My Resto Druid UI

It isn't perfect...I'm constantly changing stuff around, but I'm pretty happy with most of the UI in this screenshot (minus that rep bar at the top...gotta fix that - proly will put it in FuBar or something).

Addons:

Alamo

Bejeweled (just cause...)

Elkbuffbars

Grid

Clique

Power Auras Classic

FuBar

Recount

Sexymaps

Prat

Bartender

Button Facade

X-Perl (just for player and target, it's causing issues with my focus target though, so I'll need to get something else probably...)

Tranquility

I remember the first time I saw a druid pop Tranquility... I was in a party for the elite dudes hanging out in Stromgarde Keep back in Arathi Highlands. I was on my rogue and we were doing fine making our way through the castle until some idiot pulled another group. All our health bars dropped quickly and I was prepared for another graveyard run when suddenly I see this rain-type shiny stuff coming out of the ground and all our health bars went immediately to full. We killed the mobs and the druid said 'I love Tranquility'. So I rerolled druid.

I'd never really thought about it before, but when you have multiple resto druids n the raid, healing leads may want to utilize their massive heals from Tranquility. I've always liked to take full advantage of all my spells, and I don't really know why we have the tendancy to totally neglect Tranq after 5-mans. With resto druids in seperate groups, you can grant a few seconds of near-invulnerablity to their parties if it starts getting to be a lot to heal. I definitely wouldn't have everyone pop their tranqs at e time, but it's nice to have a healer do it at your command and then not have to worry about that party for a few seconds. This is far easier in a 10 man setting, but it works in 25 man settings too...it'll be nice when Blizzard gives us the same thing that they gave Divine Hymn and make it work on whoever's in range, not just party.

Spirit Nerf for Dr00ds and Healing the Siege

So I really haven't noticed too much trouble because of the spirit nerf. Admittedly, I haven't gotten that far yet into the Ulduar content, but at least for the moment, I don't think it's gonna be that bad or that hard to cope with. After a few more wipes last night, we downed Ignis and got our Siege of Ulduar achievements. I'm using the innervate glyph right now and I'll probably continue to do so until I have enough spirit to give me decent innervates again.
Like I said, I haven't done much in Ulduar yet - only downed the first four bosses, but I really like the mechanics of these fights and I'm getting to use different healing styles for them.


Razorscale:
I'm a Regrowth specced druid, but I wasn't finding Regrowth to be fast enough or effective enough to heal the damage from the fireballs all the time, but I was surprisingly happy with using Nourish there. It was a nice fast heal and now has a decent crit rate to give me a nature's focus buff. Yea, I'd like to have my +50% crit back on Regrowth, but I'm not gonna dwell on the past. I pretty much spammed nourish over all the fireball'd targets until I got Nature's Focus or my Egg to proc (yea...still using the Egg of Mortal Suckage ><) and then I'd either do another Nourish or I'd go ahead and throw a Regrowth.
Ignis:
Neat encounter in that it really kept me busy. Healers should be able to heal themselves and stay on their targets without too much trouble. Barkskin+Lifeblood is nice with a Rejuv/Regrowth and Swiftmend to keep myself alive.
XT-002:
I loved the voice. Nuff said.
lol...When I read about the fight before, I thought it'd be a lot harder to heal, especially during the tantrums. All I needed was a Wild Growth and lifebloom everything else. Was fun DPS'ing during the heart phase cause there wasn't really anything else to do after pre-hotting OTs.

Chain Heal Spamage

I use recount a lot. Like....a LOT. I think it's a valuable tool for self-assessment because of all the graphs. Ever since I started healing, I've believed that every spell that Blizzard gave us has a time and place where it needs to be used, and that none should be used in excess. I try to keep my healing ratios fairly consistant, with nothing being used too much or too little - all things in moderation, ya know?
This is why I cringe when I look at meters and see that other shamen have 92% of their healing done by...................CHAIN HEAL! Seriously now. It's a good spell. It's mana efficient and it can hit up to 4 targets for awesome amounts of healing. I won't go into the theorycrafting and numbers of all this mess cause elitistjerks have done that already. And I hate math.

The biggest problem with chain heal is that it's slow. Really slow. It also does a lot of overhealing. I've got MSBT running, so I see my effective heals and overheals together. More often than not, especially if I'm running with resto druids HoTing everything up, more than 60% of the total heal is done in overhealing. While we may have the mana to accomodate this, it's not helpful to the raid and can put you in a pinch later. There are several ways that you can maximize the effectiveness of your chain heals.

1) Have situational awareness. That caster way back in the corner by himself isn't gonna get a whole lot of use out of your chain heal. That tank might be meleeing, but that doesn't mean the rest of the melee are near him. Most fights have the tank pretty far away from the rest of the melee because the boss is big. This is especially true in Ulduar with the sheer size of all the bosses. A lot of chain heal spambots seem to see a target taking damage and just throw their trusty old CH at them, regardless of where that target is positioned. This is the key to differentiating the good shamen from the bad ones. Something that I often find helpful is casting CH on myself to bring other targets into position. I use the macro:

#showtooltip chain heal
/cast [target=player] chain heal

when certain targets aren't close enough together to be chained. It's really situational but kinda nice to have handy.

2) Get into a pseudo-rotation. Chain heal might be slow, but proccing Tidal Waves is awesomesauce. After a chain heal, you can get two verrrrry quick LHWs in. I'm a huge proponent of LHW because it's fast. It's horrible on your mana, but if you don't get the heal out, the mana's wasted anyway, right? It's never practical to be in a set rotation, but I like to try to stick to RT LL CH LLL as much as possible when I'm doing raid healing.

3) Don't forget your Earth Shield! I know I'm talking about chain heal here, but ES is an amazing spell, especially with the new glyph! You NEVER want this to fall off your target, but it's easy to lose track of it and get tunnel vision looking at health bars. I use EarthShieldTracker and also have the ES buff in GRID. I usually try to refresh it right after the last charge is used but sometimes it's just easier to do it when you have one or 2 charges left if you have a tiny break.

3.1

So I've just been sitting around waiting for WoW to come back up after the 3.1 Ulduar patch, staring at the cluttered mess on my desk and thinking about how awesome it would be to clear it off and organize it so I could put my laptop up here too, also thinking about that feeling of atropying muscles and how much I really should go on a run or something. My solution to these problems? Make a blog about healing in World of Warcraft post 3.1.

No, this is not a rant about ZOMG THEY'RE NERFING US QQQQQ /quitwow. This will just be as honest and unbiased an assessment of the current state of things for healers. We'll see how far I go with this. When I said unbiased, I think I can get pretty close to that as I play three healers. My main is a Restoration Druid, but I also raid with a Resto Shaman and a Disc Priest. I will, however, be forever prejudiced against Paladins and I firmly believe that their purpose in WoW should be nothing more than comic relief for everyone else. ...j/k..........sorta.

So we'll see how far this blog ends up going........