Welcome new druid!

I managed to ding my little (well not so little anymore!) druid to 80 today and have already begun the gearing-through-heroics-o-rama. Since her gear is really (really really) bad at the moment, even the simplest heroics prove some challenge. I play as resto since it's easiest to perform well as a healer in heroics when having less than good gear.

My initial feeling of the druid healing class is that they have the healing arsenal of a priest (at least quite close to it) but without the mana issues. Actually spamming heals without regard to my mana pool has never been so easy. The whole idea of laying out hots everwhere with the possibility to "boost" them into a big heal, via swiftmend, is something I enjoy. It gives a little more to do than the FoL/Holy Light spam of paladin and LHW/Riptide spam of a shaman. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy all healing classes, but for different reasons. Versatility isn't why I enjoy paladins ;)

The level 80 exclusive spell, nourish, is quite awesome. I had glyphed my Healing Touch to act like a Nourish-wannabe, but it turned out to be nothing like it. It's more like a Nourish-teaser. The real Nourish is a fairly big heal, even with very little spellpower (I have approximately 1400 on my druid when writing this), since it crits often. It is as good as Lesser Healing Wave or Flash of Light, but you got a bunch of hots to back it up. (Flash Heal is less mana efficient, and gains less from spellpower than Nourish. It also has no talents to boost it's critability, which actually would be quite welcome).

I feel that even though I am limited by the lack of gear, I still have plenty of tools to keep people alive and the potential buried here is enormous. I fully understand that some resto druids in end game think they can solo heal some raid content. Hots are a very powerful tool for multitask healing, if you're good at coordinating what heals need to go where. Unlike most other healers, a druid doesn't have to choose between two targets, but can actually heal both (or all five/ten) at once. So far I haven't found any drawbacks of druids. They have really good healing spells, and turn out to be great healers even with awful gear.

I am really interested to see where this could go and to eventually try it out in a raid setting!