What are the Classes FOR?

[Kevin]

So the druid ends up being 2nd choice healer (can't always say 2nd best, since skill has a pretty big impact in this area... maybe someone with a 60 of both classes could comment on it),
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I have a 60 druid. My wife has a 60 priest that I've played a few times and played with a lot. The priest is most definitely the more flexible and easier to heal with healer. I really don't even count tranquility as an AoE heal, if you are the only healer as a druid the times when you need to use an AoE HoT instead of a different heal are pretty rare, though there are lots of times I'd love to have a 3 second cast AoE heal or an instant cast weak AoE heal (Holy Nova). Natures Swiftness makes up for not having a shield when healing but not when you have a mage or lock AoE'ing. And the double HoT doesn't make up for not having a flash heal when healing an AoE'r either. Spamming Regrowth and hoping for a crit is your best bet there but that is horrible on the mana pool and of course the tank will be getting hurt while keeping the elite(s) off the AoE'r and you need to get a heal out on them at some point too. Priests have a lot more options there.

Innevervate is the only reason we sustain better than a priest. Mana effieciency on the heals is pretty close (depending on spec) but a priest will have a bigger base mana pool even without the talent that raises it by 10%. The 15% mana regen that a restoration spec druid wil have breaks a lot of times (devs have confirmed this bug) and when it does work is pretty negligable, even sitting around 270 spirit (which is where my druid is at in her typical gear that she uses to heal, that is unbuffed). But priests get 2 mana per int, druids 1.5. So I see priests with 6500+ mana unbuffed and druids in similar level gear at around 5000. Innervate turns that into an effective 8000-9000 pool, but if you dont have innervate you can't even sustain healing longer than a priest.

It's also my observation that if you need to sustain healing that long you either have other healers around or everyone will have, or is taking damage, and the AoE healing would be nice to have and makes up for the fact that I can innervate to heal longer. If there are other healers around that innervate is almost always better used on them anyway so it doesn't help you sustain healing either.

I can main heal just fine and do a lot of healing on the raids when I take my druid and not my warrior. Heck in Onyxia I've got her breath attack timed well enough that I usually land my healing touch right after it hits then see all the priests flash heals get cancelled (a priest can do the same type of thing with a greater heal). I've finished higher than priests in healing done several times on smaller raids as well.

But I'm pretty confident in saying that even a shadow spec priest given similar level gear is a better healer than a restoration spec druid simply because they have so many more options for healing. That being said I still think that if you only had druid healers you could get through Magmadar (all the farther I've gotten in Molten Core) given that you still had the same number of total healers.