Curious about 'roles' for healers.

[Woobels]

Hello,

Something that has been bugging me for awhile is what healers do what job best, in terms of say tank healing/raid healing/etc.
I know this is probably very different for each guild/comp but I tend to disagree with what we do.

We generally use druids almost exclusively on raid healing, but from what I've seen from higher end streams, they tend to be on tanks more often.

If someone could give me their opinion on what healers do what best I'd love to hear it, please teach this uninformed plebeian DPS.

Edit: 25 man group.

[Kraineth]

Reso has good filler for raid healing, but with lifebloom rolling/efflorescence ground-based healing, they have strong tank heals, its entirely possible to keep Lifebloom stacks on the tank and raid heal however, and any druid that is raid healing will probably be keeping rejuv on the tank as well.
Hots are better when the target they are on actually takes damage, contant aoe pulse damage left the game with wrath, and so did rejuv spam on every target possible.

[Soraka]

With changes to druids this expansion, they've become really strong tank healers. Obvious things are rejuv and lifebloom are always rolling on the tank which puts a considerable amount of baseline healing on the tank, on par with a pally's beacon. Druids also have a couple very hard hitting instant casts. Swiftmend and Nature's Swiftness+Regrowth are amazing spike recovery tools single target. Then on top of that, the new mushroom mechanic allows you to place mushrooms so they're only in range of the tank on some fights which basically gives you a lay on hands on a ~30 second cooldown. Then finally, the changes to regrowth give you one of the hardest hitting hard casts of any healer (only beaten by a disc priest's greater heal with 3 stacks of grace) and the only comparable hard cast with a 1.5 second cast time. Every other healer's goto big tank heal is a 2.5 second cast. This means worst case, you can chain cast regrowth on the tank and do over double the amount of healing, not even considering RJ and LB are still ticking too. Also, since regrowth always crits, it always puts living seed on the tank and since the tank is always taking physical damage, that's just a direct 30% increase to regrowth when healing the tank, assuming no overheal. Ironbark is just icing on the cake.

Also druids don't scale that well AoE going from 10 man to 25 man. We lack any spamable AoE and there are only so many rejuvs you can have rolling at once. Makes resto strong for 10m but doesn't scale as well to 25m as other healers do. This makes druid deprecated in 25 man for raid healing.