Oheyo

I want to thank everyone who's come here with input, you've been very helpful! I admittedly expected more than a few "git gud" answers, but this has really helped me out. I'm doing much better now, and feel like I've mastered mana conservation to a much larger degree. I also see a huge difference based on the level and gear of my tank that I didn't pay much attention to before. Now that I abuse the 5-sec rule way more than I used to though, I even heal through instances in which most of the group is underleveled nowadays, and I feel confident when I enter a dungeon to heal now, as opposed to the uncertainty I always felt before. There's a few hiccups still, not having a reliably fast/efficient clutch heal is something I'm still not used to. But I think things will work out fine. Thanks again, everyone. :D

Thank you very much for your input, both. I've mostly been gunning for a mixture of int/spirit, mostly going for "Of the Owl", "Of Intellect" and "Of Spirit" gear, when I've not emptied my wallet in an attempt to see if +heals was the way to go even when leveling. I've not tried the "burst" healing described in your post Taladril, I was under the impression that all healers were encouraged to continually keep their cast bar active (though not letting unnecessary heals finish). I've mostly found myself unable to utilize the 5-sec rule because I always find myself casting, and usually the heals felt necessary to let through because of the perpetually sorry state of my tank. I'll try experimenting further, taking what you folks've told me into account, noting whether my tanks have upgraded to plate/dire as I go. Hopefully I won't become a too hated person and suffer too bad a reputation during my learning process, it doesn't feel good to let my group down, and I doubt many people I've grouped with before want to see me again. Thanks again, I'll keep on trying!

Hello, everyone. Some background info first: I've played healers on vanilla private servers since 2010, starting out as a holy priest, and being fairly good at it. I breezed through the pre-raid content and didn't have much of a hassle when it came to raid healing. Things were pretty swell. I continued the trend on another server by rolling a resto shaman. That also worked out just fine, 5-man and raiding alike. I then rolled a pally. Same story, except I never raided as a pally. Now, the last two servers I've played on, I wanted to play a druid, since it's the only healer I hadn't really tried out for real. I started leveling as feral, figured I'd collect some heal gear, and attempted to heal through a few dungeons as I leveled. From Deadmines, and all the way up to Scarlet Library, things worked out fine. I put a rejuv on the tank, had a few downranks of HT on my bar, no problem. But Armory and up turned into a nightmare for me. Suddenly I couldn't do anything right. My rejuv was certainly not enough to keep the MT up. My R3-R4 HT healed so little and were so slow that they couldn't possibly sustain a tank taking consistent damage. A regrowth or full rank HT would OOM me, if I even managed to land it before the tank died, an accusing silence from the group following. I figured I'd respec resto. Clearly, I didn't have it in me to heal as a feral druid. It was a new, different class without a cheap clutch heal like the others, a resto build would surely be a crutch for me to lean on while I learned the ropes for real. It didn't help. Even with the faster Healing Touches, NS, and the other tools that come with the resto tree, I find that if I try casting lower rank Healing Touches on my tank, they die semi-instantly from spike damage. If I try clutch healing with regrowth (which is a spell I see people discouraging the use of anyway) I go OOM and end up standing there, watching my tank die. I do my best to clip heals, interrupting my casts if I see they're going to do solid overhealing and trying to make sure I choose the best rank for healing the tank up as close to maximum as possible, trying not to let them drop below 80%. Rejuv is constantly on the tank, my options following that are: low-rank HT, hi-rank HT, Regrowth. All of these alternatives end up with my tanks dying and my rep as a healer going down the drain. The fights I'm talking about start up with me having full mana, and very decent healing gear for my level. I went as far as spending oodles of gold to see if I could "outgear" the content we were doing at the time. My tanks don't seem to be doing anything wrong, the group uses CC when available, and the DPS manages to get down mobs reasonably quickly. I don't get what I'm doing wrong, but I am, I'm doing something terribly, terribly wrong here. If I fail this hard in Scarlet Monastery, I dare not think of how stuff like Strat is going to be. It has been like this every time I've tried to assume the role of a druid healer, over the course of two characters, one I leveled all the way to 60 while trying to heal now and then, and now on Elysium with a healer currently at level 45, resto speced, resto geared, and unable to heal through trash on a dungeon. Any pointers as to what I might be doing wrong would be sorely appreciated, I'm really in a bind here. Are mid-level dungeons simply harder to heal through as a resto druid than late-game? Do I need solid +heal gear to be able to save my group whatsoever? Have I overlooked something? I really want to be a good healer, but I don't see it happening as a druid. Thanks.