Movement and positioning are the paladin’s key issues, yes, combined with the need that all healing classes have to tweak the strat and organisation to match their raid team’s strengths and weaknesses. You are right that if people are spread out, there is very little that we can do except blow some throughput cooldowns and hopefully a useful mitigative CD and revert to Divine Light bombing, a la WOTLK. I heal H Hagara lightning phase by blowing wings and DF (and Guardian if I need him towards the end), beaconing one of my people, and dropping Divine Lights on the other/s, weaving in Holy Shocks and WoGs where it’s sensible to (I don’t use LoD there).

Yes, we’re OP on Ultraxion. We apologise. There’s not a whole lot else we can do about it if Blizzard designs a fight that doesn’t include our key weakness.

Again, I can’t speak to heroic content, but movement and the positional requirements are the only healing weaknesses that come to mind. If people are spread out, we have no raid healing ability, really. If people are standing still and clumped up, we’re OP. I don’t know what I’d do on heroic Hagara’s lightning phase; I have a weak Holy Shock on a CD, an occasional insta-Flash proc, and flashlights when I get some holy combo points built up — fine for LFR and Normal, but not likely to be useful in hard mode. That’s when I miss my druid. Wild Growth basically goes where it needs to go. Holy Flashlight has to be pretty carefully aimed to be useful.

Ultraxion, on the other hand, is basically designed to make other healers hate paladins again. It looks like the same may be true for shammies on that fight, but I don’t play one, and we don’t have any active resto shammies in my guild. Our last run had a good resto druid (red crystal), a good holy priest (green crystal), and my pally (wondrous blue crystal). I think I was outhealing them after they got their crystals and before I got mine. Once I got the blue crystal, it was ridiculous. Maybe that whole fight was meant as an apology for “to the ground, baby”.

Apparently, we reached a reply nesting limit, so I had to break the thread.

That’s why I was thinking of de-coupling LB spam from ToL. Keep ToL as the big CD, and move LB spam to a second, shorter CD. Maybe it’s just because I’m a resto-noob, but I have a hell of a time feeling like I’m making the best possible use of ToL form. It provides LB spam and insta-Regrowths all at once, plus general increase in healing output, making it a tempting time to Tranq. I try using it to blanket the raid in LB, both for heals and for my own mana regen, but in the times I feel the need to do that, we’re usually taking enough damage that I have to mix in Regrowths and HTs to keep people alive, not to mention keeping up my mastery, and I end up losing my LB stacks and spending more mana than I regen. I realize a lot of that is my lack of drood skill, having only started drooding with my worgen in Cata, but it seems like a heavily-overloaded CD. I may not be an experienced resto druid, but I’m a hell of a lot better at it than the garden variety healers you find in LFR, and those are probably more representative of the bulk of druid healers in the game these days.

I normally do all of my healing with mouseover macros on Grid, with Bartender used to make my bars in the shape of my n52te and my Razer Naga button pads. I have to switch toons around enough that to play at my best, it really helps to have everything onscreen laid out in the same way my controllers are. It speeds up my reactions quite a bit, and I’ve clearly become kind of addicted to it. Trying to set up my pally to heal some dungeons also *really* made me wish that Blizz would make a simple mouseover checkbox in the Interface controls. It’s pretty dumb to have to write 20 or more macros between my two healers which do nothing but @mouseover. I know they try to keep the basic interface comprehensible for new users, but that would be a nice quality of life improvement for most of us.

It’s really hard to say if we are more adept in one raid setting vs. another, but I am very comfortable in saying that our toolkit suffers the same problems in both raid settings.

As for other healer handicaps – I agree with you completely regarding Shaman. And I would think that Blizzard would have learned a few lessons about healing tools that require very tight grouping to be effective from their trials and tribulations with shaman this expansion. The fact that they had to design an entire raid instance around playing to one class strengths should speak volumes about the problems that exist with the limitations shaman have seen. I do have an alt shaman that I play as well, and I will say that I do often envy what she is able to do in much of dragon soul – however, I also felt very weak and vunerable on her in Firelands and I don’t believe that it was gear related as much as it was simply my ability to be effective in many situations. At the end of FL, I flat out couldn’t manage Baleroc with my shaman if the other two healers in my group weren’t strong and would have to swap to either my paladin or my druid to heal it. I don’t know if that is because of my lack of skill as a shaman, or just the toolkit I had. But it was fairly problematic for me.

As far as priests and paladins go, I have no personal experience priesting this expansion – but I will say that I got completely fucking owned in output by one of our priest at the start of DS, and I was busting my ass and pushing myself OOM trying to keep up. It was one of the most discouraging moments I’ve had in WoW. As for paladins right now, I don’t know if they have a weakness outside of their lack of available spell to cast while moving. Especially with the current way raid content has been designed in Dragon Soul. Holy Radiance is pretty disgustingly overpowered. I often feel that I have to work twice as hard, and spend more mana, just to remain competitive – and that is a bit frustrating.

As my gear improved through this content patch, I could be more aggressive with Rejuv, and with the extra damage in hard modes, I was able to keep up better with the other healers. However, when we went back into Normal modes for acheivements this week, I was regularly outhealed by both a strong priest and a strong paladin. I’ve often said that the less there is to heal, the more frustrating it is to heal as a druid, at least with our current toolkit.

I would much rather have to plant mushrooms on members of the raid than on the ground, as I never have to leave my raid frame to do that. However, a single plant would be much better, as it only requires 3 clicked actions as opposed to 7.

Healing on the beta is a bit of a pain in the ass. I love clique, and I wish that was a quality of life thing Blizzard would make available in their base UI. However, it’s not terrible if you work everything into mouse over macros and get your hands used to the keybindings that you’ve set

With regards to ironbark, I am grateful to receive it, but definitely disapointed that we lose a personal cooldown to get it. The trade off kind of stinks.

I don’t really feel that druids ever really fit in well with the cataclysm healing model, our toolkit just didn’t really jive with it. And as a result, we were continuously left in an incredibly awkward place with no one every really looking deeply into how to fix it. We received bandaids, and we had them ripped off. But it feels like either no one looked deeply enough into the underlying issues to solve them, or they didn’t care. I’d really like the think that it’s the former – but as we move forward into MoP without seeing some change, it’s really hard not to start to wonder if it’s the latter.