As far as your healing on meters go, I assume your talking about 25 man raiding. An applicant wrote this on our forums and said it really well:

Now being undergeared, you may not be running into Algalon/Hard Mode Freya just yet. But take Ignis's Flame jets as a great example for pre hotting. You should be on top of overhealing meters with the new change. For those having trouble with healing meters or just plain healing, his second paragraph sum's up 95% of druid healing; In my eyes as well as the rest of my guilds. The bolded lettering will help you out with the basic mechanics of a druid.

From the latest patch notes:

At least there won't be a reason to keep using 4-piece T8 in Icecrown. The bonus worked perfectly on encounters where the damage was not substantial enough for our HOTs to take effect, but then it was meter whoring anyway.

It's not just the gear, it's more about the way you're talented and skilled.

If i look at your char on armory, there are a few things you should think about:
- You have 17,83% crit but only 187 haste-rating? Haste is much more important than crit - mainly because Reju isn't able crit without 4xt9 and your target should be 1sec. gcd on reju...
- Although you have only 187 haste-rating, you don't have spend any point on your Celestial Focus (1/2/3% haste)? Take a look at my 2nd Talent-Specc on Armory... that's the way i play with low haste-rating.
- Check your gems & enchants, update them if necessary (f.e. your shoulder enchant)
- Change your glyphs: Swiftmend / Reju / Wild Growth

Next Step: what's your heal-rotation? Group-Heal? Tank-Heal? Group-Heal/Tank-Support? Focus-Heal?


PS: My actual Talent-Build is in testing-procedure... i know there's still need for more haste, but i'm workin on it

I have been trying to go get some more haste on my gear by the way I found out from a friend that haste is much more important than crit, so I have started gearing towards that. I also got some Tier 8.5 Leggings drop for me yesterday so have got those up. Should I be changing Nourish for Rejuvenation if I am single target healing?

My guild wants me to concentrate on Single target healing as that is what Druids excel at. Also, changing Lifebloom for Swiftbloom? Really? Lifebloom is the best thing that has happened to me as a healer, and the extra second along with the talent that increases the duration by 2 second, it seems staple. I could change Wild Growth for Swiftmend if I am concentrating on single target healing couldn't I?

Get a 4th piece of T8. This will increase your healing done by around 10% and try to put your Reju's on low hp targets first.

€: Missed the last page.. :[

Your description of healing just 1 or 2 tanks for the most part is going to lend to your results/issues. Rolling HoTs on tanks is great to help smooth out the damage spikes, but if that's all you're doing there's a lot being left on the table. Try using just regrowth and rejuv, and use the remaining time to HoT those in the raid taking damage, between wild growth and rejuv, and then SM or nourish as needed. More overhealing is typical now that the HoTs tick at full health.

Rolling lifeblooms on 2 tanks would benefit from the LB glyph, but the swiftmend glyph is very nice. While a druid can single target heal just fine, what we excel at is raid healing, especially when countering consistent raid aoe damage. Tank healing is not the druid's specialty, but we're not bad at it either. But our effective HPS goes up based on the number of people we heal. This is why haste so effective, once you get to a 1 second GCD you can chain cast rejuv and wild growth in a 25 man environment very effectively.

In a 10 man setup (which is what I mainly do) haste is still awesome, as you keep HoTs on both tanks and still can react to raid heal or throw buffed nourish on those tanks as needed. If there's nothing better to do, you can also roll LB, but to really get the most efficiency from LB you need to try and time a slow roll and that's rather restricting when fast reaction time is needed. I prefer using LB when OOC procs, for the mana regen, and the extra second from the glyph makes no difference.

Yea, it was a hotfix sometime right after patch 3.2 to let HoT effects do their full healing, even if they would completely overheal the target.

Source.

Yes. Prior to 3.2, HoTs only overhealed if, when the tick should occur, the target was at less than full health (and the tick itself was more than enough to bring the target to full health.) Ticks against full health targets never "fired" and thus did not appear in the combat logs. Post 3.2, ticks against full health targets do occur and they count as 100% overheal. This puts HoTs on the same footing as cast-time spells, from an overheal measurement standpoint. It's a good change, though a tad deflating if you were unaware of the rigged system that previously made HoTs appear to have such low overheal.

