In this article, we present you the viable talent and glyph choices for your Restoration Druid (WoW MoP 5.3). We detail what each of the talents and glyphs do and in which situations they should be taken.

The other articles of our Restoration Druid guide can be accessed from the table of contents on the right.

This guide has been reviewed and approved by Celece, one of the best Restoration Druids in the world, who raids in Midwinter. You can watch her stream on Twitch.

1. Talent Choices↑top

• Performance-enhancing
• Survival
• Crowd Control
• Movement
• Utility
• Situational

There is no longer such a thing as a default build. Most of the talents are now viable. They can easily be changed, thanks to Dust of Disappearance (and Tomes of the Clear Mind from level 86 to 90). You will frequently find yourself changing talents and glyphs between encounters, in order to adapt your play style to different mechanics. Therefore, it is important to understand what each of your talents does and how they affect your play style.

2. Tier 1 Talents↑top

Tier 1 talents offer a choice between 3 means of increasing your movement abilities.

• Feline Swiftness is a passive ability that increases your movement speed by 15% at all times.
• Displacer Beast is an active ability that teleports you 20 yards forward, activates Cat Form, and grants you a 50% increase in movement speed for 4 seconds.
• Wild Charge is an active ability that differs based on the shapeshift form you are in, as follows:
  • No shapeshift form: you fly to an ally's location.
  • Bear Form: you charge an enemy, immobilizing them for 4 seconds.
  • Cat Form: you leap behind an enemy, dazing them for 3 seconds.
  • Travel Form: you leap forward 20 yards.
  • Aquatic Form: your swim speed is increased by 150% for 5 seconds.

The choice here will come down to either Feline Swiftness or Wild Charge. If the benefits of Wild Charge will be needed during the encounter (flying to an ally's position or leaping forward in Travel Form), then Wild Charge will be a great choice. Otherwise, Feline Swiftness will probably be the go-to choice.

3. Tier 2 Talents↑top

Tier 2 talents offer a choice between 3 healing spells.

• Nature's Swiftness is an active cooldown that makes your next Cyclone, Entangling Roots, Healing Touch, Nourish, Regrowth, Hibernate, and Rebirth instant cast, free of mana cost and usable in Bear Form. Moreover, it increases the potency and duration of the spell by 50%.
• Renewal is a self-heal for 30% of your maximum health with a 2-minute cooldown.
• Cenarion Ward is a buff that you can place on a friendly player, lasting up to 30 seconds. When the player takes damage, Cenarion Ward activates a 6-second HoT on the player, consuming Cenarion Ward in the process.

Nature's Swiftness will be a great choice for providing emergency heals. We recommend this macro for pairing Nature's Swiftness with Healing Touch, for easier use.

Cenarion Ward is a useful buff to keep up on targets that take constant damage, or on someone who is dangerously low on health.

Renewal provides an excellent self-healing cooldown, but we believe the versatility offered by Nature's Swiftness and Cenarion Ward (being castable on anyone) outweighs any benefits that Renewal may have.

4. Tier 3 Talents↑top

Tier 3 talents offer a choice between 3 crowd control spells.

• Faerie Swarm is a spell that replaces Faerie Fire, upgrading the latter spell to also slow the target's movement speed by 50% for 15 seconds.
• Mass Entanglement is an AoE root, that roots up to 5 targets.
• Typhoon is a spell that affects enemies in a cone in front of you, knocking them back and dazing them for 6 seconds.

The choice between these talents is entirely situational and, in any case, it is unlikely to play any part in your performance.

5. Tier 4 Talents↑top

Tier 4 offers a choice between 3 performance-enhancing talents.

• Soul of the Forest passively grants you 75% increased haste for the first spell cast after casting Swiftmend.
• Incarnation: Tree of Life grants you the Tree of Life healing cooldown. It lasts for 30 seconds (with a 3-minute cooldown), it increases all healing done by 15%, and it improves some of your spells.
  • Lifebloom can be kept up on multiple targets simultaneously.
  • Wild Growth affects 2 additional targets.
  • Regrowth is instant cast.
• Force of Nature is an active ability that summons a treant which casts Swiftmend on your current target and heals it with Healing Touch for 15 seconds. Force of Nature has a maximum of 3 charges, and a new a charge is added every 20 seconds. Otherwise, it has no cooldown.

We believe that Incarnation: Tree of Life is the best choice in most situations, since it gives you a lot of control and it has the potential for burst healing. That said, Soul of the Forest can also be a good choice.

Soul of the Forest provides a nice amount of additional throughput during an encounter, but it may require you to delay using Swiftmend (in order to line it up with Wild Growth), which will diminish the talent's benefit. While Soul of Forest primarily boosts your raid healing (through Wild Growth), it can also be used with Rejuvenation for solid tank healing. Finally, it can be paired with Tranquility, which greatly hastens that spell's channel time.

If you do decide to use Soul of the Forest, this is the soft haste cap you will need to be at.

Force of Nature is the most underwhelming talent.

6. Tier 5 Talents↑top

Tier 5 talents offer a choice between 3 crowd control spells.

