing through (by the way - right now we are raiding with 2 warrior tanks and 2 pally tanks).

Paladins are really quite good raid healers when they don't need to keep people topped up. The list of fights where this is the case isn't exceedingly long but arguably iron council does fall into that category.

Whenever I'm assigned to tank healing (not often), I definitely precast almost the entire duration of a fight. I'll try to help out raid healers as I can with WG and rejuves but I usually spend my time refreshing hots and just chain precasting. If you consider the lag, which you brough up, then you really have .5-.8 seconds to cancel a cast you've just started before it goes off. Factor in reaction times and you're basically at a system of .5 second increments going something like 0.0 Cast -> 0.5 Yes/no -> 1 Complete / cancel. The main reason for this is what you stated: if we get behind, it's a pain in the ass to get back on top with nourish.

Another thing worth noting is that assuming you had two nourish crits for 14k in between swings, odds are you didn't need the first seed. That's the great thing about its mechanic triggering on next damage application, except in the case when that damage application was the killing blow to the tank in which case somebody screwed up anyhow. 65%crit won't be difficult to achieve (29% tooltip needed) given that 37% is free between talents and moonkin/ele sham, you'll get an additional 2-3% from raid buffs, and crit will move from a tertiary stat to secondary after haste softcap is achieved. So even if 1/4 of your seeds overlapped, you're still looking at it doing an additional 15% of your nourish healing, I see no reason not to include that in any MT healing model. Plus look at the only fight we were given where tank HPS actually matters - algalon - there are no wasted seeds there.

The bottom line is one nourish crit + a few hot ticks can easily top off a tank after a normal boss swing, which means nourish "spamming" has no problem keeping with even intense damage with another MT healer... Mimiron's plasma blast for example.

A rather rudimentary question I apologize, but I'm trying to determine my maximum utility while fighting Vezax Heroic (normal mode). I typically stay in with the melee, keep Rejuv and Regrowth on the MT, and fish for clearcast procs with melee, swapping back to the tank to either put a single lifebloom or regrowth on him. This is tremendous for saving mana and I usually provide the most effective healing out of our group while rarely, if ever, needing to step into a saronite pool.

Yet I have to wonder as on basically every other fight I'm best utilized for raid healing, am I doing the wrong thing here? Should I be out with the ranged group topping people off? Thoughts and suggestions appreciated!