It was also a great change for the way Blessing of Ancient Kings procced, since now HoT effects will always fire, it gives it more chances to proc, and more chances to add more to the shield. (WTB 5 more fragments >.>)

Yup, it can proc from 100% overheals. The original blue post said it could not, iirc. t8 4set heals can proc it too... Another reason to miss t8

EDIT: Did some real testing today (September 9th). I apologize for jumping to conclusions before. I assumed it was the the overheal from t8 4set that proc'd it, but really its just each cast of a healing spell has a chance to proc. It can not proc off HoT ticks, but once the proc is up, all HoT ticks stack the shield buff.

Im just wondering what you guys think is best for maximum healing per second on iron council hardmode in terms of using the tier 8.5 set bonus.
Yesterday I got the chest off of general vezax hardmode for offspec (which pissed me off because i was after that chest for 2 months pre TOC) which is awesome but it means that I would break my 4 piece set bonus unless i changed my legs to tier. Now I am thinking of ditching the tier set for that fight the next time we kill Steelbreaker on hard just to see what my HPS is like compared to what i usually do on that fight just to see how much of a differance the initial heal on rejuvenation matters.

The most HPS I have ever done by the time steelbreaker died was 9.6k hps and that was due to a clutch tranquility on the healer group towards the end boosting my output by 400 or so hps. This week i did 9.2k and just out of interest of seeing the nerf to 4 piece I think im going to go with non tier pieces, so hodir hard mode gloves, vezax hardmode chest instead of teh tier and seeing how i do. I think it will come to around 3500 spell power in raid(estimate) so in theory it should trump what i lose on the initial heal.

your thoughts?

Sorry if this has been covered, but 20 minutes of searching didn't net me an answer.

Questions about innervate:
1) How much mana it returns. I'm going on the assumption the % of base mana, is the mana a "naked" level 80 druid would have (roughly 5300 according to rawr). Am i drawing the correct assumption?

2) Mana provided via glyph of innervate. If assumption 1 is correct, then the glyph should yeild an additional 5k (i may be WAY off here, i don't know if the glyph changed with 3.2, and can't check from work) mana from innervate. If assumption 1 is wrong can someone tell me how much mana the glyph gives (i saw someone state 1500, but that seems very low).

3) Glyph stacking: Does the effect of the glyph stack with innervate, meaning that even when casting innervate on myself i would get the additional 90% mana.

4) I am beginning to think that with the change to innervate the glyph of innervate has pretty much overtaken the glyph of rejuv (since it's only useful occasionally). Does the conventional wisdom agree with this?

Innervate regens 7866 mana and the glyph regens the Druid an extra 1573 mana (no matter who the Innervate is cast on). The glyph is worth ~40 mp5.

edit nvm found

Hey guys, I haven't really been on my druid much since 3.2 (gearing up a DK tank, mostly) so I don't think I'm much up on some of the new resto druid stuff. So bear with me a little, please.

Where the hell is my mana going? I feel like even when using innervate early (40-50%) I'm often seeing the "Mana Low" combat text in most fights, hard modes or not. Especially in ToC. I'm mainly doing 10 mans with my guild but we have a fairly good comp for a 10 man that isn't missing too many major buffs for me. Before tonight I'd been using [Forethought Talisman] and [Illustration of the Dragon Soul] and really just having mana issues all around (picked up [Sif's Remembrance] tonight to replace FT). I'm not sitting with a lot of BiS stuff (lol shoulders) but before 3.2 I wasn't having too many mana problems even with my, admittedly, lackluster rotation. Buffed and during an encounter I believe my regen sits at around 815 or so.

The rotation I had been using was rejuv, quick stacking LBx3, RG, and nourish if needed while LB ticks then blooms. I've been playing with rejuv, RG, LBx1 and nourish if needed while LB ticks and blooms but it doesn't really alleviate the mana issues. Could my rotation(s) be the cause of my mana issues and if so what are some recommendations on rotation?

I'm also thinking I should spec out of Celestial Focus and pick up the nourish and revitalize talents in the resto tree but how much would that effect my haste? I'm sitting at the soft cap right now with CF. I haven't got much gear at my disposal in my bank but I have some. Any spec/gear recommendations? I really haven't been able to find any definitive answers while searching so any input would be nice or handy links for me to go read as I'm still sorta new around here.

Try Innervating at 70%+ if you know you will be casting a lot while it's on. You could get all epic gems for a little boost. Get revitalize, drop CF. Make up the haste with the new badge ring, and/or crafted runed orb cloth boots. Also, why are stacking 3 LBs? Try to only do that to back up tank healers, but really focus on blanketing out RJ and casting WG whenever a pack has damage, and SM whenever someone is below 60% or so.

