Healing Impressions

I know a lot of resto druids were (and still are) a little peeved about the changes to the Tree of Life form.  I for one can admit that I was amongst the group of fairly disgruntled tree healz pissed off at blizz for taking away our beloved form when it was first announced.  I’m actually still not very partial to the idea that I’m a druid but the manner in which I go about healing kinda goes against one of the facets of being a druid.  I mean don't get me wrong, druid healers still have hots but priests have hots as well.  One of the things that made druids cool to play was the fact that we shape-shifted into a form to take on a particular role.  Kinda like superheroes.  Yes the primary reason superheroes wore their costumes was to keep their real identity secret but if you disregard that then the main reason was to individualize each hero/heroine.  I guess the argument can be made that even if superheroes didn’t need to worry about their identity or being confused with another superhero, they still had their own powers...(of course there were some superheroes that had the same powers as others but...yea).  Which in that case would  make this a bad comparison but I’m sure you guys pretty much get the just of what I’m trying to say.  Being a druid meant becoming so attuned to nature that you possessed the ability to harness said power and take on a form to fulfill a role.  That’s what was so cool about the druid class.  While it is technically a hybrid class you still have the option to specialize and be effective at any role which most players tend to do.  When I dps as my feral kitty I’m glad to be in kitty form.  If I wanted to see my gear or do something else besides dps in my kitty form, I would have rolled a rouge or pally or something.  Players don’t spec as healers to do dps and I’ve only had the unfortunate pleasure of witnessing maybe one or two players that spammed wrath instead of healing while specced restoration...before 4.0.  Needless to say I don't know what was wrong with those guys but to each his own.  Now resto druids lost their permanent shape-shift to have the ability to throw out some dps from time to time.  There’s even synergy in the resto talent tree for it.  Hopefully cataclysm will provide reason enough for healers to be doing dps when there should be capable dps doing their job already. 

I digress.

My reason for posting isn't to qq about the changes to tree of life as I’ve known about the changes for some time now so its kind of irrelevant how I feel about them.  I wanted to give my impressions of resto healing as of 4.0.  I’ve only gotten the opportunity to heal in a raid once (only for a few trash packs) since the patch but I have healed multiple 5-mans.  I have to say that I really like most of the spell changes and I cant wait to actually use them in a Cataclysm raid situation.  There is definitely a lot more to healing now then spamming rejuvenation on everyone and wild growth when it’s on cool down.  I don't know about everyone else’s  server but on my server trees were coming out the woodwork towards the end when the fall of the lich king patch went live because of how easy tree healing was.  It took very little skill to top hps meters or be in the top.  Because of this I was mostly less then thrilled to have to heal anything especially with two or more trees randomly tossing rejuve on everyone. With the new patch mana isn't really much of an issue but cast times are.  So while you can spam whatever you want, if you don't use the the right heal your target can potentially die before you are able to react.  I like how the need to become efficient at healing has already been implemented so we don’t have to get used to the changes in Cata.  Besides the whole “lack of tree form” thing I really look forward to