Any point in keeping lower-rank spells?

[Kastakin]

As the title said, is there any point in keeping in the action bars spells of lower levels?
I mean, if I get rank 2 in Healing Touch is there any reason why I should keep rank 1 and rank 2 spell on the bar?
Sorry for the noobish question, hope it's not Off-Topic.
Thank you in advance for any reply.

[Lorilay]

Yes. You should aim to heal for the health deficit you're facing, so downranking is very useful. If you're healing a tank with the max rank of healing touch, it will probably hit for 50% or more of their life. As a tank, it's a little scary when your healer lets you drop to 30% or so before big heals hit, so try to use smaller heals and throw them out when your tank is at higher hp %.

When I was leveling, I'd keep max rank regrowth, max rank rejuv, and 2 ranks of healing touch (max and -1) on my bar. Once you get healing touch rank 4, that should stay on your bar as your main heal. You may need to rank up to 5 until you start picking up +healing gear.

Importantly, it becomes more mana efficient to downrank as you get more +healing gear later in the game.

[Armilus]

Just to add on to what Lorilay said.

When you get higher level you start to get items that have +healing on them. Your total amount of +healing is added to every healing spell you cast and the lower ranks use far less mana so you get way more health per mana using lower rank spells with +healing gear.

If a spell has a faster cast time than 3.5s it receives proportionately less of your +heal value so that you always get the same amount of healing from your +heal gear over 3.5s. For example, a spell with a cast time of 1.75 (half of 3.5) would only add 50% of your +healing value but after 2 casts in 3.5 seconds, you would get the same benefit as a spell that has a 3.5s cast time. Since you are a druid and will mainly be using healing touch, you don't need to worry about this.

What you do need to worry about is the second rule that changes how much of your +healing is applied. This rule is to prevent really low level spells that use almost no mana at level 60 from being too powerful. Any spell that you learn before level 20 receives a smaller bonus from +healing gear. This is why you stick with rank 4 healing touch, it's just high enough level that you still get all of your +healing applied.

[Skullmiser]

Healing spells that take less than 3.5 seconds to cast get less from +Healing
Rank 4 healing touch is a high enough rank to avoid healing penalties.

Rank 5 healing touch is the first rank that takes 3.5 seconds to cast. Is rank 4 still always more efficient?

[Norjak]

I will quote from a good post from the Feenix boards:

2. How to heal effectively

As mentioned before, your main spell to heal with will be Healing Touch. Healing Touch and Rejuvenation are the spells that profit the most from Bonus Heal, but Rejuvenation is just not reliable enough to use it effectively. Since the most healing in Vanilla is done with direct heals, most of it would be wasted on a full HP bar after one or two ticks. It is not forbidden to use, but only on targets that take continuous damage or have to be kept at 100% HP (Most of the time, this would be the Main Tank).
For anything else, use Healing Touch. NEVER use Regrowth (except for Vaelastrasz in BWL maybe) since it is a very expensive spell which will result mostly in useless overheal.
Of course, using Rank 10 (or 11 if learned) of HT (=Healing Touch) will only be possible if a target has lost a big enough amount of health to not result in a huge amount of overheal. This will only happen in some exceptional cases or in combination with Nature's Swiftness.
For that reason, we make use of downranking (using a spell with a lower rank). Downranking decreases the healed amount, but also the mana cost and the cast time. This makes you not only heal faster, but also increases the efficiency of your healing, because the overheal is reduced and the healing done per mana point spent increases with an increasing amount of bonus heal on your gear.
For example: Rank 10 HT heals an average amount of 2060 for 720 mana, resulting in the amount of 2,9 HPM (Healing per Mana). Calculating Rank 4 (220 Healing/110 Mana) results 2,0 HPM. Now we add 500 Bonus Healing and calculate again: HT Rank 10 (2560 Healing/720 Mana) = 3,6 HPM; HT Rank 4 (720 Healing/110 Mana) =6,5 HPM. Of course, this is a very simplified example because there are penalties for spells with lesser cast time or lower ranks, but the base concept should be clear.

So, what spells should you use now?

For big/emergency heals use Nature's Swiftness+HT Rank 10/11.
For MT Heal use Rejuvenation.
For >1000HP heals use HT Rank 4.
For <1000HP heals use HT Rank 3
Of course this depends on your bonus healing. With AQ40 gear, Rank 3 becomes more interesting because it heals about 1k with a cast time of only 2s. Just try it out yourself which heal fits best for which amount of health loss.

So why Rank 3/4?

Blizzard added some downranking penalties to prevent you from stacking bonus heal and healing with too low ranks, which would result in a very fast heal with almost no mana cost but considerably high value.
There are two penalties to be considered:

1. The Cast Time Penalty: Every Heal with a cast time below 3,5s has its Bonus Heal multiplied with the cast time divided by 3,5 (Bonus Heal*(Cast Time/3,5). So for a spell with 3s cast time this would result in a penalty of ~0,86. This penalty is calculated before talent reduce, so Improved Healing Touch does not affect this penalty.

2. The Level 20 penalty. Every spell learned below level 20 suffers from a penalty that is calculated by the following formula: 1 - ((20 - lvl) * 0,0375) (lvl = Level that the spell is acquired). So for rank 1, the penalty would be 1-((20-1)*0,0375) = 0,2875. Like the Cast Time Penalty, this does not affect the base heal, but the bonus healing added to the basic spell.

As you can see, healing with a spell lower than rank 3 would result in a large penalty and decrease the efficiency rather than increasing it.

Here is some useful information on Rank 3,4 and 10 (calculated with 500 Bonus Heal):

http://imageshack.us.../capturenu.jpg/ **dead link

Obviously, Rank 4 is the most effective heal with good HPM and HPS values. With better gear and increasing bonus heal, the effectiveness of Rank 4 compared to Rank 3/10 will increase more and more. Still, Rank 3 will be more interesting with increasing gear, because the cast time of Rank 4 is just too slow to have a chance against paladins/shamans or priests.

Source:
http://www.wow-one.com/forum/topic/12549-pve-druid-restoration-guide/

[Tiddy]

Low ranked Moon Fire makes great totem killers as well

[metagame]

In pvp you want to keep rank 1 Moonfire/Insect swarm on your bars so you can quickly OOM those pesky dispel happy people