As far as living seed, it seems like a good pvp talent and thats it. I dropped it for my raid healing and it hasn't changed anything at all. In fact, I used the extra points for 4 min CD on tranquility instead which is really really useful at times.

Which times? I can't think of a situation where I'd like to tranquility twice in 5 minutes, once in the beginning of the fight and again at the end of the fight for only the people in my group.

Past the haste GCD cap both haste and crit add nothing to HoT spells. If your healing breakdown is anything like mine... typically (on 25 man boss fights) 80%+ of my healing comes from rejuv, wildgrowth, lifebloom and swiftmend, neither haste or crit are going to add a huge addition.

I think of it like this, which would I rather when I need to cast direct heals? Landing my direct heals faster or having a chance that they crit and heal for more. Haste is more reliable because it isn't based on a chance and in the event that I do cast a direct heal chances are that I'm doing so because I want fast healing so haste suits that also. Crit on the other hand works with
the talents nature's grace and living seed and landing a crit at the right moment is a great thing.

Having said that I gauge upgrades based on spellpower more than anything else. I'm not going to give up spellpower to swap some haste for crit or vice-versa

Tranquility is great for 5 mans more than raids i guess where there is a lot of splash dmg. In raids, its good to have in case of emergencies, and with a 4 min CD it means I can use it more often. I might get living seed after the patch though, because blizz said that its not working properly right now.

I would totally agree with what you're saying, except that Tranquility only heals party members; it's not a smart raid heal like CoH or WG. If it were, it would be worth putting points into. Usually the people in my party (healers) need healing less than others in emergency situations.

Tranquility is amazing for any 5 man fight that has a lot of AoE damage, Loken for instance, just use it and the fight is essentially reset with everyone topped back up to full. It almost trivialises these fights, bonus points if you manage to use it with a clearcasting. I agree that it should be changed in some way to make it a little more appealing for raids though, I basically never use it because the 5 people in my group are rarely the ones who need healing most, those 8 seconds would be better spent triaging the entire raid.

I'm considering moving points from Replenish to Improved Tranquility myself, not sure if it's worth the respec cost though. Depends on whether I want to keep doing heroics, as I've almost got all the badge gear and drops I need from them, might make going for the achievements a bit easier.

It boils down to that for me too. For me any haste or crit on my gear is incidental, pretty much all healing items have stam/int/spirit/spellpower plus one of either haste or crit. Unless you're specifically going for one stat over another for whatever reason then chances are both stats will be in roughly equal quantaties on your gear. That works for me because I value both about the same, haste makes heals hit sooner which is always great, and crit synergises fantastically with Living Seed and Natures Grace and serves to make your Regrowth more and more reliable.

Getting a 15k Natures Swiftness Healing Touch crit that procs a 4500 Living Seed when the tank is at 50% or lower is a great feeling too.

Aye aye, would be a true spell of awesomeness if you could heal an entire raid with it. (But would sadly also lead to druid stacking with imp tranquility as a solution to some bosses with predictable massive AoE damage.) But with totems and whatnot being raidwide now I often place myself in the tank group precisely for the reason of giving the tankgroup an extra o shit button. 5-mans is where the talent really shines but I like it a lot for raiding as well.

My tactics:

Q1 - Load your tribloom before the pull, try and refresh the LB stack just before the tank pulls, if you can get tribloom + rejuv up PRE pull it is a great barrier. Once you hace your regrowth up as well I have come to LOVE using nourish to heal spikes at this point. Just keep LB, Rejuv, Regrowth, Wild Growth (if needed) rolling and use nourish to top off the tank if needed.

Q2 - Casting 3 LBs as your warrior pulls will pull extra mobs at you, if you have your tribloom on the MT and refresh it before he pulls, you should not have a problem with him getting the mobs. Just make sure he is using AE threat generators (like Tclap)

Q3 - Skill makes up a lot...Stamina is easy to come by at this point, so just make sure they have a decent amount of avoidance and mitigation. When doing a PuG I always Armory the people before inviting them, you can tell if someone knows the class by the enchants/gems etc. Someone who takes the time to properly enchant and gem will probably be okay even if slighly undergeared.

I have one additional tip to add regarding prestacking HoTs. Since timing is essential spend some time to carefully look at your tank before each pull. No, not at his healthbar. I know thats where us healers tend to rest our eyes the most, but look at his toon. Carefully watch everything he does before a pull. Most tanks have small details in their bodylanguage that can show you precisely when they mean to pull. One of the warriors I play a lot with for example has a tendency to make an ever so small tap forwards before he´s going to charge. Also he does not do this when he´s planning to use his gun to pull. Theres more small details he does too, but you get the idea. So from studying him a lot I can tell both if he plans to charge or use his gun and I know exactly when he´s going to do it and can prehot him just at the right moment. This is one of my best tips I can give as a healer. Takes some learning for each tank but isn´t very hard once you learn what to look for besides obvious preparing spells and abileties.

With such a massive amount of our healing coming from hots, has there been any word that we might (3.1?) get a new talent that functions similar to the Shadow Priest/Affliction Warlock ones that provide extra damage (or in our case healing) on dot (hot) ticks based on your crit chance?

Maybe I'm looking at it wrong, but I pick up haste to get me to a 1 second GCD for hots and then I really don't care if my gear has haste OR crit on it (with mp5 being the ideal 'extra' stat but there aren't many items set up this way). If I want something to crit, I use Regrowth, and I have enough haste (raid buffs etc etc) that my spells are already casting a good bit faster.

Now granted, I wasn't raiding SWP at the end of TBC (Up to Illidan pre nerf then we cleared first 3 of SWP post nerf), but from what I understand, Shadow Priests and Affliction Warlocks started to fall behind in terms of effectiveness because they scaled from Spellpower effectively and not much else. I just see us being locked into a situation where we have tons of wasted stats on our gear, especially considering that with raid buffs we can already hit a 1 second GCD. Priests, Shamans, and Paladins all make excellent use of both Haste and Crit, while I'm feeling kind of left out in the cold here. I thnk there's been some discussion either in this thread or one of the others that we have better coefficients on our spells and this is supposed to make up for the fact that we aren't scaling on every stat on our gear, but will this truly make up for it in the long run?

There has been nothing confirmed or really spoken about by Blizzard about giving us any form of Crit conversion for our HoTs.

I believe it is their aim for us to use our direct healing spells more often though instead of further enhancing our HoTs (slight PvP issue).
I do not really see a way around this without weakening HoTs further in order to let direct heals become more prominant in our style of healing although giving Nourish some talents might make it more appealing to be used more frequently... doubtful that could do enough to shift the balance.