Oh yeah, drop glyph of nourish and get glyph of innervate.

I tend to SM on cooldown about 75% of the time. I'm often tank healing and splitting raid heals since we only run 2 healers, typically. I respec'd earlier picking up 2/3 Revitalize and 2/2 Empowered Touch. I'm kind of torn between 2/3 Revitalize or 2/3 Living Seed since I really don't know how much healing LS really accounts for. In Uld10 last night I was using the LBx1, rejuv, RG and nourish during LB's duration if needed. AoE/raid heals are always covered by WG and rejuvs (<3 4pcT8, sad to see it nerfed to suckitude). The single LB rotation wasn't bad but I was still seeing "Mana Low" more often than I've been used to over the years as a resto druid.

Why the innervate glyph over nourish? The extra healing from the nourish glyph is pretty nice (seeing 10.9k crits with current spec and glyph + 3 hots and IDS up). The extra 1600 mana or so doesn't seem like that big a deal...

Edit: I've lost every roll for Spark of Hope since Ulduar launched.

70% is probably a tad early for Innervate (you'll likely waste a tick or so) but 40-50% is definitely late. I have a Power Aura set to pop it at 60% and then every 3 minute cooldown thereafter assuming I'm under 60% again. This Innervate methodology is working very well. Depending on how heavily you are tank healing (are you just rolling some HoTs as a buffer for the primary tank healer or are you out and out tank focused jamming Nourish?) you could definitely switch to 3/3 Revitalize instead of 3/3 Living Seed. There are some solid mana returns on Revitalize and Living Seed has marginalized value if you aren't casting Nourish with heavy frequency.

You could also pick up 18mp5 by switching head/shoulder chants to regen instead of crit -- not a ton, but every little bit helps. Especially with Awakening equipped, I'd think that would put you in good stead unless you are having to cover for relative weakness of the 2nd healer. I can also tell you we run three healers on Northrend Beasts and Faction Champions to keep those encounters more manageable (and I say this having 2-healed 1-Light Yogg in 10s). There's just no reason not to run 3 healers on these two encounters as there's not a real dps requirement on them and it keeps them much safer. So a different raid setup may help your mana pool on those encounters (we have a primary spec Boomkin switch Resto for them -- you may be able to do something similar). We have our Boomkin switch back to primary spec dps and 2-heal Jarraxus and Twins because healing output is much less intensive on those but I really don't think you'll have mana issues on those two encounters anyway.

If you're mainly doing 10mans, I'd recommend dropping the wild growth glyph for innervate if you're having mana issues, I personally love nourish glyph for healing 10mans / the odd fight where I need to tank heal

Also, offtopic but I wouldnt consider a 4pc bonus which is still worth ~150 SP post-nerf "nerfed to suckitude" >.>

A little of column A and a little of Column B. The priest or other tree I run with are pretty on par as far as healing skills go. Usually I'm with the priest but I tend to out heal him somehow. I don't exactly spam Nourish but I do use it on the common side of casting as opposed to a snap reactive 1s heal. I've learned to pretty much adapt to what the other guy is doing as well as take lead if I need to. Especially when I've been having to use SM on CD almost all the time lately (admittedly more often when paired with the other druid).

When I two-heal it's with a Paladin and he has tank focus completely. I'll throw down HoT coverage (Rejuv, single LB, perhaps a Regrowth) as GCDs allow but otherwise I'm on raid entirely. In that he doesn't have to cover raid (or even himself for that matter), he is able to keep the tank up pretty well solo. At the very least he deals with spikes and I'm not having to throw Nourishes out to deal with those. My guess is that trying to fill both raid and tank healing roles at the same time is the direct cause for your mana issues. Especially if the priest you are running with is Disc., you might try that same strategy and see how it rolls. If he's Holy, maybe give him raid coverage and you take primary tank coverage or get him to respec

@ charminultra

Something to consider in addition to what has already be mentioned: If you're using Nourish frequently, you might want to find some more talent points to put in Tranquil Spirit. Nourish is a huge mana hog and this could help reduce some of your mana concerns if you're using it alot.

You might also think about slow-stacking LB instead of using a quick-stacking method. Although it provides a less consistant healing stream, you should find it less draining on your mana. Additionally, it is (at least from my experience) easier to maintain, as you only need to cast one LB every 9 second cycle.