Prior to we talked about glyphs and spec for trees, now we will mainly tell of restoration Druid healing. It appears that most of you were doing pretty well when it comes to not doing something weird. Now that you've tweaked your spec and glyphs if necessary let's look at what you should be doing in those raid healing situation to maximize your healing prowess.

What we are going to do is telling you what you should be doing now and then we will cover how those things are going to change slightly with the new patch. If we don't cover the current situation, the changes won't make a lot of sense and we certainly want to cover them in sufficient detail on both sides of the 3.1 line. So let's cover effective healing as it currently stands.

Druid healing is all about making life bars stand still under any amount of incoming damage.  Let's put damage on a scale from 1 to 5 with Patchwerk hateful strikes are a 5 and something like random trash AoE being 1.

Every other healing class is supposed to use a spell that matches the incoming damage with heal that replaces what was lost. A heal too small and the life bar never hits the top. A heal too big and you just lost too much mana. The focus here is to keep life bars at or near 100% by applying the proper fill spell to top people back up. Druids are different.

You can think of other healers using a paintball gun to fill in the places that need more green.  A Druid uses a lot more finesse. Druids heal with a collection of brushes; some small, some big, to fill in those empty spots. It takes more time and patience, but it's also less messy.

Likewise the Druids are going to match incoming damage but they do not worry about time quite as much. If you are a Paladin you probably spam Flash of Light to top everyone up but a Priest hits CoH, a Shaman Chain Heal. Now the purpose is to try to get everyone back to 100%. If you don't get caught up, the next damage could put some folks in the danger zone - especially if that shade pops out when your group is already engaged with some mini spiders, a pat and the like.

The Druid combats this in a different way. Seeing incoming damage he can just throw Rejuvenation on the party members that got popped and then go do something else. With 2,000 or so spell power that Rejuvenation is going to tick pretty big and the current damage is taken care of as well as anything further the party member might get from the same mob. Incoming damage at level 1 and a level 1 style Heal over Time; the next 15 seconds is pretty much taken care of.

With no real need to top it off, the party members' life bar stands still. The remaining portion of the Heal over Time timer will top off the health bar with no need for anything else to be done once the damage stops.

Heal over Times work more like mitigation is another way of looking at it. Every Heal over Time you make use of is more like adding a boatload of armor. The bar may not move toward 100%, but it shouldn't drop any more. What you are doing is counting on the fact that your Heal over Time will be there longer than the damage. Thus, the time component becomes the real issue.

You have the ability to get good at anticipation incoming damage and get the Heal over Time in place before the damage happens by reason that you can fire and forget with Heal over Times. Now you can talk about keeping a life bar at 100% when you do that effectively. Knowing which spell to apply to which party members can pretty much leave the Paladin sitting there twiddling his thumbs and doing some DPS because there really isn't anyone to top off.

Let us put it all in perspective. Rejuvenation is your first option, which does not heal real big but it is instant cast and will take care of about 50% of all incoming damage to everyone but your tank. Let's call that your level 1 incoming damage heal. Wild Growth is rank 2, which ticks bigger, especially at first, and you don't even have to aim. Regrowth is rank 3, which is nice initial heal and a good Heal over Time on the back end for those times when you are dealing with damage that could really put people at risk. Lifebloom is rank 4, which is the best anticipatory heal you've got but you really need to use it properly. Like Lifebloom, Swiftmend is just nearly on par with nourished and instant cast to boot. Nourish is for rank 5 damage.

There is really never a situation where Healing Touch is the best option. A glyphed HT is not as good as Nourish at the same cast time. A non-glyphed healing touch takes almost as long to cast as a Regrowth and Nourish, which would heal for more. It's not that HT is a stupid spell and it's just that everything else is better, so why use it. If you are ever going to pop HT it should be right after Nature's Swiftness. But to be honest, Nourish is a better spell even in that situation if you already have a Rejuvenation and Regrowth.

Tranquility is the best heal we've got. But considering that even with 2 points in Improved Tranquility, you've still got a 4 min cool down, it's not really something you can rely on as a got-to heal. Plus, using Tranquility without those 2 points is probably going to take you out of the fight anyway since without the threat reduction you’re basically dead if you use it. And even in those cases where it might save folks, it's probably a wipe regardless of what Tranquility does.