Originally Posted by
Torty
You can use it three times on Garalon (7 min fight). It will give you ~21% uptime. The usability of this talent really depends on the nature of dmg you get. I.e. they are going with 2 healers so raid spikes a lot on Crushes even on normal mode. It can be possible that he would have much easier time healing with NV even though it gives less theoretical HPS increase. I would still go with HotW, but I'm not raiding 10m so wouldn't comment here.
There are 2 big issues with resto druid at the moment:
1. We basically have zero burst tools. Almost every single new encounter Blizz design involves some sort of burst damage rather than steady one. We really lack in this department and our toolkit is just subpar overall. The only logical way out of this would be redesigning Shrooms into something like Halo or Light Hammer: maybe increasing cd, healing and mana cost (it's been suggested million of times, but Blizzard don't want to make all healers the same). It could be anything really. It's so annoying to be benched just because your toolkit doesn't allow you to perform the role you are supposed to perform as a healer on certain encounter even though you are doing high throughput on average. You could be doing 20-30% more healing than a shaman and still get benched, because healing tide + slt + mana tide + ascendance are so much better, they outshine insane hps difference.
2. Spirit scaling. All other healers get something out of spirit be it more holy power, more chi (resulting in more mana tea), stronger rapture or insane mana tide. The only thing our Spirit gives is more Rejuvs, which is really just it: more Rejuvs. The more gear people will get, the worse druids will be. It's kind of strange balance to have, when only one spec out of five gets nothing from the only regen stat. It can be compensated by higher spellpower scaling (and it is, for a degree), but it also generates bigger problems. It shifts us into somewhat 'rotational' healers. We've been there before: WotLK. It won't be as bad this time, but you will still have to press WG and SM exactly on cd or you will get majorly screwed, more than any other healer class is screwed by missing their cds, because of higher % healing done by your 'rotational' abilities.
I might be overreacting or doing wrong analysis, but if the trend is there, we will be majorly screwed next tier without fixes. I liked niche healing model more :/ This generalization coupled with poor balancing brings more problems than solves.