• Disorienting Roar is an AoE disorient that lasts for 3 seconds and affects all enemies in a 10 yard radius.
• Ursol's Vortex is a targeted AoE slow. When enemies first try to leave the slowing area, they are pulled back in.
• Mighty Bash is a single target 5-second stun.

The choice between these talents is entirely situational and, in any case, it is unlikely to play any part in your performance.

7. Tier 6 Talents↑top

Tier 6 talents offer a choice between 3 talents that affect your gameplay.

• Heart of the Wild increases your Stamina, Agility, and Intellect by 6% at all times. Additionally, with a 6-minute cooldown, it allows you to viably perform roles outside of your specialisation, for 45 seconds.
  • allows you to DPS in Cat Form, by increasing your Agility, Expertise, and Hit Chance;
  • allows you to DPS as a caster, by increasing your Spell Damage and Hit Chance, and reducing the mana cost of all your damaging spells by 100%;
  • allows you to tank in Bear Form, by increasing your Agility, Expertise, Hit Chance, and armor, making you immune to critical hits and granting you the Vengeance ability.
• Dream of Cenarius is a passive ability that grants you a healing bonus each time you deal damage, and a damaging bonus each time you heal.
  • Wrath and melee abilities increase the healing done by your next healing spell (except for Tranquility) by 30%.
  • Nourish, Healing Touch, and Regrowth increase the damage done by your next Moonfires or your 2 melee abilities by 65%.
• Nature's Vigil is a 90-second cooldown that increases all healing and damage done by 10% for 30 seconds. While Nature's Vigil is active, all single target healing spells also damage a nearby enemy for 25% of the healing done, and all damaging spells heal nearby allies for 25% of the damage done.

These talents are being constantly re-balanced on the Beta, making it hard to say which one will be the best choice. At the moment, however, Heart of the Wild's passive bonus gives it the upper-hand, with Nature's Vigil not far behind.

8. Major Glyphs↑top

There are a large number of Major Glyphs that can affect your gameplay as a Restoration Druid, although few of them offer obvious benefits. Minor Glyphs do influence your gameplay at all, being almost entirely cosmetic.

The following 3 glyphs clearly improve your performance (this does not mean that they should be taken in all scenarios, however):

• Glyph of Lifebloom allows you to retain all the stacks of Lifebloom when you cast it on a new target. The effect does not work when you are in Tree of Life form or when Lifebloom has less than 2 seconds remaining on its duration.
• Glyph of Healing Touch reduces the remaining cooldown of Swiftmend by 1 second each time you cast Healing Touch.
• Glyph of Rejuvenation reduces the cast time of Nourish by 30% while Rejuvenation is active on 3 more targets. You won't often get the benefit of this glyph (since Rejuvenation and Nourish typically denote raid and tank healing, respectively). However, you might find it useful, depending on the encounter.

Glyph of Regrowth deserves a special position. It increases the critical strike chance of Regrowth by 40%, but removes its HoT component. Despite the fact that you both gain and lose certain benefits, we believe that this glyph is quite strong and should always be considered a strong option.

The following 2 glyphs modify your abilities in ways that may end up being advantageous:

• Glyph of Wild Growth causes Wild Growth to affect an additional target, but it increases its cooldown by 2 seconds. The result of using this glyph is that you gain higher healing throughput (assuming that there are 6 players to be healed, so, predominantly in 25-man raids) from Wild Growth casts, but your uptime with it will be lowered. This frees up a global cooldown, allowing you to weave extra spells in. You will have to decide how important healing a 6th target is to you in the encounter, compared to having higher uptime of Wild Growth.
• Glyph of Blooming causes your Lifebloom to heal for 50% more when it blooms, but it reduces its duration by 5 seconds, and no longer allows it to be refreshed by other single target heals. This will probably only be useful in PvP, where Lifebloom can often be dispelled, but it may also be useful in some rare PvE situations.

The following glyphs improve your utility during raids:

• Glyph of Rebirth is very useful if you ever intend to use your Rebirth, since it allows the target of your Rebirth to come back to life with full health, meaning that they do not risk instantly dying again to environmental damage.
• Glyph of Innervate causes your Innervate to regenerate 10% of your maximum mana when you cast it on other players, in addition to regenerating their own mana. This glyph will be useful when you find yourself regularly casting Innervate on other healers.
• Glyph of Stampeding Roar increases the range of Stampeding Roar by 30 yards. If using this ability is vital to your raid's strategy, this glyph is excellent.
• Glyph of Stampede removes any form requirement from Stampeding Roar. In the event that your assignment is to cast Stampeding Roar during a time of heavy damage, this glyph may prove slightly beneficial to you.

9. Changelog↑top

• 20 May 2013: Patch 5.3 update: updated Force of Nature description.
• 29 Apr. 2013: Changed the talent category of Displacer Beast to movement. Added more details about when and how Soul of the Forest is useful.
• 07 Mar. 2013: Patch 5.2 update.
  • Updated Displacer Beast explanation to mention the movement speed buff that it provides.
  • Updated Soul of the Forest explanation to reflect that you now gain 75% spell haste, up from 50%.
  • Updated Nature's Vigil explanation to reflect the new cooldown and the fact that the damage and healing bonus is now 10% instead of 20%.