Like anything, it’s all a work in progress!

I still think there are some upgrades you may be overlooking in the new heroics. I would take a look at their gear listings and see if anything catches your eye there. Otherwise, good luck with your loot rolls, of course!

Personally, I’m not too into the 4 piece T10 bonus. From what I’ve gathered, it’s not going to produce an effect that’s going to work along the lines of a “smart heal.” Meaning the heal isn’t necessarily going to be steered towards people who actually need a heal. It’s just going to randomly land on people near the person you just healed. We’re already dealing with WAY too much overhealing, from recent changes and I don’t see that being much help with that.

We have sort of become the Affliction locks of healing. We need haste and lots of it. I talked with two other druids in my guild and I think we’re in agreement that we’re going for the 2 piece bonus (which is already quite nifty) – by getting our gloves and pants, then going for off spec haste pieces, to fill in the gaps. With the new Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation (which I started off hating and now love) and enough haste, it’s hard to deny it room in your arsenal.

The T9 bonus was quite cool and it was hard to break that set. Transitioning to the point of better gear and moving onto the Glyph of Rapid Rejuv was kinda scary, but very rewarding, overall.

I can’t believe how much it crits…with the talent bonus, it’s somewhere around 50% unbuffed, and with 2 hots on the target, crits for high 10k – low 11k, which is WAY bigger than HT crit, plus does it far more often.

Upgrades…yeah…I’ve been wanting to get upgrades for items like trinkets/offhand/necklace, but I don’t seem to get very good drops, or I lose the roll.
I did get the Igniter Rod from Ignis the other day though, so a bit of an off hand upgrade.

On another note, what do you think about the T10 4p set bonus compared to the T9 bonus. I absolutely love the T9 bonus…seeing rejuv crits for 3500 is great. Having a chance to jump to a new target is nice and everything, but I usually have rejuv rolling on most people in the raid already. And a 2% chance seems awfully low to really be very useful.

It sounds like you’re not really having any mana issues and you’re just looking for stronger heals. I’m going to throw a couple suggestions at you, to hopefully get you started on your way to that goal.

1) Unless you’re having a problem with mana, you are probably going to see more results with pure spellpower gems – unless you need different gems to compliment your meta. All stats gems really don’t have a place in raiding gear, since you have the chest enchant already.

2) There are some upgrades to your offhand that I’d suggest. The first one being the Handbook of Obscure Remedies, from badges and then Ironmender, from Ulduar (which I still use). If you can stomach heroic Halls of Reflection, there is the Shriveled Heart from there, which is nice, too.

3) I would toss the mp5 trinket. MP5 by itself, does very little for resto druids. I use my trinket for the spellpower, that happens to have an MP5 buff that can be useful to us. But you never want to go out of your way to just get mp5.

If you want to have some kind of trinket to keep the mana efficiency going, I would suggest the Majestic Dragon Figurine, from Sarth (which I used forever) or the Spark of Hope, from Ulduar.

When you reach the point where mana isn’t a problem anymore, aim for raw spellpower trinkets. What I use are the Solace of the Fallen, from 25 man Jarraxus and the Sliver of Pure Ice, from 10 man Icecrown.

Other alternatives include the Illustration of the Dragon Soul, the Egg of Mortal Essence, or Eye of the Broodmother.

Hopefully, this gives you some idea of where to start and I’m sure we can talk talents or more another time.

Good luck!

I’ve healed ICC 10, and even though it says i’m a bit low for 25, I would probably do fine raid healing.

As for my guild being behind me, if they weren’t I can just kick them out. I’m a power hungry GM and I’m usually on top of the healing list (well except for the Pally, but who can compete with them for overall heals most of the time? (10-20k every few seconds…sheesh), so even if someone did want to complain, I’d show them the numbers and it’s hard to dispute those.

