I have both a 70 holy priest and 70 resto druid. For the priest, i use 1, 3 and 7 Greater Heal on my healing bar. Do any of you druids use downranked spells?

Not any more. For damage spells there is really no reason to, and for healing spells the new calculation of +healing benefits that came with BC really made it useless to do so.

Also most healing Druids go for Tree, where you only use HoTs, and the one HoT we use mostly only has one level.

So, no. I'd guess most of us do not use downranking.

My brother has a resto druid lvl70 and he has always spammed low rank heals.

I'm not sure how he does it in raid though but in a 5 man he has to use really low ranking heals. Never had a problem with him gaining agro until he started getting all the good gear from raiding with the +healing on it; once he went to even lower ranked heals then we didnt have a problem anymore.

I'm only at 1600ish +healing in my PvE resto set (mostly PvP gear, really), and I haven't had to downrank spells to avoid aggro so far. I'd imagine it'd get more difficult if I actually raided and got to 1800-2000, though.

For PvP, though, I have downranked spells on my bars. Rank 1 HoTs and DoTs/Debuffs for dispel fodder.

Not to mention, your best healing spell is already downranked! Lifebloom is only rank 1. >>;

Cool, that helps. I seem to be pretty mana efficient as a tree anyways, so didn't seem like downranking was needed.

thanks again

Downranking isnt necessary, as for pulling aggro, over heals dont count towards threat so the tank doesnt have high enough tps, the only problem woul d be the initial aggro gain, in which case just wait a tiny bit more for a sunder.

If its heroics then the tank isnt good enough, if its normal dungeons, who cares, he could probably tank an add or 2 as resto anyway lol.

Just a note to add that I could understand using downranked spells as with a Dreamstate build (where your bread and butter spell is Healing Touch), but certainly not with a deep Resto build.

A second note (not so much directed at OP) that downranking generally isn't used as a strategy to reduce healing aggro. Other healing classes downrank their spells for mana efficiency reasons. If your tank (normal or heroic) can't keep up with the TPS of a couple of HoT ticks, fire him. I could understand the tank asking you to hold back a little bit if and only if there are three or more mobs to tank.