Tank Healing with Nourish strategy

About Nourish: Nourish (http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=50464 ) is a spell with a 1.5 base cast time. This was designed to be our flash-heal ability (heal for a moderate amount in a short amount of time).

The effect heals for 20% more (before glyphs & set bonuses) if you have a Heal over time effect (HOT) on your target. The druids have 4 HOT spells that will increase the healing effect: Regrowth, Rejuvination, lifebloom, and Wild Growth. The Tier 7 set bonus and the Nourish glyph increase the amount healed by nourish by 5% and 6% (respectively). With both bonuses, and 3 HOTs, nourish is a really incredible healing spell.

About your other healing spells for tank healing:
Regrowth: 2 second cast direct heal, with long HOT component. In 3.1, the primary use of this is to have a long lasting HOT on your tank. You are welcome to cast this HOT on more than one tank without too many side-effects if you want. No longer recommended as a direct healing spell. Let the HOT run out and then re-cast
Rejuvination: Instant cast HOT that lasts a moderate amount of time. Use this to buff nourish healing.
Lifebloom: Instant cast HOT (with a large heal “bloom” at the end). Lasts short amount of time. See lifebloom page on options for how to use it.
Swiftmend: instant-cast direct heal. Nice if you need some instant burst healing on tank.
Nature’s Swiftness + Healing Touch: large instant burst. Don’t cast Healing Touch without using Nature’s Swiftness.

Tank Healing with Nourish strategy 1: Using nourish with Tier 7 bonus and Glyph combo
-Cast three HOTs: regrowth, rejuvenation, and lifebloom. Then, cast nourish until a HOT spell needs to be re-cast (see page 2 on lifebloom strategies). You want to maintain all three HOTs because you gain 11% healing for each HOT you have on the target. With 3 HOTs, that’s a lot of extra healing your nourish will do.

NOTE: Obviously, you don’t want to use wild growth as a tank heal, unless your tank is in range for 4 other people to benefit from it, since wild growth costs more mana than you want to spend on one target. However, if you are tank healing and raid healing at the same time, and have the mana to use it, wild growth will buff the amount of healing done by nourish with T7 bonus & glyph

Tank Healing with Nourish strategy 2: Using nourish with only T7 bonus or only the glyph:
Without both bonuses, you only gain either 5% or 6% extra healing, instead of the full 11%. In that case, you have the option of dropping lifebloom entirely from the rotation – or keeping it. At a 5 to 6% bonus to tank healing, a single lifebloom by it’s self isn’t that great. However, if you have a preferred lifebloom healing strategy, then go ahead and keep using it.

Tank Healing with Nourish strategy 3: Neither T7 bonus or Glyph:
You probably shouldn’t be tank healing with a Nourish-spam healing strategy if you aren’t at least willing to dedicate a glyph slot to nourish. You may just be support tank healing with HOTs or something. However, I consider the nourish glyph “mandatory” for any serious tank healing. Any HOT after your first one isn’t increasing your healing done by nourish if you skip both the glyph & the set bonus. Using at least the glyph is recommended for tank healing. You may also be able to get away with regrowth + regrowth glyph – however, you’re still better off switching out the regrowth glyph for the nourish glyph. You may also be one of those Healing-Touch spec’d healers, but I don’t really have advice for that healing strategy.