@ sober
Ya it's kind of interesting trying to put it together. There's quite simply a lot of different methods for druid healing that will work reasonably well. I can read EJ and put down the numbers they have, and some of the number crunching I've done myself, but that doesn't capture of totality of what we can do.
Blizzard, for better or for worse, has balanced druid healing to the point where every one of the spells we have seems to have, at minimum, situational usefulness, which is great. However this leads to a variety of play styles, all of which it's really hard to capture in a single sticky. I'm guessing this is part of the reason it has been incomplete for so long, and the reason the base build I listed has 16 unused talent points...
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I also tend to ignore revitalize because it seems such a waste of points.
There's some good numbers on this
here, and post 1309 on the previous page is actually a bit better. It turns out to be a surprisingly strong talent, I know I was surprised when I first saw the numbers. Really though it is still more or less optional, like most of the talents. I simply chose it because I needed points to get to WG, and if your trying to maximize your raid-wide HPS you are using 5 RJ + WG, which means Living Seed, and Natural Perfection don't really do you any good.
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For example you say the WG glyph is near essential. I've never had it and never felt I needed it. I tend to wg, rejuv if damage is big and then just nourish spam.
WG is the one glyph I've seen probably the most commonly in raid-healing builds. There are certainly instances where it isn't needed. It's likely most important if you have a melee-heavy raid. Certainly fights where spreading out is essential it's basically useless, given that you'll be lucky if your WG hits 2 targets, much less 6. That being said though, if you are in to going min/max on your raid healing potential the WG glyph is necessary, as is RJ and Swiftmend. But as we all know mix/max isn't everything,. Being tops on the healing meters and losing people to spike damage doesn't = progression.
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Same thing with the rejuv glyph, if I'm putting rejuv on people with less than 50% health the possibility of them falling to splash damage is higher than I would like...
The thought with this glyph is that you are pre-hotting the entire raid with RJ and this gives you a buffer when someone's health drops below 50%. That being said < 50% is where most people react with a direct heal, instead of letting them linger with low health. Usually the benefit of this glyph is minor, but given the fact you'll likely be rolling RJ on the whole raid it gets proc'd enough to make it worthwhile.
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The one thing I notice you don't take that I would consider almost essential is 5/5 tranquil spirit. Being able to cast nourish more is a really good tool for lots of encounters where you've hotted everyone up and they're still dieing.
5/5 tranquil spirit is almost needed if you are largely using your direct heals (Nourish, etc.). I used to have several points here myself, till I moved them to the new improved empowered touch. However I assumed for 25s raid healing, you'd be using a 5 RJ + WG rotation, and having this account for 90%+ of your healing in order to maximize your output. Meaning that the points in Tranquil Spirit would likely be underutilized.
Again though, (do I sound like a broken record yet? :p) healing in 25s is different then healing in 10s, which is different then healing in 5s... I almost feel the need to have different builds of each situation myself, but I don't feel like re-specing that much. Direct healing talents certainly play a larger role in 10s where you are likely to be using them more frequently.
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When I said LBx3 roll I was thinking of the druid who healed me yesterday through CoS and kept it up the whole time, even for trash.
But I didn't realise that keeping it rolling on a tank was better HPS than letting it bloom, restacking then spamming nourish the whole time.
If it helps the increase in HPS is partly due to the fact it takes 1 GCD to roll LB and 3 to re-stack it. It the time it takes to apply the 2 additional stacks you could have cast Nourish about 2 times. However in general it's better to keep the HoTs up as a first priority as the 1) increase the strength of Nourish, and 2) all have a better HPSC (Healing per second of cast-time).
There is a similar argument for doing the RJ + WG spam. Let's say Nourish can heal for about 6-11k (it can crit ;-))right now, but RJ, at a similar spellpower, will do 13-15k over it's duration. They both take a similar about of time to cast (RJ is usually a little faster due to GotEM talent points), so your overall amount of potential healing will go up if you, for example, spam RJ instead of Nourish. Which one ends up higher in practice will likely depend on the encounter and the amount of over-healing.
Edited, Sep 2nd 2009 12:18pm by someproteinguy