I guess I’m doing fine, just did ToC 10 tonight and was between 2200 and 2700 hps, I just wonder if I’d benefit from some other things. I’m thinking of a respec, since there are a couple talents that seem to be wasted…tranquility for example..yeah it’s great to be able to do it every 3.5 min, but I find myself using it about once a week…not once every few minutes…

When I had the Conquest trinket that improved Nourishes spell power, I tried to use it in my healing arsenal more, because that’s the whole point of the trinket, but I found myself going back to HT a lot because of how much faster to cast it is, and like I said before, it’s not gimped if rejuvie or regrowth just expired on a target, which, in the heat of battle can happen a lot when everyone’s taking a ton of damage.

If I do decide to switch to Nourish for a while, I’ll switch from the HT glyph to Nourish, maybe that will give it the edge it needs in my mind.

Sorry for babbling on here, sometimes it’s helpful to talk things out. It already made me realize I need to change my tree a bit.

I’ll be back soon.

It’s funny that you should mention HT, because I was planning on making my next post about the 25 man ToGC Anub encounter and HT factors in hugely for us, during the last phase.

Personally, I don’t have a lot of experience with HT. I have always been a more HoT based healer, but I have recently re-discovered Nourish and the jury seems to be pretty unanimous that Nourish is the way to go, over HT. I would be inclined to think you could substitute Nourish for HT, in a similiar build and as long as you’re seeing the same or better results and you can afford to keep it going (because as you said, it can be a bit more expensive, mana wise), I’m all for it.

On that note, I did find an excellent sticky on MMO (http://www.mmo-champion.com/class-druid/resto-druid-raiding-guide-updated-for-3-3/) that has a couple of caster based builds that were focused around using Nourish, that could probably benefit you, for wanting to go HT. When Blizzard slid Nourish into the talent trees a bit more, they lumped it into similiar talents that HT was already in. So they could essentially benefit both spells.

My question for you, to kind of give you some more assistance would be what gear level do you find yourself at right now and what kind of content are you mostly doing? That can also determine the kind of fights that you’ll be seeing and how to react to those. I know I tend to use Nourish and castable heals more often in smaller groups, because there are less heals to go around and you need faster results.

Overall, I’m excited to see you breaking the mold and I’m glad to see that your guild is behind you doing that, too. Please let me know how it goes for you and if there is anything more I can help you with, let me know. I’m just sorry I don’t know more about HT directly, to be able to answer your question a bit better.

When I got to 80 and dual specced Feral/Resto, I decided to try glyphing Healing Touch, since it’s a spell rarely used in raid heals, I figured that it would be pretty useful as for a quick heal to toss out. Couple that with the Naturalist talent, which takes another .5 seconds off HT, and you have a 1 sec cast, for about the same size heal as a Nourish hitting a target with a HoT already in place, but without the need for a HoT, and nearly half a second faster to cast.

Now, I notice that I go through a bit more mana this way than with Nourish, since HT costs around 140 more per cast, but I’ve found that it’s so much easier to get health bars up quick immediately following large damage AoE and such.

With all this extra spell haste in the new patch, it went from around a .9 s cast to under .8s, so I’m going to have to see if it might be a better idea to take a couple points out of Naturalist and get HT to stay right around 1s, but I only just thought about that after babbling on here for a while.

I basically just wanted your opinion on glyphed HT versus Nourish. I don’t call myself an expert in Druid healing by any means, so I’d love some input.

Glad to see you found some humor in my post. I tend to catch a lot of flack, for being one of the few vocal people that doesn’t really care for Nourish. Or more importantly, how Blizz handled it.

It’s nice to see some support so far. I was actually a boomkin for quite a while and I miss it sometimes. Keeping track of the sun and moon over your head now seems a bit much – lol. But I might pick it up again someday.

These days, my SP is my main, on a different server, but I am bringing up a baby druid. I am hopeful that eventually druid healing is something that’s fun for me to do again. But so far, it’s seeming as though the changes over the past year have pushed druids farther into a very small box.

Great post with lots of food for thought.
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