Yeah, this is kind of the modern resto druid way of life these days. We have to commit a ton of GCDs to reach our healing potential, but our ceiling is pretty high.
There are times when it can be correct to put Lifebloom on someone else if you are fishing for Verdancy procs. Of course, if you’re having trouble finding value out of Efflorescence due to your group being spread out, that may be less important.
Efflorescence with an uncooperative group can be problematic. As long as there is at least one melee DPS, you can always safely drop it under the tank and make sure you stand in its range as well; it affects 3 players and while it would be better to have the entire party in it so you’re more likely to heal someone who needs it, it’s still better to have 3 people in it than not using it.
There are two tips with dispels I can give.
First, try to figure out what each thing that goes out does and how important it is to dispel. If it will cost you more globals to recover from dealing with something that could be dispelled than dispelling is the right play even if things are a bit dicey at the moment. Whereas some effects you can safely just heal through without even noticing them. In mists for example, the magic debuff that puts a circle around a player in melee is almost always going to be worse to leave up than dispel; meanwhile the poison from the wasps at the end at a single stack might be something that your stray rejuvenations and wild growths take care of anyway.
Second, and this will take some practice, but you’ll want to start working out a schedule for how long it will take for a teammate to be healed by your HoTs when deciding your next move. If someone has 40% of their health covered in Hots on them, they’re at 65% health, and they’re unlikely to take significant damage over the duration of your HoTs, you don’t need to top them off. Your HoTs will do that. As a druid, you will need to get comfortable with people being under full health while they have HoTs rolling that will get them to full over time. Once you get comfortable with that, finding the free global for dispels becomes easier.
I use mouseover macros for all my healing spells that have a target. This means that the spell will cast whoever my mouse is hovering over when I hit the button. Note that this does take some getting used to mouse placement, but it is a big help once you get used to it. I provided an example macro below.
I know Blizzard also added built-in mouseover casting support into the base UI in Dragonflight. I don’t use it because I combine several things together into my mouseover macro. But in theory you can use that rather than worrying with a macro.
Example Lifebloom macro:
#showtooltip Lifebloom
/cast [@mouseover,help,nodead] Lifebloom; Lifebloom
This macro has a conditional (the parts in brackets) and then a fallback (the part with no brackets). What it does is first checks if I my mouse is hovering over an ally (help) that isn’t dead (nodead); if so, it casts Lifebloom on that target (the first lifebloom before the semi-colon). However, if any part of the condition is false (so my mouse isn’t on a target, the target isn’t friendly, or the target is dead), it will run the second part of the statement after the semi-colon. That fallback will just cast Lifebloom per the standard rules I have configured for WoW, which is cast on my target if possible, or myself if not.
You can replace Lifebloom in the above with any healing spell that has a target (Rejuvenation, Regrowth, Wild Growth, etc.).