Not Quite

We all knew the patch from last week had contained some extreme changes to nearly all the classes, but I wasn't to sure how it was going to impact my healing. For the moment I am reserving judgement on the changes because one night of raid healing doesn't quite equate to a fair trial.

I had logged on and started going through my list of things I needed to do when I get a whisper from our raid leader asking, "You healing tonight?"

I replied, "Sure thing, I just need to spec, pick up some glyphs, maybe a gem or 2, and set up my keybindings." Yeah I know I should have had at least the glyphs and gems bought by this time.

Our raid leader replies, "Well you got 15 minutes."

OH CRAP!!! It was 15 minutes before our raid time. So I go through my talents, select the resto summary and decide on a build like this (2/3/31)  http://wowtal.com/#k=RqSJ9KSs.a6d.druid. I had figured I wanted to go for the stronger HoTs and maximum manan since we never know on our raid nights what our 3rd healer might be. We've been fielding just me and our discipline priest lately and he does a great job on tank healing. Therefore, I try to field the raid heals and hope whoever we pickup can swing between tank and raid healing.

I check in and our raid still isn't full, so I play around with regemming some gear for haste and try to get that dismal 710 (21.65%) haste rating up some. After changing gems and finding the reforging guy in Stormwind, I ended up with a haste rating of 896 (27.5%). Eh... it'll have to do for now. The whole goal is to hit that soft cap of 1016 (37.5%) and add in a 6th tick on a single Rejuvenation cast.

I start in setting my keybindings when I get an invite to the raid. I wasn't quite worried since we were still waiting on our tank to log on. Fortunately I am a creature of habit and the keybindings went pretty fast and I made my way to Ice Crown.

Now, I'm heading into ICC with no addons (yep not even DBM) and clueless on how my rotation is going to work with the restrictions on Lifebloom and the ever so long casting Nourish. I used those 2 spells so fluidily before these changes that I knew there were going to be some tough habits to break. It was just something I'm going to have to watch. This was definitely going to be an entertaining night in ICC since we were starting with an old id and on Sindy.

Our raid finally gets going an hour late with 3 PuGs, a mage, a hunter, and a discipline priest. Our regular priest is missing and probably had something to do at the school. I did come to find out that during my fishing excursion, the guild had recruited a resto shaman. Yea for chain heal and herosim (BTW, what happened to heroic presence?).

The Sindy fight goes along pretty well considering that the hunter and mage hadn't seen this fight. I found using my Tree of Life form for her last phase was a good place for it since things tend to go south of hell at that point. Tree of Life is extremely useful and powerful on phases like that, but it's a really bug mana drain.
We head up to the Lich King throne and I was surprised that we were attempting him with the 4 new people. But what the hell! I'm game.

We ended up attempting him 6 times and our best was the 3rd when we pushed him below 30%. Our biggest problems were in DPSing the orbs and slowing the Valkyries. Other than that, our raid was on.
As for the resto evaluation, I really like Efflorescence, Rejuvenation is a monster, and the faster and crittable Regrowth are nice. I am bummed with the 30 minute cool down on Rebirth and the restricted use of Lifebloom. I can tell it's going to take a few raids to square everything out. So everything looks good, but we're not quite there.