Somehow I have the sneaking suspicion that if my last post were exclusively about raid healing suddenly you'd claim that we need to address MT healing.
recount of effecient heal
Come on, that's why I asked and tried to be explicit on my view.
I'm not really sure which healing role you were talking about with efficient heals, but sure. Let's chalk this down to miscommunication/misreading.
maybe Swiftmend if they already have a Regrowth or Rejuvenation on them.
No way in hell you're going to upkeep regrowth/rejuv on even 10 raider.
You're right. You don't. The main scenario for Rejuv is a Warlock maybe, and the main scenario for a Regrowth isn't that you were doing upkeep but that within the past 20 seconds you (or another Druid) had used Regrowth as a quick instant heal and now he needs another instant heal so you just Swiftmend. It isn't something you try to keep on raid members, but something you take advantage of if it was already on them. It
is possible to Rejuv+GCD+Swiftmend though. That gets you a solid heal in 1.5 seconds, but then you still have another GCD to go before you can heal anyone else. If you want to give someone a big heal in 1.5 seconds flat though, it works.
The point I just made regarding the Paladin's heals healing a tiny amount of damage also still applies
Most of the heal you do on raider need to be around 500-1000 hp. Just check the log, or prove me wrong. Caster and fury warrior have a shitty hp pool, you're rarely going to be over 3k hp. An no, we're not going to pretend that everybody is playing under titan flask,, heart of hakkar and whatnot.
Wtf? Everyone should be on a Well Fed buff + Prayer of Fortitude + Gift of the Wild + Greater Blessing of Kings. Possibly an Imp's Blood Pact buff too, if you have SM/Ruin Warlocks in raid. Maybe add Elixirs of Fortitude while you're at it (just +120 max health for 1 hour, but cheap and stacks with all the other buffs). If they have sub-3k health
with all those buffs, something is wrong.
but you still end up with 50% of +healing (before multipliers) on a 1.85 second cast because it's originally the coefficient of a 2.5 second cast.
As I said, I did not play with the current blizzard version of vanilla, but if that's true, something is
very wrong , it should not even be 20% of healing power.
Downranking coefficients were introduced in Burning Crusade. In vanilla the only penalty coefficient is the 3.75% penalty per level requirement beneath 20. That's why Rank 4 Healing Touch is a thing. However, I did miscalculate the penalty, so it turns out that the Druid actually gets 55.357% of +healing with R3 Healing Touch (pre-multiplier). That means that at 1150 +healing the R3 Healing Touch already outputs a bigger heal than a Paladin's Flash of Light with the same coefficient. So, you can do that also, if you've got a burning need for a high speed heal. R3 Healing Touch with its penalty still comes out to a higher +healing coefficient per second than the Paladin gets with Flash of Light.
The other appeal of spamming Rank 3 Healing Touch is that with 5/5 Tranquil Spirit it comes to 99 mana which IIRC means that if you use a Burst of Knowledge trinket it should cost zero mana. That gives you around 10 seconds of 0 mana cost casting, which should let you trigger the 5 second rule without stopping with casting heals. It also helps you trigger Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon, but that trinket is only worth contemplating if you plan on spending most of the encounter spamming high speed heals, and when you downrank that aggressively that consistently, probably mana is not your issue.
I'm not saying that you can't have fun and play druid, vanilla is quite easy, you don't even need to bring 40 retard to clean the PvE.
I'm firmly of the opinion that if you can clear that raid with 20, you should clear it with 20. The fewer raiders per raid, the more loot per raider, and the fewer repetitions of that raid. It also means that the raid becomes a bit more challenging and a bit less braindead.
Druid is a decent heal, and probably way more fun to play than a paladin. If you're good, you can absolutely cover the same role as a priest or pal, and even best them if they're not that good themselves. But you are , and always will be (as long as vanilla is concerned) a challenger, you just don't have the same busted tool as your counterpart.
The point I'm making is that if you're all good and geared, the Paladin's healing capabilities simply fall behind the rest. Ultimately Paladins are the weakest healer and more of a utility pickup.
Which can be cool in itself, we don't need to autisticly min-max everything.
Since you're discussing offbeat playstyles, meme spec viability, and the like, I should probably point out that any time you try meme spec shit you should get ready to min-max and optimally play the fuck out of it. That's generally the only way you make those things even semi-viable.