tl;dr
Fellow resto druids, do you tend to take and use swiftmend, or do you prefer the 0/30/21 build for an increased mana pool via HotW?
Some fun back story…
Back in vanilla I started as a hunter and that was my main through all tiers of raiding. At some point or another though, I made a druid alt and absolutely fell in love with the feral play style. My guild was a progression guild though and looked down on hybrids playing anything except healer, forcing me to heal when we had alt-friendly raids. I had never healed before and I think, because of the situation at the time, I absolutely hated healing! Because respec costs were so high, I ended up running the 0/30/21 build so that I could be viable in PvP (which was what I did a lot on my druid back then), and still heal in raids. My guild gave me a lot of grief at the time for not having swiftmend.
(NOTE: I’ve since found out that 0/30/21 is a popular vanilla healing spec. The things we didn’t know at the time :P)
Sometime over the years though (maybe in WotLK), I discovered healing on a different character and fell in love with it. Since then it’s been my favourite role to play! In classic, I wanted a similar, but different experience for myself on my druid, so I’ve decided I want to go resto. I’m leveling resto and healing a lot of dungeons.
Now to the point…
I just hit 40 and picked up Swiftmend. Classic has always been about careful mana conservation and healing efficiency, and I’m looking at this spell under that lens. From what I can see, the amount of healing vs. the amount of mana it costs doesn’t seem like it’s very worth while.
Putting up a rejuv, letting it tick to near end, then using swiftmend (for maximum efficiency) gives around the same level of healing as one of my lower rank healing touches, which also costs half the mana and only takes 2s (intead of roughly 10). To me, this puts swiftmend into a very niche category… one where I expect I may need an emergency heal on someone, allowing me to prep, heal other people, then burn swiftmend if I need it. This is kind of like regrowth… nice to have, but rarely used (in my current healing style) simply die to the prohibitive mana cost. Additionally, I can see this having increased usefulness in PvP, when mana longevity is less of an issue as compared to burst healing potential.
Something else I noticed though, is that swiftmend only has one rank. So while the cost of rejuv/regrowth goes up, swiftmend stays the same. This will somewhat help mitigate the mana efficiency issue discussed above, though I suspect for all cases, HT will remain the healing powerhouse and relegate swiftmend to a niche use area.
So my question is this… fellow resto druids, do you tend to take and use swiftmend, or do you prefer the 0/30/21 build for an increased mana pool?
/discuss 
